This is the way to present classic cartoons. Watching the Bugs Bunny Show on Saturday afternoons at 5 was the highlight of the week for me in the 1960s. These titles and wraparounds just made the whole experience more exciting.



BUGS BUNNY SHOW OPENING TITLES

Bugs Explains How To Write Cartoons With Him In Them

Hey, I suggest you read the comic first before you read my dumb comments, so I don't spoil the gags for you.Johnny Hart's early Sunday pages generally had more action and visual humor than his dailies. They were less dialogue oriented than his later strips where a character would stand in the same pose for 4 panels and read a pun out of Wiley's Dictionary. These Sundays are full of natural graphic design. I wish I had the actual full color Sundays to look at.
These drawings aren't slick, and on the surface even pretty crude; they have things in them that I would criticize in cartoonists' drawings if they were working for me - like small cramped areas, vague details and shapes here and there...but Hart makes up for it all with instinct and guts. Hart's pen is directly connected to his feelings, and it delineates expressions and poses not seen before; not pulled out of a stock cartoonist bag of tricks.

You can be slick but lack soul and I'd rather have the soul if I had to pick one thing. Of course if you have both - like Clampett or Avery, it's even better.
Hart's pacing and staging is comic-strip perfection.

These nose tickling expressions are hilarious and you can totally feel them. You could not write a gag like this. And not just anyone could even make it funny. It's Hart's capability of turning real feeling into a few well-placed lines that create the entertainment.

I always loved the way he drew teeth - ragged, uneven and chunky. You can tell a real cartoonist from a wimpy one by how much he loves to draw teeth in all their ugly uneven and funny glory. Like Johnny Hart and Jack Kirby. You know what I hate? When people just draw all the teeth in a blank white bar. What a waste of 32 of the most naturally funny parts of our anatomy! How dare modern animators smooth out God's beautiful imperfections!
The actual main gag in the cartoon itself is totally abstract and I love it. It's a real clever exploitation of cartoon absurdity.
It's nuts on a bunch of levels and you have to accept each nutty concept in turn in order to get to the next gag:
1) A flower can be sneezed so hard that it can spear itself through a tree - intact.
2) That action has a specific sound it makes - 'KAZANGO"
3) Wiley sensed that the word "Kazango" was written in the panel where the flower crashed through the tree. Wouldn't it be cool if every time you heard a sound, the sound effect would appear in the air around you? We just accept that in the comics without question and so Hart points it out to us. For some reason, you don't see this as much in animation, but when you do, it's great.
4) Kazango is an acceptable explanation for how it happened.

These kinds of absurdities would be hard to get past executives, because "it doesn't make sense".
As simple as these designs look, Hart manages to get good descriptive poses out of them, sometimes broad, othertimes - like in the above panel - subtle.
I also love Hart's lettering style.


BTW, isn't newsprint texture great for comics? They oughta bring it back for comic books.

The Bugs Bunny Show (Warner Brothers/ABC-TV 1960)


I love the way they presented cartoons in the 1960s. Cartoons would be bookended by rousing title songs and introduced by bumper animation between the story cartoons. This was a great way to present "old" cartoons but make them seem as if they were new and special.


http://looney.goldenagecartoons.com/tv/bbshow/


The bumpers featured Bugs, Daffy and the gang talking directly to the audience. This made us feel like the characters were real and our close pals.

http://toolooney.blogspot.com/2007/08/bugs-bunny-show-bridging-sequences.html

http://toolooney.blogspot.com/2007/12/bugs-bunny-show-part-2.html

http://toolooney.blogspot.com/2007/12/bugs-bunny-show-part-3.html

http://toolooney.blogspot.com/2008/01/bugs-bunny-show-part-4.html

I don't know who came up with this format first but it's a brilliant concept. Was it Mighty Mouse Playhouse?
http://www.retroland.com/pages/retropedia/tv/item/131/


The other kind of classic cartoon format is the non-formatted "grab-bag" cartoon block. The syndication model. We used to watch "Cartoon Carnival and "Cartoon Party" and a million variations of these local TV packages. They would run classic cartoons, but mix together different studios and eras. The prints were usually pretty crummy too.

The effect of this sloppy packaging cued us in to the fact that these were "the old cartoons" and though many were entertaining, they didn't get the full impact of the packaged cartoon shows that seemed like they were specially-made . Syndicated cartoon shows seemed like they were bargain-basement leftovers. It didn't help that they would mix classic fully animated cartoons with super low-budget made-for-TV cartoons, like the Al Brodax Popeyes, Dodo, Hercules, Lippy The Lion and such.

When I was consulting for the early Cartoon Network, they had whole 3 hour blocks of "used-cartoons" like "Down Wit' Droopy D" and I explained my theory to them.

What I really wanted to do, was repackage the 40s Looney Tunes in a similar way that WB packaged the 50s Bugs and Daffy cartoons into the Bugs Bunny Show.

I wanted to make a new title sequence and bumpers, only in a style that would be a caricature of the Clampett-Avery 40s version of the characters.










The Bugs Bunny Show aired on Saturday afternoons at 5:00 when I grew up (sponsored by The Kraft Teddy Bears), and I always ate my TV Dinners and Salisbury Steaks on my Cartoon TV tray while laughing uproariously to Chuck, Friz and McKimson cartoons.

I wish they would go back and re-attach all the specially made bumpers and the original "This Is It" Theme song intro to the 50s Looney Tunes package and re-air them (and go back to the original un-remastered prints).

This kind of presentation does a lot to make kids think the cartoons are new and not recycled cartoons.

Hanna Barbera and many original TV cartoons also used this fun format.

They restored a few on this set and it's really fun way to watch cartoons.