Got a Magnifying Glass?

One of the reasons Tom and Jerry won all those Oscars under Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera was because the characters were great actors. They were wonderfully expressive.

The Cat Concerto (released in 1947) is a fine example. Ken Muse turned out some fine footage of Tom as the high-brown pianist, with Irv Spence providing looney expressions when Jerry exacts revenge for having his nap inside the piano disturbed.

That brings us to Carmen Get It!.

In a way, comparing a cartoon made in the early ‘60s to one from the later ‘40s isn’t quite fair. At Warner Bros., what was being made in 1962 was pretty lacklustre compared to the cartoons from the period of Rabbit Hood or Back Alley Oproar. The later Tom and Jerrys produced by Hanna and Barbera weren’t as attractive as the ones made when they were winning Oscars (wide screens, flattened designs and a changeover of animators in the mid-‘50s didn’t help).

Still, cartoons should be entertaining. And I’m afraid the Tom and Jerrys under the eye of Gene Deitch were not.

One of a number of things that bothers me about them is what I mentioned off the top is the expressions. Deitch seems to have loved a number of things, and one of them was long shots. It’s smart to vary shots in a cartoon but the problem with Carmen Get It! and a number of other Deitch shorts is the characters spend too much time in wide shot, which eliminates any chance to give the characters expressions and let them act, as Hanna and Barbera used to do.

These are just some examples.



In the scene below, Jerry has a rose between his teeth. It’s a good idea, but Jerry is so tiny you can’t make out the rose. So what’s the point of it?



Okay, but the closer shots, you’re saying. The M-G-M animators—Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Spence, Muse, Mike Lah—were able to make the characters act. You knew what they were thinking. What they were thinking motivated the next part of the story. Deitch’s animators simply went for goofy expressions.



And what about Tom below? I’m sorry, it’s a pretty wretched drawing. It’s more or less held for five frames. Could you picture Muse drawing something like this?



There are some good things going on with the story in this cartoon. The last scene was no surprise, but I like it anyway. But Tom and Jerry just didn’t mix well with Gene Deitch.

Deitch moved on to create a dozen cartoons starring Nudnik, a stylish little series. You won’t find long shots like those above. Nudnik’s actions and motivation are clear for the audience to see. Will Jones of the Minneapolis Star Tribune praised the Paramount-released cartoons in a column on Oct. 10, 1966, where he recommended arriving early or staying late to watch From Nudnik With Love at a local theatre. Among his “few nice words about the Nudnik cartoons,” Jones wrote:

Visually, the cartoonists who make the films indulge in the same sort of elaborate sadism that is a characteristic of the Roadrunner and the cat-chasing-mouse cartoons, but with a most important difference in point of view. It is not just one cartoon creature trying to do in another, or outwit another. It is Nudnik, simply trying to bring something pleasant into the world, who triggers the action. And it is the whole that is the sadist, rejecting Nudnik and anything he has to offer. . . .
A fellow named Gene Deitch gets credit as writer and director for the cartoons.

Deitch was praised for later films, winning the San Sebastian International Film Festival’s “Golden Seashell” in 1969 for Obri in the best short film category. (It was banned in Czechoslovakia, where it was made).

As for the aforementioned The Cat Concerto, we’ll have some words tomorrow.

It's Greek, All Right

The term “It’s Greek to me,” I gather, means “I can’t understand it.”

How appropriate it was that one of Gene Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons was It’s Greek to Me-Ow. Does anyone understand what is going on in these Deitch cartoons?

In one scene, I was hoping for perspective animation like in the 1930s when a character goes running or flying “past the camera.” It starts out that way, but then Deitch cuts to a medium shot. And one that doesn’t even try to match the previous frame.



He just loves those jagged impact drawings (even the Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerrys had them). They’re all over the place in this short.



Deitch also like doing what James-Call-Me-Shamus Culhane did better 15-plus years earlier for Walter Lantz. He has impact footage where there are camera shakes, and goes back and forth from frame-to-frame between extreme close-ups and a medium shot. Culhane’s versions seem funnier to me; I don’t know why; the timing's pretty much the same.



Fans of Tod Dockstader’s “boing” sound effect (which I first heard in the Deitch Popeyes as a kid) will enjoy this cartoon. I don’t know anyone else who would. Deitch had a good perspective on humour but I can’t picture him laughing at this. If you want to keep yourself amused with this cartoon, consider the words “It’s Greek to Me-Ow” fit the opening bars of Scott Bradley’s Tom and Jerry theme. Think up your own funny lyrics for the rest of it, instead of watching this cartoon.

Something I find amusing may have been unintentional, but I’d like to think it was deliberate. A theatre manager in San Francisco booked it with a Melina Mercouri movie. “Hey, we got this Greek chick in this movie about Greece. Let’s have a Greek cartoon, too.”

Buddies Thicker Than Water

When Gene Deitch was handed the task of creating new Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM, he and his writers put the cat and mouse in different locales. For a time they were paired with a grumpy guy who reminded speculating cartoon fans of Clint Clobber from Deitch’s Terrytoons (he wasn’t Clobber, as Deitch had to inform them).

However, in Buddies Thicker Than Water (released in 1962), Tom’s owned by a young lady in an urban penthouse apartment.

Having come from UPA where design was practically everything, Deitch and his artists came up with exaggerations on ultra-current home interiors.



This is a lovely satire on 1962 home interiors. Who had a pole lamp like that? We did. Or that plant? We did. Or that clock or divider or plastic chair? We didn’t, but I knew people who did. (The chair was the same colour, too).



The uncredited background artist came up with a different background to use as a close-up. Actually, this is part of a long background that was panned left-to-right at one point in the cartoon.



A view from the other direction.



This kitchen is pretty basic and dull. But at least Deitch (or whomever handled this kind of thing) has it laid out at an angle.



Dig the modern art portrait of Tom.



More modern art. My guess is a blue filter was placed over the camera.



The cartoon starts with some exteriors; I presume the setting is supposed to be Manhattan. The snow is on a couple of cycles. The penthouse has a jazzy human statue next to the tree and a crazy TV antenna on top.

Animation? Soundtrack? Well, let’s forget those for now and say the backgrounds in this short may be the most attractive thing about it.

Santa Claus Meets Gene Deitch

Gene Deitch wasn’t very happy with me.

I dislike Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons. The stories meander, the music sounds like it was made in a tunnel, and the layouts are so awkward that you can barely see Jerry sometimes. Then there’s the stiff animation. And the weird sound effects.

For ages, Gene made excuses for how poor they were. Then something happened. Some animation fans, perhaps feeling sorry for them, or out of respect for Mr. Deitch, yapped endlessly on-line about their greatness. After that, Gene started to believe his own press clippings, so to speak, and got defensive about any criticism of the cartoons. Including my criticism. “If they’re so bad, why are they on DVD?” he asked me. Well, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch is on DVD, too. Release on home video is not quite an acid test of quality.

There are things Gene invented which I like. I enjoy Sidney the Elephant. The Juggler of Our Lady is a fine, serious cartoon. I watched Tom Terrific when I was little; all kids, I’ll bet, loved the almost comatose Manfred the Wonder Dog and Tom turning into all kinds of things.

So allow me to give you the Christmas present of Gene Deitch. Tom Terrific had a prototype, an heroic kid character in a comic strip. Terr’ble Thompson appeared in newspapers in 1955-56. If nothing else, it has Gene’s stylistic stamp. The strip was in serial format (like Tom Terrific), with the “episodes” tied together with a frame or two and some dialogue. Terr’ble was involved in a Christmas adventure, which we post below. The comics start on December 13, 1955 and end on December 28th. We include comics from Sunday colour sections.

Note: After clipping all the comics from a newspaper, correcting the colour balance, uploading them and HTML coding the post, I discovered they are already on-line, minus the United Features Syndicate copyright notice. So, we have substituted these cleaner, web-site versions instead.



Deitch was on the move. Long gone from UPA, by March 1956 he had left John Hubley’s Storyboard, Inc. and accepted a job with Robert Lawrence Productions. The strip came to an end on Sunday, April 15th. In June, Deitch was hired by Terrytoons as its creative supervisor. He admitted a full-time job plus a full-time comic strip was hurting his family life.

50 years after T.T. vanished from newspapers, someone decided a product from the mind of Gene Deitch must be re-examined. In 2006, Fantagraphics reprinted the strips in a book, including the Sunday editions in full colour (digitised in some cases due to the washed-out quality of the Ben-Day dots on newsprint). You can see the book at this site. Gene and his son Kim talk about the strip. Best of all, there’s not a Dicky Moe or Landing Stripling to be found.

There's Always Room For Jerry Jello

Mouse-flavoured Jello?

That’s evidently what we get in Calypso Cat, where Tom attacks Jerry with a mould of gelatin dessert.



No, Tom, don’t play with your food! It’s dangerous.



The weird off-modelness of this scene can mean only one thing—it was produced by Gene Deitch.

Steven Konichek’s music certainly doesn’t sound like anything you’d hear in a cartoon. Or anywhere else, really. He starts the scene with an echo-ey vibraphone which gets suddenly cut off and replaced with a solo piano and flute while Tom fingers the Jello, which is interrupted by a squeak toy noise and some other odd sound when Jerry bites Tom. It then jumps into a jazzy number with vibes, drum/cymbal and a horn (maybe a trombone) for a few seconds. Later, we get a violin accompanied by a ratchet. There are continual tempo changes. A melodic score it’s not. And the acoustics sound like something in a subway tunnel.

Freelancer Larz Bourne came up with a story reminiscent of the Hanna-Barbera unit shorts where Tom is pining over Toots and ignoring Jerry. At least Joe Barbera’s stories had likeable characters and some laughs. This has Tom turned into a vibrating turtle.

For Gene Deitch, this Tom isn’t terrific.