Posts Tagged ‘Merrie Melodies’
“I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque”*…
Looney Tunes without Looney Tunes: “Looney Tunes Backgrounds.”
[TotH to This Isn’t Happiness]
* Bugs Bunny
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As we contemplate context, we might send uncertain birthday greetings to Werner Karl Heisenberg; he was born on this date in 1901. A theoretical physicist, he made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, superconductivity, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. But he is most widely remembered as a pioneer of quantum mechanics and author of what’s become known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 “for the creation of quantum mechanics.”
During World War II, Heisenberg was part of the team attempting to create an atomic bomb for Germany– for which he was arrested and detained by the Allies at the end of the conflict. He was returned to Germany, where he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which soon thereafter was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He later served as president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them
Werner Heisenberg
“The cinema is an invention without any future”*…
Some lost films are more lost than others. There are very early works that no one now alive has seen, and we have little hope of recovering. While later silent feature films were duplicated and distributed widely, there are hundreds of short experiments by the first film-makers, movies no more than a few seconds long, that no longer exist even as a memory.
It seemed too good to be true, then, that lost films by Georges Méliès could really have been found by chance in a German bookshop in 2013. Yet a dogged research project by an independent scholar from France, Thierry Lecointe, has helped uncover miraculous images from lost films, not just by Méliès, but also by Alice Guy-Blaché.
The frames were preserved as images printed on to the card pages of tiny flipbooks. With digital technology, the flipbooks, known as folioscopes, have now become something like film fragments again. The photographer Onno Petersen shot each page in high-resolution and the motion-picture restoration expert Robert Byrne, from the San Francisco Silent Film festival, produced animations revealing such treats as a long-lost magic trick, dance, comic sketch or a train caught on camera more than a century ago…
Some of the earliest experiments in film 120 years ago were reproduced as flipbooks for wider audiences. Now a painstaking restoration project has brought long-lost gems back to life: “What the flip! The chance discovery that’s uncovered treasures of the very earliest cinema.”
See also Variety‘s account of a similar reclamation project: “George Melies Flip Book Sets off Crowdsourcing.”
* Cinema pioneer Louis Lumière… who was, happily, wrong
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As we enjoy our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that “Tweety,” the star of 46 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, made his official debut in “A Tale of Two Kitties.”
Originally created by Bob Clampett (who also created the first version of Bugs Bunny and went to to such marvels as Beany and Cecil), Tweety was redesigned by Fritz Freleng– who took over when Clampett left Warner Bros, reimagined Tweety, and crucially, added Sylvester the Cat. The first short to team Tweety and and his hapless nemesis, 1947’s Tweetie Pie, won Warner Bros its first Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons). Both Tweety and Sylvester were, of course, voiced by the great Mel Blanc.
In related news, there is a live action reboot of Tom and Jerry on the way…
“The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans”*…
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s deep affection and respect for Chuck Jones, who once observed that “the name ‘Chuck Jones,’ according to my uncle, limited my choice of profession to second baseman or cartoonist.” Happily for the world, he chose the pen over the bat.
The (wonderfully appropriately user-named) Every Frame a Painting has done us all a tremendous service:
email readers click here for video
If you grew up watching Looney Tunes, then you know Chuck Jones, one of all-time masters of visual comedy. Normally I would talk about his ingenious framing and timing, but not today. Instead, I’d like to explore the evolution of his sensibilities as an artist. To see the names of the films, press the CC button and select “Movie Titles.”
* Charles Martin “Chuck” Jones
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As we agree that this is in fact “what’s up, Doc,” we might send send beautifully-collaged birthday greetings to another animation giant, Evelyn Lambart; she was born on this date in 1914. Lambart joined the National Film Board of Canada in 1942– their first female animator; one of the few women in the world working even as a co-director in any form of cinema during the 1940s and ’50s, she made beautiful films– and animation history– both as a co-director with the great Norman McLaren and on her own.
Read more of her story, and see several of her works here.
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”*…
Bookworm: Movies
Search for trends in the dialogue of thousands of movie and TV shows, based on subtitles from Open Subtitles
Bookworm is like a lot of other word frequency sites. But unlike most, it directly incorporates links to every text searched, so you can actually see what drives changes; and it lets you customize the corpus so you can exclude texts that aren’t interesting to you. This particular instance looks at movies and TV shows. Genre, location and language information from the Internet Movie Database textfiles. Click to see the movies/TV shows where the matches are found. For some caveats, explanations, and examples, see the accompanying blog post.
Hours of illuminating fun at Ben Schmidt‘s “Bookworm: Movies.”
* Rudyard Kipling
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As we marvel at multiplying memes and dynamic dialogue, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that Warner Bros. released The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, a feature-length Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies compilation of classic Warner cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences produced by Friz Freleng, hosted by Bugs Bunny. The new footage was one of the final productions of DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.
From the Department of Superfluous Redundancy…
From Damn Cool Pictures, “50 Completely Useless Signs“…
More at Damn Cool Pictures.
As we await further instructions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short “A Wild Hare”– the first “official” Bugs Bunny cartoon– premiered (though readers will recall that Bugs [or at least, his prototype] made his inaugural screen appearance two years earlier). Directed by Tex Avery, “A Wild Hare” was nominated for an Academy Award.
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