Thursday 3 October 2024

Tee For Two Background

The Tom and Jerry cartoon Tee For Two (1945) opens with a slow right pan over a long background of a golf course, showing increasing carnage as the camera moves along, stopping at a frustrating Tom trying to get a ball out of a sand trap.

The colours don’t quite match as I amateurishly snipped the frames together, but below you can see how the pan worked.



Tom swinging away is on a cycle of 12 drawings, shot one per frame. You can see Bill Hanna’s careful timing at work through the spacing of the in-betweens as the upper swing is slow, then the abrupt during the follow-through.



Crazy eyes on Tom? This must be Irv Spence animation.

As for the background, I presume it’s another one of Bob Gentle’s water colours. It looks like his credited work much later in the series, but I don’t know if Gentle was out of the military when this cartoon was made.

This short, by the way, is the one with the scene of Tom getting stung in the mouth by a ridiculously large swarm of bees, animated by Ken Muse.

Ray Patterson and Pete Burnett also get animation credits.

Here’s the cycle at about the speed you see it in the cartoon, minus Fred MacAlpin’s sound effects.

2 comments:

  1. One of my favorites

    ReplyDelete
  2. Terrytoons swiped the bees-in-the-mouth gag, but it doesn't work nearly as well there, even if it was animated by Jim Tyer.

    ReplyDelete