Wen hasst du am meisten? Wie weit würdest du gehen? Heute is der tag zum handeln.

Saturday, July 16th, 2011 Horrorthon Posts


Barney Miller’s and my supernatural teen thriller 7 Souls was just published in Germany, so I awoke to a big thick bubbly envelope containing two German hardcover first editions of Seven Souls (They kept the English title).

Wow! I have never in my life been in a situation like this: I’m flipping through a book I can’t read (because it’s in German) but those are my sentences and I can see the English product names and place names (“Das taxi raste über den Central Park South”) poking through. Somebody sure went to a lot of fucking trouble and drank a lot of German coffee while wrestling with our sentences.

Obviously stuff gets translated all the time (and Google will do it in three seconds). I’m just blatantly grooving on the excellence of getting something like this in the mail! Zowie wowie.

Tex Avery’s cityscapes

Monday, July 4th, 2011 Horrorthon Posts

Tex Avery’s cartoons combine high-speed slapstick and vaudevillian characterization with existential surrealism, which called for extreme technical and stylistic precision. In particular, the cartoons feature richly-detailed background paintings (until the style was deliberately streamlined in the 1950s) that belie the ridiculous story-lines and somehow make everything even funnier.

You won’t see anything like this in any Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes short (especially Chuck Jones’ stuff, which is always extremely stylized and subdued). MGM’s Fred Quimby gave Avery higher budgets than he’d been allowed at Warner’s, and Avery hired at least two former Disney artists (who were part of a late-1930s mass labor exodus from Disney) who worked on the backgrounds.

Now that I’ve finally got the legendary Intégrale Tex Avery (see my earlier post) I can finally see the incredible vast landscapes in Avery’s animators’ imaginations. And so can you (since I spent some time extracting the backgrounds, starting with my favorite Avery cityscapes).

These are backgrounds from Northwest Hounded Police (1946), Hound Hunters (1947) and Ventriloquist Cat (1950), all of which take place in the sort of anonymous mid-size metropolis you see in cartoons and comic strips. (Click images for much bigger full-size versions.)

http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/texaverycityscapes

And yes, Kilroy was here.

Tex Avery

Friday, July 1st, 2011 Horrorthon Posts

Fred “Tex” Avery (1908-1980) is probably my favorite animator of all time. He created Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck before leaving Warner Brothers (after a Jack-Kirby/Stan-Lee-style dispute with Leon Schlesinger) to set up his own shop at MGM, where he made 63 cartoon shorts between 1942 and 1955.

The 63 MGM Tex Avery cartoons (which are like a holy grail to me, for reasons I’ll explain) contain 16 that star Droopy, the diminutive basset hound who’s one of the triumverate of Avery/MGM characters whom the French have actually had printed onto commemorative stamps (the other two being the sexy red-haired singer “Red”—the basis for Jessica Rabbit—and the sex-crazed, eye-popping Wolf who follows her around).

Turner (who owns MGM) put out a laserdisc box set of all 63 Avery cartoons (which I actually held in my hands in a record store in the mid-eighties, but did not buy, because I didn’t have a laserdisc player, because nobody did) that’s out of print like all laserdiscs. There were two VHS collections (“Tex Avery’s Screwball Classics” and “Tex Avery’s Screwball Classics 2”) which had a measly eight cartoons each; my then-roommate and I watched those to death back 20 years ago. But nothing on DVD! Absolutely nothing. All I had, all I could have, was my memories of watching after school on my friend Alan’s blurry color TV, and dozens of crappy, disorganized YouTube copies from VCRs all over the world.

I mentioned that the French have a special reverence for Tex Avery. A year ago I began reading about the mysterious “Intégrale Tex Avery”—a professional-grade bootleg DVD set containing the entire contents of the 25-year-old laserdiscs. (They transcoded from the PAL discs, which have more scanning lines.) Getting a hold of these mythical five DVDs was not easy or fast…but I did it. Click this link to behold a sight I’ve imagined for years: the exquisite title cards to all 63 MGM Averys:

href=http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/texavery

If I could invite you all over right now to watch, I would!

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