Not Carlo Vinci. At least in some early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
In Big Bad Bully, there’s a lot of chasing and running going on, as Yogi Bear tries to get past a bull to reach a honey-filled bee hive.
The first Yogi run cycle takes up four drawings, in full animation. Carlo loved high legs. He also had a geometric preference for a leg drawn at a 45-degree angle when running; you can see that in a number of the H-B cartoons in the ‘50s.
The clenched fists are a bonus.
Notice something else. The bull’s run cycle takes up three drawings. There are other bull run cycles later in the cartoon. Carlo and director Bill Hanna could have simply used the same cycle over and over, but they didn’t. The cycle below is on five drawings.
Here is the cycle slowed down.
Actually, this cycle is reused. When the bull runs at Yogi from the opposite direction, the inker simply flipped over Carlo’s drawings and traced them.
We’ve pointed out the stomping exit cycle Carlo liked to use. Here’s an example of Boo Boo doing it.
There’s a variation Carlo employed at Hanna-Barbera and Terrytoons when the character does a horizontal dive out of the scene.
The music behind these cycles is the appropriately named “On the Run” by Jack Shaindlin. It came from the Langlois Filmusic library. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted comments to a trade publication by Shaindlin that most of the hundreds and hundreds of cues he wrote for the library were never copyrighted. You won’t find this cue in the ASCAP or BMI copyright listings.
The cue name was discovered by Earl Kress, who vainly searched for a clean copy of it. The Langlois library was ubiquitous in the 1950s, especially on industrial films and the gratis-to-stations TV series Industry on Parade, but 78 rpm discs or 16mm sound film with the music has proved to be extremely elusive. Perhaps some collector has them and would be willing to make them available for people who enjoy the old H-B cartoons and Shaindlin’s musical handiwork.
Despite all of Chuck Jones' yawping (yowping?) about "illustrated radio", I've laughed much much more at Carlo's insane cycles than I have at Bugs Bunny fluttering his eyes or ballet prancing like a smartass for the millionth time.
ReplyDelete-- I remember reading somewhere that Bill and Joe sort of "prophesized" the humor of limited animation every time they'd screen a rough draft of a Tom and Jerry without the full animation. Carlo's H-B work fulfilled that "prophecy", if you will.
The irony of Chuck Jones' "illustrated radio" remark is that his much-lauded "Rabbit Seasoning" cartoons are almost entirely dialogue driven.
DeleteOne or the other said the Tom and Jerry pose reels were funny and sometimes lost some humour when fully animated.
ReplyDeleteJones' Bugs became way too coy for my liking, but his cartoons from the late '40s were very funny.
ALL of the music here was from Langlois-Filmmusic as, Yowp has listed before.In addition to the recurring ON THE RUN, there's PIXIE PRANKS at the start,TOBOGGAN RUN also recurring and, the "music for a phony cow" FUN ON ICE.
ReplyDeleteGreat article! Thanks for sharing the screen grabs of Vinci's work.
ReplyDeleteUndoubtedly the MGM training enabled the early H-B animators to do limited animation with strong poses and personality. (Too bad it didn't last.) The little dance, more aptly described here as a stomp cycle, gives the zip-out more zip. And I've always vastly preferred the original Yogi to the blowhard he became later.
ReplyDelete