Recent content by J Lee

I think Mike Barrier had it right in this case -- Charlie's more of an aggressive New York type who would appeal to a New Yorker like Michael Maltese or his original creator, Warren Foster, more than a cerebrial Californian like Jones. But in the mid-1940s when Warners was often saving a few...

Yes, that's Pierce's raspy voice as the Rooster in "Boulevardier from the Bronx." It would turn up in a number of WB cartoons over the years with only slight changes in the voice inflection. (As for the cartoon itself, it's the first of two by Kansas City Friz that showed a bit of a dislike...

Hey, when you think about it, Wold Trap is almost the perfect place to watch "Long-Haired Hare" or "Rabbit of Seville." (though obviously, the Hollywood Bowl would be the perfect place to watch the former). Have a nice trip, Jon, and I hope you survive the Fairfax County traffic. ;)

Going by the animation credits on the various cartoons from 1955, it seems they weren't released in sequential order. The credits for "Sandy Claws" indicate it was made before the shutdown, while "Tweety's Circus," which does use the 1945/41 MM music, appears to have been the first cartoon made...

"Kitty Kornered" was the first cartoon to carry the LT written "That's all, Folks!" ending, but for some reason, Stalling didn't have time to write a theme for the ending, so they simply used the Merrie Melodies music on the close. For "Acrobatty Bunny" Stalling came up with new music, though...

Jerry Beck has posted a link to the Associated Press story on Jackson Beck's death from Long Island Newsday. It mentions that along with his voice work, Beck was a founding member of AFTRA, the TV and radio union. His online bio also said that he was a vice president in the union (which brings...

Beck also provided the narration and some voices for the original Superman cartoon done by Filmation in 1966 in Hollywood, but voice-tracked in New York in order to use Superman's original radio voice, Bud Collyer (Woody Allen also based his movies out of New York most of the time, which is why...

Obviously a weekend of partying and gambling in the mountains of New Mexico has killed off too many of my brain cells. Time for a long sleep and maybe five or six Red Bulls to wake up tomorrow morning. ;)

Whoops! You're right -- I got my first and last use of the suicide gag in WB cartoons mixed up. (And as long I'm in the neighborhood, Clampett also used a faux-suicide gag in "A Tale of Two Kitties", when Catstello shoots himself in the head with a water pistol)

The suicide gag debuted in Bob Clampett's "The Sour Puss" where Porky's fish does himself in after being smooched by the cat. Clampett then used it with t the Peter Lorre fish in "Horton Hatches the Egg" and most famously as the end gag in "An Itch In Time." There were other variations of the...

For a while in the 80s and 90s TBS, TNT and then CN ran a print of "The Bears' Tale" with the opening WB shield cropped off, but I have an earlier copy on tape off WGN that has the full logo, so I'm not sure if the edit TBS had was done by someone just in the past 20 years or if the cut was made...

I wondered that too the first time I saw it, but then I also wondered what possessed MGM-UA to cut the opening WB and Merrie Melodies credits off about two dozen or so cartoons in 1987 for the Vidde-Oh! collection and replace them with a 1940 BR opening and 1940 theme music. The jumps on...

That's what I would think, but I've see so many examples over the years of techies "playing around" with the opening and closing titles on various versions of the cartoons for no logical reason when they're dubbing them to videotape, that may have been the case here as well. I'm also not sure...

Both those cartoons had their correct endings when they were in the original AAP syndication package, so the problem came somewhere down the line, in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. Both were also Cinecolor releases, and there may have been some sort of problem with the negative quality of...

Franklyn's first couple of scores tended to be sedate in places where Stalling was loud -- his endings for "Bugs and Thugs" and "My Little Duckaroo" are quiet going into the closing theme music in a way Stalling never was, while some of his opening title music, such as "Devil May Hare" is also...