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The Act

theact.jpg

I'm in Boston for the holidays, and today I did one of the few things you can do in New England that you just can't do in California--I went candlepin bowling. While I waited for my friend Deb to arrive at the alley, I checked out its video games--and found that one of them was The Act, an "interactive romantic comedy" which I'd read about on Cartoon Brew earlier this year.

The Act is tough to describe, but virtually every reference I've seen to it brings up Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair, and that's as good a frame of reference as any, although this new game is vastly more interesting than the Bluth one. It's an arcade game done in full character animation--amazingly, maybe the first since those Bluth laserdisc games of the 1980s, even though the technology is far more practical these days. But while the Bluth games' themes were pretty much exactly the same as other early arcade games, The Act is indeed a romantic comedy, involving a klutzy window washer, a sexy nurse, an unpleasant boss, and other characters. I'm not sure if the parallels are intentional, but it reminds me a lot of a Harold Lloyd film. (In part because there's no dialog--or at least I didn't hear any during the section of the game I was able to get through before losing.)

Dragon's Lair was a game with a simple input device (a joystick) and game play that was almost beside the point (you thrashed the joystick around, but it didn't seem to have that much impact on what happened). The Act has an even simpler input device (a rotating knob, not unlike the one from Pong), but the game play is surprisingly subtle. Basically, you rotate the knob to control the hero's behavior, and the idea is to keep him active without forcing him to go over the top. So in the first bit of game play, in which he's flirting with the nurse in a Casablanca parody, you've got to turn the knob with a lot of finesse--rather slowly, precisely, and sporadically--to avoid scaring her off.

Between the nicely-done animation, unusual premise, and unique game play, I found the game pretty absorbing, and was playing when Deb arrived. She was intrigued, but when I asked her if she wanted to have a go, she said "No!" I should have asked her why, but didn't.

Back at my folks' house, I looked into the story behind The Act, and found that I'd lucked into being one of the first people to play it. It's the product of a Boston-area company called Cecropia, and is in a test rollout at seven Massachusetts and New Hampshire locations through January, including the bowling alley we'd gone to. The animation, directed by Broose Johnson, was done by laid-off veterans of Disney's Orlando studio, and it's good, funny stuff; even the backgrounds are well done.

(The Cecropia site has more background on the game.)

The Act has almost nothing to do with the barely-alive industry that arcade gaming has become--it's low-key, free of violence other than the slapstick kind, and rewards restraint on the part of the game player. Most players of arcade games--who seem to be a pretty lonely bunch of pre-teen boys these days--probably wouldn't like it; most people who might like it probably haven't played an arcade game in years.

I have no idea whether it stands a chance as a business enterprise, but I hope so--it's a new idea, and one which makes excellent use of hand-drawn animation. If you find yourself near any of the test locations in the next few weeks, check it out. And if you don't find yourself near them, stay tuned: Apparently, Cecropia has plans to release a home version at some point.

I hope it's a success, one way or another--I'd like to see its makers get a shot at continuing this experiment with further games...


Posted by Harry on December 24, 2006 11:21 PM Comments: 0

Joe Barbera, 1911 (?)-2006

When a major animation figure who was involved with a lot of wonderful cartoons dies, is it inappropriate to dwell on the dark side of his career? If anyone's reading this, I may find out.

At MGM in the 1940s, Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna made some of the funniest, most expressive, most alive short films--of any sort--ever produced anywhere. If they'd left the business when the studio's cartoon arm closed in 1957, I'm convinced, their reputation today would be pretty simple to summarize: Everyone would know that they were grand masters of the American animated short, period.

But Bill and Joe went on to found their own studio, one whose yearly output dwarfed their entire MGM career. And it produced...well, mostly cynical crud. (For years, my attitude towards the early Huck Hound and Yogi Bear shorts was almost entirely dispassionate, perhaps because we got them on Portland TV only when I was about nine and had already been soured on HB from watching too much of its later output; recently, I've come to appreciate them for their voicework, design, and, in some cases, writing. But I'd still rather watch almost any Jay Ward cartoon from the same era.)

From the start, the HB studio's work was derivative--Ruff and Reddy being clones of Crusader Rabbit and Rags--and by the mid-1960s, most of it was derivative junk without the saving graces of the early stuff. HB has been called the studio that saved the animation business, but to borrow a phrase from a war of that era, it had to destroy the artform in order to save it. I still wonder if TV animation would have gotten so bad so quickly if Hanna-Barbera hadn't defined schlockiness down a little more each season for so long.

And it was all doubly depressing because Hanna and Barbera had proved themselves capable of making wonderful cartoons. For all we know, Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott were capable only of swill; Bill and Joe didn't have that excuse. I remain convinced that they could have done better. Even with the budgets they had. Even in an era in which the networks made it almost impossible to produce a good TV cartoon.

(Question: Is it pure coincidence that when HB utterly dominated the industry, nearly all television animation was abysmal--and when the company's fortunes took a turn for the worse, in the late 1980s or so, the quality of the average TV cartoon improved sharply? Discuss...)

(Another question: If Daws Butler had never lived, would anyone remember the earliest HB cartoons with even a small fraction of the fondness they generate today?)

Pardon me--I think I'll go off now and watch The Zoot Cat...


Posted by Harry on December 19, 2006 6:25 AM Comments: 6

The Return--Slowly But Surely--of Harry-Go-Round

When I celebrated Friz Freleng's birthday here back in August, I really didn't intend to go for close to three months without blogging. Actually, I've been blogging up a storm--I've just been doing it over at my PC World technology blog. But I've neglected this site--mostly because things have been busy at work--and feel bad about it.

I'm resolved to get things rolling again here, and in that spirit, I've been working on reviving my MessageCenter, which was crippled by spam earlier this year and has been altogether offline for months. I have a rough draft of a new version (powered by BBPress) up; it still needs some refinement, but feel free to check it out if you have a moment. I'll report back here when it's ready for an official grand opening.

And with that, I'm leaving the country on a business trip. But I'll be baaaaaaack before long...


Posted by Harry on November 14, 2006 6:06 AM Comments: 1

Once More, With Freleng

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As you may know, blogs everywhere are participating in a great Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon today, in honor of the great man's 100th (maybe) birthday. So here's a Friz tribute I wrote a long, long time ago--it appared in Animato #18, which cover-featured Jerry Beck's Friz interview, back in 1989. (Amazing in retrospect to think that back then, not only was Friz still with us, but I wrote of his career as a Warner Bros. director in the present tense.)

If I was going to write about Freleng today, I might come to different conclusions, or discuss them more artfully--or maybe not--but I decided to present my essay exactly as I wrote it back in the 20th century. In fact, after initially planning to OCR it into ASCII text, I decided I liked the scanned image--Times Roman type, crummy newsprint, and all (including at least one typo). It reminds me of the fun we had desktop-publishing Animato, back in the era when communicating with animation fandom required printing up magazines and begging comic-book distributors to take them so they could wind up in retail stores.

So here's to you, Friz:
frizessay.jpg


Posted by Harry on August 22, 2006 6:36 AM Comments: 2

The Other Site I Work On

I haven't had much time lately to work on this site or Scrappyland, although I did just fix (I think) a nagging problem that was hobbling the ability to leave comments here.

But I have a good excuse, and it's not that I haven't been investing time in Web stuff. It's just that most of my energy has gone into the total redesign that PCWorld.com has launched. We started work on this in early 2005; we're still ironing out some kinks, but I'm really pleased with it overall.


Posted by Harry on August 2, 2006 10:07 AM Comments: 0

A Bullwinkle Christmas
Almost everything of note that I bought at this year's San Diego Con used to belong to Pete Burness, apparently. Besides the Scrappy art, I picked up a promotional booklet for The Bullwinkle Show--Sing Along With Bullwinkle Meets Santa Claus:

singbullwinkle.jpg

For me at least, the whole Jay Ward sensibility has a profoundly Cold War-era feel to it, so I was tickled to see this art, with Bullwinkle, Boris, and Dudley on a sleigh ride along with JFK, Jackie, Bobby (I think), Castro (in back, to the left of Bullwinkle), and Jay Ward (Right?). I'm not sure who the dapper guy in the middle with the moustache is, though. And I feel I should be able to identify who drew this, but I can't.

Inside are a bunch of satiric Christmas carols that don't mention any Jay Ward characters, but do make reference to Caroline and other Kennedy kin, the Peace Corps, Green Stamps, the New York Mets, Nielsen ratings, the Beverly Hillbillies, Dean Rusk, and other hot topics of the early 60s.(From the references to Christmas, JFK, and the Hillbillies, I deduce that the booklet dates from 1962--unless, and this is sadly possible--it was published for Christmas 1963 and released before November 22nd.)

Here's one page from the interior, with a song by Bill Scott (most of the ones in the book are by Allan Burns, and all of them are sort of faux-Tom Lehrer):

singbullwinkle2.jpg

I bought one other Ward-related item--yep, also from the Burness archive--and I'll try to remember to post it, too.

Posted by Harry on July 29, 2006 8:57 PM Comments: 1

Walt in the Neighborhood
disneymuseum.jpg
When it comes to cartoon-related matters, I've always had a bizarre knack for being in the right place at the right time. But this is silly. I've just learned that the Disney family (and specifically Diane Disney Miller and Ron Miller, who are San Franciscans these days) intend to build a Walt Disney Family Museum, paying tribute to the man--and it's going to be in the Presidio, about a mile and a half from my home. (Already, the Presidio has an animation connection: It's now the home of Industrial Light and Magic.)

Apparently, the plans have been brewing for awhile now, but I managed to miss hearing about 'em. (That would be the third comics/animation-related museum in the general area, along with the Cartoon Art Museum, which is less than a mile from my office, and Santa Rosa's Charles M. Schulz Museum, which is an hour's drive away, and worth it.)

There's a whole section at Disney.com on this proposed Disney museum, and this piece at Jim Hill Media by Roger Colton has more details and says it's all planned for 2008 or 2009. And here's the Presidio's own page on the project, which says that the Walt Disney Family Foundation has been a neighbor of mine since I moved here four years ago. Who knew?

I can't say for sure that I know Walt would be pleased. But I know I am...

Posted by Harry on July 29, 2006 4:56 PM Comments: 0

The Art of Scrappy
I don't know how much original Scrappy production art survives--for all I know, Columbia has a vaultful of the stuff--but it's safe to say that it's not exactly plentiful on the open market. I do own one piece that seems to have been prepared for a book. In all my time as a collector of Scrappyana, though, I've run across only two pieces that seem to have been done during production of a cartoon--one of which was gone before I found it, and the other of which I was foolish enough to let out of my grasp.

Until this weekend. Within ten minutes of arriving on the floor of the dealer's room at the San Diego Con, I was rifling through Scrappy drawings. Maybe I've developed some sort of weird Sixth Scrappy Sense.

True, the seller, who said that they came from Pete Burness's collection (did he ever work for Mintz?) also told me they were from Willie Whopper cartoons. But I knew better, and now they're mine.

This one's probably the nicest of the bunch. It looks like a posed shot, so it's possible it's for a publicity drawing or somesuch. But it sure conveys the flavor of early Scrappy:

scrappyart-chase.jpg

Here's what's pretty clearly an actual Scrappy animation drawing--possibly from Sunday Clothes, the third one (I need to check my copy):

scrappyart-praying.jpg

And here's what seem to be warmup sketches of Yippy, a bully (or is that Scrappy himself in a particularly foul mood?), and a little character who I believe is a one-shot Harpo Marx satire, although I'm not sure what cartoon he would have appeared in:

scrappyart-warmup.jpg

It's been almost a year since my last significant update to Scrappyland--but I've begun work on a version 3.0 that'll feature these and other recent additions to the archives. Meanwhile, does anyone else out there have more information (or informed speculation) about these pieces?

Posted by Harry on July 24, 2006 9:48 PM Comments: 2

Comic-Con Rumor
I'm sure there's scads of post-con reporting going on that I'm not reading, so I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but here goes: I attended a "talk back" session at the close of the con, and the organizers said they're contemplating the possibility of only letting pre-registered attendees in on Saturday next year.

They also said they weren't sure if this would help with crowd issues at panels--they felt that it might skew attendance towards dedicated fans who were most likely to want to attend lots of panels. And they said that one of the biggest challenges with the con has become the fact that all the companies involved in the most popular panels are insistent that they be held on Saturday--which is at least one reason why that day has become the most frustrating, least pleasurable one of the convention, at least for me. But it's an intriguing idea...

Posted by Harry on July 24, 2006 7:19 PM Comments: 0

Crammed Diego
This may be--for me, at least--the year that the San Diego Con got too big. I haven't heard any word on attendance, but I seem to have spent more time than ever more or less trapped in show-floor traffic that's just not going anywhere. One panel I wanted to go to--not obviously a huge crowd-pleaser--was turning people away by the time I got there; the line for the Simpsons panel was so long that it was half over by the time I got into the room. I've also been barked at twice by con representatives for trying to jump lines when I was simply trying to use hallways to get from one place to another.

Part of the problem, I think, is that this convention isn't about anything, other than the vague notion of "a celebration of the popular arts." Not being about anything, it's about everything, including comics, animation, fantasy movies, horror, science fiction, costume-making, toys, role-playing games, computer games, and myriad other topics. I didn't see any scheduled events about tattoos, but judging from some of the attendees this year, the showing off of elaborate tattoos has become another theme of this show.

Conventions, like magazines, need to be edited. Most of the best comics conventions I've ever attended had a clear sensibility at work--often that of a single person, such as the old New York cons' Phil Seuling, or Don Phelps, the proprietor of some amazing conventions in Boston in the 1970s. If there's a sensibility at work in the San Diego programming, I can't detect it. And while it may be a celebration of the popular arts, it's anything but a celebration of excellence--over and over, the programming booklet applies the same superlatives to anything and everything. Veronica Mars is memorable. Shag has entered the pop culture pantheon. Gumby is magical. David Boreanaz is one of TV's biggest stars. A blurb on a session about Pokemon season 9 uses two exclamation points (!!). And so on. There's no editing going on, and that, I'm sure, is one reason why the con is so huge.

Oh, and would someone inform the management of the San Diego Convention Center that convention-center food can consist of more than ludicrously overpriced pretzels and cookies served at understaffed counters with nowhere to sit? I spend a lot of time in major convention centers as part of my day job; I don't know of another whose food service is as bad as what we get in this otherwise lovely , highly functional city.

I'm not sure if there's any way to change San Diego into something other than what it's become, and to be fair, the people who run it do a mostly good job of crowd control and attendees are generally respectful of each other. But this is the first year I've said to myself, "Gee, I'm not sure if this'll be worth the hassle next year."

animationblast
Of course, even a San Diego Con with more than its share of hassles also has more than its share of virtues--you just need to find the small, focused convention hidden in this mammoth enterprise. I've enjoyed hanging out with folks like Jerry Beck, Amid Amidi, Bob Miller, Milt Gray, Will Ryan, and others, and meeting ones like Craig Yoe and Leslie Carbaga. I've been to some good panels, including a Jerry Robinson one hosted by Mark Evanier, an Alex Toth tribute, one on Dan DeCarlo (an artist who, I discovered for the first time, I admired), and Jerry Beck's Worst Cartoons Ever, which included not one but two Sam Singer cartoons I'd never seen. (Some of my favorite memories of the convention involve sitting in a huge crowd of strangers who were singing, snapping, and clapping along to the theme songs to things like Mr. Titan and Super President--who knew that terrible cartoons could bring people together?)

I've picked up some cool stuff, including the new issue of Amid's Animation Blast (which is one of the best single issues of an animation magazine, ever) and Craig Yoe's wonderful and wonderfully weird Arf Museum. And did I mention I bought three pieces of production artwork from Scappy cartoons? (More on that soon.)

In short, this trip hasn't been a waste at all. But if you know of any smallish, focused, high-quality comics conventions anywhere, lemme know about them--I'm not sure what Comic-Con is these days, but it isn't a comic con, exactly...

Posted by Harry on July 22, 2006 10:04 PM Comments: 1


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