The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle
| The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Superhero (Mighty Mouse) Comedy Slapstick (Heckle & Jeckle) Comedy horror (Quacula) |
| Voices of | Alan Oppenheimer Diane Pershing Frank Welker Lou Scheimer Erika Scheimer |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language | English |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 16 (96 segments) |
| Production | |
| Executive producers | Norm Prescott Lou Scheimer |
| Producer | Don Christensen |
| Running time | 1 hour (shortened to 30 minutes in 1980) |
| Production companies | Filmation Viacom Productions |
| Original release | |
| Network | CBS |
| Release | September 8, 1979 – April 8, 1980 |
| Related | |
| |
The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle is a 1979–1980 television series featuring newly produced Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons. The series was produced by Filmation, and aired from 1979 to 1980 on CBS with 96 episodes (128 if counting the educational "Nature" and "Homonyms" segments, hosted by Mighty and Heckle and Jeckle respectively) produced.[1] It was the second Mighty Mouse cartoon series, following the original Mighty Mouse Playhouse from 1955 to 1967, and followed by Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which aired from 1987 to 1988.
Production
[edit]CBS was looking to bring Mighty Mouse back to television for the first time since Mighty Mouse Playhouse went off the air in 1967. They had purchased the Terrytoons studio back in 1955 and eventually closed it in 1972. Without an animation studio of their own to produce new content, they licensed out their works to Filmation.[2]
In the Mighty Mouse segments, Mighty Mouse protected the world and his love interest, Pearl Pureheart, from the evil machinations of Oil Can Harry and his new bumbling henchman, Swifty, a fat cat who could still run extremely fast. Their encounters could happen in any time period, with Pearl and the villains adopting roles specific for the era, though Mighty Mouse remained the same. Several changes were made to the Mighty Mouse formula for Filmation's series. The characters' operatic dialogue delivery from the theatrical shorts was mostly removed to reduce the necessity to hire additional actors that could sing for roles that producer Lou Scheimer would fill in the various episodes (although Mighty Mouse would still belt some lines out, like his catchphrase, "Here I come to save the day!"). According to producer Norm Prescott, the operatic dialogue was also removed because he did not think that "a singing superhero mouse" would fly with contemporary audiences. Filmation also abandoned the faux serialization tradition of starting off each entry as if it were a continuation of some non-existent previous part. Instead, events would unfold as Mighty Mouse usually watched for trouble through a giant telescope from his fortress on a cheese-like planet in space. One all-new story, the science fiction serial "The Great Space Chase", was serialized across the entire season in 16 parts. In keeping with broadcast standards of the time, the violence was toned down or non-existent. For the Heckle and Jeckle segments, the magpies' antics were toned down to reduce their malevolent and sadistic nature. However, they still remained somewhat madcap in their antics, particularly with fourth wall breaks taking advantage of them being cartoon characters. Jeckle was portrayed as the smarter of the pair. The series introduced a new segment, Quacula. Quacula was a pale blue vampire duck with a Daffy Duck-like bill and fangs, dressed in a blue jacket and a black cape with a red lining, who slept by day in a white egg-shaped coffin, in the basement of a house owned by an anthropomorphic bear named Theodore. Every night Quacula would rise from his coffin and try to terrify Theodore and others, but he would never really succeed; his antics tended to be more comical than frightening. Also, Theodore would come up with one plan after another to rid himself of Quacula, but always fail to do so. Each hour of The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle consisted of two Mighty Mouse cartoons, two Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, one Quacula cartoon, and one episode of "The Great Space Chase". Also included were "Mighty Mouse Environmental Bulletins" and Heckle and Jeckle's "Homonyms" (to add a little educational karma).[1][3][4]
Due to one of their studio training programs, run by Don Christensen, Filmation brought a lot of new people in, including storyboard artists John Kricfalusi, Tom Minton and Eddie Fitzgerald, and screenwriter Paul Dini, and gave them their start in animation on the show and their other productions such as Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' The Brown Hornet. Because the studio kept all of their work in America, they were hiring more than any other company and teaching working animation to the next generation. A lot of the animators, including Kricfalusi, Kent Butterworth and some old animators who had worked on classic 1930s-1940s cartoons like Tom Baron, Ed Friedman, Dick Hall, Don Schloat, Larry Silverman, Kay Wright, Lou Zukor, Ed DeMattia, Lee Halpern, Alex Ignatiev, Jack Ozark and Curt Perkins, wanted to rebel against Filmation's mandates of reusable animation and their strict "on-model" policies where model sheets had to be traced, and sneak in some fluid animation. They wanted to break the rules, not understanding the limitations put on by network strictures and economic realities.[5][6] Fitzgerald, Minton and other storyboard artists drew some funny and lively storyboards as reference for the animators.[7][8][9][10][11] As a result, the animation and art was a lot more energetic than the original Terrytoons.[1] Fitzgerald storyboarded a scene in the episode "Movie Mouse" where Oil Can Harry does a wild take in response to Swifty telling him that he used handcuffs to tie up a snake. He got in trouble with Scheimer and Prescott, who claimed that it could not be animated. Butterworth insisted that it could, and he spent a week working on it to prove it. The scene wound up in the finished episode.[12] Kricfalusi, Fitzgerald, Minton and Butterworth would later go on to work on Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.[13][14] Paul Dini wrote some of the Quacula and Heckle and Jeckle episodes. When he first got hired, he was lighting models for Filmation. Dini's father was a friend of Prescott's. He had just gotten out of school and sent Filmation a script, which they found funny, so Dini was given some work.[5]
After the series premiered, cartoonist Scott Shaw filed suit against Filmation due to the fact that he had created a character named Duckula for the comic book Quack! #1 (July 1976), published by Star*Reach. While the notion of a vampire duck was not really new as Daffy Duck had appeared with a "Duckula" character in Daffy Duck #92 four years prior in 1975, what drew concern from Shaw! was the fact that he was alerted by friends at Filmation that they had copies of Quack! on hand during production, and that Quackula's character model sheet seemed to be a Bob Clampett Daffy with Duckula's features overlayed onto it (Shaw! would recruit Clampett as an expert witness). Additionally, Duckula had his own bear supporting character named Bearanboltz, a dim-witted pastiche of Frankenstein's monster, which again made the similarities too convenient. The matter was settled out of court by Filmation with Shaw! for $30,000, and after 16 episodes Quacula was dropped from the show. The show was shortened to a half-hour in 1980, and was moved to Sundays in its final season.[15][16] In 1982, "The Great Space Chase" was re-edited into an 80-minute movie which had a limited release to theaters. It later appeared on home video.[17][4]
Voice cast and their characters
[edit]- Alan Oppenheimer – Oil Can Harry, Swifty, Narrator, Additional Voices[18]
- Diane Pershing – Pearl Pureheart, Additional Voices[18]
- Frank Welker – Heckle, Jeckle, Quacula, Theodore H. Bear, Additional Voices[18]
- Lou Scheimer (uncredited) – Mighty Mouse, Additional Voices[18][19]
- Erika Scheimer (uncredited) - Additional Voices (episode 4)
Episodes
[edit]
| No. | Original air date | Title | Written by: |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | September 8, 1979 | Mouse of the Desert (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 1 | |||
| Stop...Pay Troll (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon | ||
| Goldfeather (Heckle & Jeckle) | Bill Danch | ||
| Star Boars (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| The Golden Egg (Heckle & Jeckle) | Dan DiStefano | ||
| 2 | September 15, 1979 | Planks a Lot (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 2 | |||
| The Exercist (Mighty Mouse) | Marc Richards | ||
| The Heroes (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ron Card | ||
| House for Sale (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Cavebirds (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| 3 | September 22, 1979 | The Star of Cucamonga (Mighty Mouse) | Ron Card |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 3 | |||
| Gypsy Mice (Mighty Mouse) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Show Business (Heckle & Jeckle) | Bill Danch | ||
| Weird Bear (Quacula) | Bill Danch & Ted Pedersen | ||
| Spurs (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ron Card | ||
| 4 | September 29, 1979 | Loco Motivations (Mighty Mouse) | Dave Bascom |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 4 | Buzz Dixon | ||
| Cats and Robbers (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch | ||
| Birds of Paradise (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Monster Mash (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| The Open Road (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| 5 | October 6, 1979 | Blimp with the Wind (Mighty Mouse) | Dave Bascom |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 5 | |||
| Catula (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch | ||
| Robot Factory (Heckle & Jeckle) | Creighton Barnes | ||
| Uncle Ferenc (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Farmer and the Crows (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| 6 | October 13, 1979 | Mouserace (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 6 | |||
| The Sun Harnesser (Mighty Mouse) | Ron Card | ||
| Foreign Legion Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | Dan DiStefano | ||
| The Magic Lamp (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Mail Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | Creighton Barnes | ||
| 7 | October 20, 1979 | Movie Mouse (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 7 | |||
| Mick Jaguar in Concert (Mighty Mouse) | Buzz Dixon | ||
| The Malcon-tents (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ron Card | ||
| Room for Rent (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Bellhops (Heckle & Jeckle) | Nancy Schipper | ||
| 8 | October 27, 1979 | Pheline of the Rock Opera (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 8 | Buzz Dixon | ||
| Captain Nemo-oh-oh (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch | ||
| Sphinx! (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Morgana La Duck (Quacula) | Paul Dini | ||
| Hang Two (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| 9 | November 3, 1979 | Snow Mouse (Mighty Mouse) | Ted Pedersen |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 9 | |||
| Haunted House Mouse (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch | ||
| Witch Way Outta Here (Heckle & Jeckle) | Dan DiStefano | ||
| Return of Star Boars (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| C.B. Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | Nancy Schipper | ||
| 10 | November 10, 1979 | Cat Ness Monster (Mighty Mouse) | Creighton Barnes |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 10 | Sam Simon & Buzz Dixon | ||
| Rugged Rodent (Mighty Mouse) | Buzz Dixon | ||
| Shopping Center (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Time and Before (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Where There's a Will (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ron Card & Bill Danch | ||
| 11 | November 17, 1979 | Gorilla My Dreams (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 11 | |||
| Cattenstein (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch | ||
| Identity Problem (Heckle & Jeckle) | Creighton Barnes | ||
| Bungled Burglary (Quacula) | Paul Dini | ||
| Time Warped (Heckle & Jeckle) | Paul Dini | ||
| 12 | November 24, 1979 | Cat of the Baskervilles (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 12 | |||
| Pearl of the Jungle (Mighty Mouse) | |||
| Invisible Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | |||
| Shanghai Salty (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Marathon Bird (Heckle & Jeckle) | Nancy Schipper | ||
| 13 | December 1, 1979 | Moby Whale (Mighty Mouse) | Buzz Dixon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 13 | |||
| Big Top Cat (Mighty Mouse) | |||
| Supermarket (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Pyramid (Quacula) | Ron Card & Bill Danch | ||
| Flowered Knighthood (Heckle & Jeckle) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| 14 | December 8, 1979 | The Disorient Express (Mighty Mouse) | Sam Simon |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 14 | |||
| The Maltese Mouse (Mighty Mouse) | Buzz Dixon | ||
| Astrobirds (Heckle & Jeckle) | |||
| Haunted House (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Apartment Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | |||
| 15 | December 15, 1979 | Beau Jest (Mighty Mouse) | Bill Danch |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 15 | |||
| Curse of the Cat (Mighty Mouse) | |||
| The 25th Century (Heckle & Jeckle) | |||
| Magic Duck (Quacula) | Ron Card | ||
| Safari Birds (Heckle & Jeckle) | Sam Simon | ||
| 16 | December 22, 1979 | Around the World in 80 Ways (Mighty Mouse) | Ted Pedersen |
| The Great Space Chase: Chapter 16 | |||
| Tugboat Pearl (Mighty Mouse) | |||
| Wonderland (Heckle & Jeckle) | |||
| The Fantastic 2½ (Quacula) | Ted Pedersen | ||
| Arabian Nights and Days (Heckle & Jeckle) |
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Erickson, Hal (2005). Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 Through 2003 (2nd ed.). McFarland & Co. pp. 546–549. ISBN 978-1476665993.
Mighty Mouse Playhouse maintained an average 11.6 rating with a 45.8 percent audience share throughout its CBS run. No need to tamper with that kind of success. But in 1967, the old Terrytoons were edged off the network and into syndication thanks to the up to date competition of superhero TV cartoons churned out by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. It was the latter studio which, in tandem with CBS Films successor Viacom, brought Mighty Mouse back to life in 1979 with a package of brand new cartoons, bundled together with the revival of another enduring Terrytoons property, the talking-magie team of Heckle and Jeckle (who in the tradition of Mighty Mouse had had 104 of their theatrical releases played on CBS to excellent ratings from 1956 through 1961). The 60-minute New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle followed TV-cartoon tradition of having the verbal humor carry the ball in lieu of brilliant animation, though the artwork was sprightly and in fact was a lot more energetic than some of the original Terrytoons. "Non-violence" was the byword here: Mighty Mouse used his wits rather than his muscles to defeat Oil Can Harry, who in turn was motivated by greed and selfishness rather than lust in his tiltings with Pearl Pureheart. Like-wise, Heckle and Jeckle were stronger on quips than on their patented mischief and practical jokes. And there was a new character wending its way through the program: Quackula, a vampire duck who slept in an egg-shaped coffin, and who, despite the producers' assurances that the character was "sure to be loved", was infinitely less lovable than Britain's Count Duckula (q.v.). Mighty Mouse appeared in two weekly, cliffhanging seven-minute episodes set in Outer Space (it was the Star Wars era), plus one self-contained adventure; Heckle and Jeckle starred twice a week; and Quackula flapped about merely as a one-per-week filler (he disappeared, due to an obscure legal conflict with a similar comic book character, when New Adventures was pared to a half hour for its second season). Additionally, Mighty Mouse was on hand to dispense the 30-second "environmental bulletins" and safety tips dictated by CBS, supervised by a team of academicians, and interwoven into the program between adventures. Missing were all those operatic oratorios sung by Mighty Mouse in his theatrical-release heyday. "No more opera," insisted Filmation executive Norm Prescott in 1979. "I don't think that a singing superhero mouse would fly with contemporary audiences." Not even a flying superhero like Mighty Mouse. Disregarding an overkill assessment of the series as "Mindless and monotonous" with "relentless violence-based humor" from a panel of children's TV experts assembled by TV Guide, the 16-week New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle was fun but antiseptic, just as Mighty Mouse himself had always been. Even if Filmation had wanted to be "relentlessly" violent, it was gagged and bound by the nonaggressive strictures imposed by CBS.
- ^ Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 163. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle was a licensed show that came about because CBS wanted it on the air, but I don't recall why. We developed the two Terrytoons projects, along with Quacula, a new project of our own, as a one-hour anthology aimed at younger audiences, with a crowd of anthropomorphic characters.
- ^ Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 164. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Many of the original Terrytoons Mighty Mouse shorts actually began as if they were cliffhangers, although the stories wrapped up at the end of each, so it was more of an "in media res" style of storytelling. So, when we began developing The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, we looked to the style of serial stories we were already telling with Jason of Star Command and the new Flash Gordon, and did the same. This time, the serialized adventures had a bit more of an outer space feel though, as Mighty Mouse had to save the galaxy from the evil feline (Oil Can) Harry the Heartless and his "Doomsday Machine", and save the regal Queen Pearl Pureheart. Our other Mighty Mouse toons were more traditional Earth-bound stories. Unlike some of the theatricals, however, we dispensed with the operatic oratories that were sung by the hero and his castmates. We also dispensed with much of the cartoon violence that had been violence that had been acceptable for theatrical toons, but not okay for modern television standards and practices departments, replacing the mayhem with satire and slapstick. Heckle & Jeckle was another Paul Terry creation, first seen in the theatrical short "The Talking Magpies" in January 1946. Although the two black birds looked like twins, one had a British accent, and the other had a Brooklyn accent. Although sold to CBS in 1955, their last short was created in 1966, and Heckle & Jeckle became another theatrical-to-television mainstay. The third element of the series, probably inspired by our work on the unsold Dracula series, was Quacula, about a vampire duck who lived in an egg in the basement of a run-down home owned by Theodore H. Bear. Quacula didn't drink blood, he fed on fear by scaring Theodore, or others. Unfortunately, he wasn't always very good at accomplishing his fear factor goals. Each week, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle would have two seven-minute Mighty Mouse traditional shorts, as well as one episode of the science-fiction serial, "The Great Space Chase." There were also two Heckle & Jeckle shorts, and generally one Quacula short. We also included short safety tips and "environmental bulletins" in each show, hosted by Mighty Mouse, as well as homonym segments from Heckle & Jeckle. Total story count was 32 Mighty Mouse shorts, 16 Mighty Mouse serial chapters, 32 Heckle & Jeckle shorts, and 16 Quacula shorts.
- ^ a b "The Many Adventures of Mighty Mouse". Cartoon Research. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
- ^ a b Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 165. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
By the way, due to one of our previously mentioned studio training programs, run by Don Christensen, we brought a lot of new people in and gave them their start in animation on this show, Fat Albert's "Brown Hornet", and others. Because we rigidly kept all our work in America, we were hiring more than any other company and teaching working animation to the next generation. A lot of the young folk wanted to break the rules, not understanding the limitations put on by network strictures and economic realities. Some became more famous than others, and some eventually understood why we did what we did because they would go up against the same walls in their future at other companies. Popular superhero producer/writer/story editor Paul Dini cut his writing teeth on the Quacula and Heckle & Jeckle series. If I remember right, when he first got hired, he was lighting models for us. His dad was a friend of Norm Prescott's. He had just gotten out of school and sent us a script, and it was funny, so we gave him some work. Two other members of the "young folk" who worked on Mighty Mouse were board artists Tom Minton and Eddie Fitzgerald. Both of them later worked on Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse revival for CBS in 1987. Tom described his scripts/storyboard work on that show as, "revenge for what we couldn't do at Filmation". To that I say—and I like Tom—that times change and the rules were different a decade later. That really is the heart of it. Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi got his start on "Quacula" too, and our Tom & Jerry show the following season, Kricfalusi later became an ungrateful jerk, ragging on Filmation publicly and saying he wasted his time there. He didn't have to accept a paycheck or get a start in the industry through us, but he did both.
- ^ "TOM BARON". alberto's pages. Retrieved November 19, 2024.
- ^ Kricfalusi, John (2010). The Art of Spümcø and John K. IDW Publishing. pp. 45–47. ISBN 1613774907. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
I quit working for Calico in 1979 and jumped over to Filmation to become a storyboard artist on The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle. I had never done a complete official storyboard before, so it was daunting. The other thing that shocked me was the storyboard format that Filmation used. (Storyboards are the panels of sketches that outline the action and dialogue in an animated cartoon, kind of like a comic book.) They printed nine postage stamp–sized frames on each piece of 8 1/2" x 11" paper, and expected the artists to draw characters accurately and with backgrounds on these microscopic panels. I have never been able to draw small, let alone at the subatomic level. They must have thought they were saving money on paper; Filmation was all about saving every possible penny, in the craziest ways. A sort of experimental revolution was going on at the studio, and I don't know how it started. All the storyboard artists were in one wing of the building, and most of us were young, naive, and eager to make funny cartoons. The scripts were terrible, but we supposedly had leeway to add gags to the storyboards, which, in TV animation, was unheard of at the time. Even drawing the characters in a goofy way was forbidden, but I saw the other guys doing it, so I did too. Eddie Fitzgerald was the spirit of the department. He convinced us that we were a lot freer creatively than we were in actuality. His enthusiasm and energy infected us all. Eddie was doing these crazy storyboards for a segment called Quacula, about a vampire duck. Quacula was part of the Mighty Mouse series, but not an original Terrytoons character; it was created at Filmation. Eddie, like me, had recently discovered Bob Clampett's Warner Bros. shorts and they had changed his life. Prior to discovering Clampett, Eddie was perfectly happy to have a job drawing at all, even if it was on bland Filmation cartoons like Flash Gordon. After Clampett, Eddie was outraged at anything that didn't attempt to measure up. He showed me his Quacula boards. There was a scene where the dumb bear Theodore was a short-order cook at a greasy spoon restaurant and he was flipping hamburgers. He was also unwittingly flipping a screaming and quacking Quacula on the grill. None of this action was written in the script; Eddie was adding it as he drew, and it was really funny. Eddie developed a drawing style that suited the tiny panels. He drew the characters with bold lines of action and expressions in broad strokes, and his compositions were brilliant. He could draw characters and backgrounds from any angle. He was not into the Hanna-Barbera style of left-to-right action and straight-on camera angles. Eddie placed his camera slightly above or below the characters, and always framed them perfectly within the background. They really looked like miniature Clampett compositions, mixed with Eddie's own exciting style. I was amazed and inspired by his work, and sometimes sat in with him, offering my own gag suggestions. He would emit his famous guffaw that you could hear all around the studio and then redraw entire sequences, which would, of course, drive the writers crazy. They expected us to blindly obey their every disjointed line of dialogue and awkward screen direction. Eddie was a proselytizer for Clampett. He talked about him incessantly to everyone in the studio, including his officemate, the old-timer Paul Fennell. Fennell hated Clampett, not just his work, but personally. Fennell was a pal of Friz Freleng and Bill Hanna, and he would turn to Eddie and say, "I'd walk ten miles to see a Friz Freleng cartoon. But I wouldn't walk across the street for Clampett. He's a bum!" One morning Eddie was on a deadline to turn in a board by noon. Meanwhile, Paul, who was in his mid-seventies and not too healthy, had forgotten his blood pressure pills that day and was crankier than ever. He was working at his desk, loudly ranting about Clampett, just to get Eddie's goat. "Clampett only made ten cartoons at Warner Bros. Friz made 1,000!" Milt Gray yelled over to their office, "Hey, Eddie, do you want to see this list of the 98 cartoons Bob made at Warner Bros.?" Paul continued ranting, even madder now. Finally, Eddie couldn't concentrate on his work anymore and told a purple-faced Paul to pipe down so he could finish his board. Paul's eyes bugged in outrage, and he hauled off and punched Eddie right in the nose! Then he turned around and went back to work, continuing to curse out Clampett. Eddie was shocked, but turned around to finish his board. Not everyone loved Clampett and his work, but at least we all felt strongly about it.
- ^ Kricfalusi, John (2010). The Art of Spümcø and John K. IDW Publishing. p. 47. ISBN 1613774907. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
I met Tom Minton at Filmation, and he was hilarious in a completely different way than anyone else there. Personally, he was dry and underplayed, but he had the craziest drawing style I had ever seen. It didn't look like what everyone else was doing. It screamed rebellion to management, yet somehow the management loved him, and he got away with sick jokes and bizarre ideas all the time. I think Tom must have cast some kind of magic spell over executives, making them believe he was a conservative, upstanding citizen who would never think to undermine the pure and wholesome blandness of their television cartoons. Tom would come by our office and toss in the latest script—on fire! We'd have to stomp up and down on it to put it out. We hated the scripts because they were so lame. Our boss, Bob Kline, was a super hero-type artist, not a cartoony guy, but he was very good to us, and encouraged us to be creative and funny and protected us from the bureaucracy as well as he could.
- ^ Kricfalusi, John (2010). The Art of Spümcø and John K. IDW Publishing. p. 49. ISBN 1613774907. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Everyone played practical jokes on everyone else, and the whole feel of the department was like what we had read (and heard from Clampett) about the crazy antics at Termite Terrace, the run-down building where Clampett and Tex Avery directed their Warner Bros. shorts. It was all a mirage though. The storyboard artists would do their best to draw the cartoon stories funny and lively, but when we saw the finished cartoons after they'd been animated, they looked like any other Filmation cartoon—bland, stiff, lifeless, and boring. This was a real revelation to me. I realized it didn't matter what any one artist did in his department if the rest of the departments, like animation and layout, didn't follow through. The other departments at Filmation were set in their ways and went about doing things the way they had always done things. There were a few exceptions to this though, thanks to Eddie. He would sneak around to the layout and animation departments and try to get them as excited as he was about making the cartoons look funny, and Eddie actually had some success on his own Quacula cartoons. Somehow he convinced the layout artists to copy the wild poses in his storyboards and do more exaggerated drawings than they typically drew. But even when they did, the drawings came out like stretched, exaggerated blandness, like someone who had never seen real cartoons trying to draw wackiness. This made some of the cartoons look truly bizarre. There were even a couple of young animators who were willing to risk their necks by animating crazy stuff. I remember Kent Butterworth animating a huge "take" for a villain in a Mighty Mouse cartoon. The character grew giant veiny eyeballs and opened his mouth to scream, revealing a pimply tongue and big ragged teeth. The funny thing was that it was animated really slowly, which made the take seem unsettling, but it made it through the system and was the talk of the studio. I was wandering through the studio one day and happened upon a model sheet of Quacula that looked different from the one we had been using. It was totally professional. I asked who had done it and found out it was a redesign suggestion by an artist named Bill Wray. I had someone introduce me to him and we became friends.
- ^ Kricfalusi, John (2010). The Art of Spümcø and John K. IDW Publishing. p. 50. ISBN 1613774907. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
On his own, Bill landed a job around 1981 to make a cartoon for an early cable show called Channel Zero. He asked me to collaborate with him on the project. We storyboarded this chicken running around screaming because he had an egg stuck in his butt that he needed to lay. When he finally fires it out, it vibrates and cracks open. Inside is the world's angriest baby who does a crazy dance, and that was it. It was approved, and Bill, Lynne Naylor, and I laid it out. Lynne and I animated it, and Bill painted some surreal Clampett-inspired backgrounds. It was my first shot at doing anything of my own and I was hooked. Bill later quit the animation business to go to New York and study art at a famous college. He was disgusted with the state of animation, and told me, "John, if you ever get anything going with your own stuff, call me, and I'll come back to work on it," which he did years later on Ren & Stimpy. In the middle of this energetic environment, I struggled to draw my first tiny storyboard. It was for a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon, and I didn't know what I was doing at all. I had never drawn backgrounds, I couldn't draw small, I didn't know when to cut from a close shot to a medium or long shot, and on top of it, I was trying to fill the storyboard with funny drawings and gags. It ended up being a clunky board. I took too long, drew too zany, and got called into the producer's office where I was fired. He told me that Filmation wasn't looking for the artists to rewrite the stories, and I had the wrong idea about the place. I asked if I could do layouts (the production stage that follows storyboards) instead, because then I could draw bigger and follow the approved boards, but the producer refused—he was trying to get the whole creative revolution under control. Years later I saw that "zany" storyboard I had done and thought it was so tame I couldn't believe it caused even an eyebrow to lift. This was my first taste of reality in the cartoon business. No one in charge really wanted anything to be creative, funny, interesting, or different from exactly what they were used to.
- ^ "The Art of Spümcø and John K." DOKUMENT-PUB. Archived from the original on September 8, 2024. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
- ^ "A Thrilling Tour Through The History Of Wild Takes In Animation". Cartoon Brew. November 13, 2024. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
- ^ "Q&A: Toon Titan John Kricfalusi Hails Mighty Mouse Rebirth". WIRED. January 5, 2010. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
- ^ "John Kricfalusi". Lambiek Comiclopedia. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
- ^ Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 165. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Unfortunately for us, Quacula got us in a bit of trouble. It seems that cartoonist and Hanna-Barbera animation layout artist and character designer Scott Shaw! had created a character named Duckula in a comic called Quack! published by Star*Reach Productions. Duckula appeared in the first issue of Quack! (July 1976) in a one-page story, and in the second issue (January 1977) on the back cover. Although the concept of a vampire duck dressed like Bela Lugosi wasn't new—Daffy Duck had faced a character named Duckula in issue #92 of his comic in February 1975—the fact that a bear was involved in both Quacula and Duckula struck Shaw! as a bit too close for comfort. Duckula's bear was Bearzanboltz, a dimwitted Frankenstein pastiche, whereas Theodore H. Bear was just a dimwitted bear with a penchant for saying "Ooh Ooh" like Arnold Horshack of Welcome Back, Kotter, or Joe E. Ross's exclamations from Car 54, Where Are You? Still, Shaw! filed a lawsuit against us for plagiarism. We settled out of court for around $30,000, and dropped Quacula from the Mighty Mouse line-up the following season. Ironically, Warner Bros. had an animated special, "Daffy Duck Meets Drakeula" in development, but they dropped it as soon as this all got brought up. I had no hard feelings against Scott; he was very talented. A few years later, I brought one of my nieces to meet him when he was doing a signing for the funny Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew comic book series he co-created.
- ^ "Duckula Plagiarism". Facebook. Retrieved January 21, 2024.
- ^ Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 195. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
On December 10, 1982, we released Mighty Mouse in The Great Space Chase to theatres as a kid's matinee film. The 86-minute feature was edited together from the various serialized short stories we had done. It didn't have a long theatrical life in the United States, but it was more popular worldwide, and received multiple videotape releases.
- ^ a b c d Scheimer, Lou; Mangels, Andy (December 15, 2012). Creating The Filmation Generation. TwoMorrows. p. 164. ISBN 9781605490441. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Alan Oppenheimer was the voice of Oil Can Harry, his new assistant Swifty and the Walter Cronkite-esque narrator, Diane Pershing was Pearl Pureheart, the legendary Frank Welker was Heckle, Jeckle, Quacula, and Theodore H. Bear, and I was the voice of Mighty Mouse himself. Part of the reason we did away with the songs was that Alan wasn't going to sing, and I can't carry a tune, so we would have had to hire somebody else to do the singing. Between Welker and Oppenheimer, you could get a hundred voices out of those guys. Oppenheimer I got to know fairly well because we worked together for years. But Welker, you never saw him beyond doing the show. We recorded as an ensemble whenever we could get them all together, which usually was once a week. They did a better job when they were all together because they helped each other. It wasn't standing alone, doing just your voice, and trying to figure out what the other guy just said, and it was easier on the director because you didn't have to remember what the other guy said and how they said it. I did a lot of the voice directing starting that year. But I recorded my voices separately, Mighty Mouse included. I didn't have the guts to work with those professionals. I wasn't trying to fool anybody; I belonged to the union and did all that stuff. But I didn't have the guts to work in there with them.
- ^ "The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle". The TV IV. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
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