The Bandmaster Part 2

I have an odd fascination with the Lantz studio. By all accounts, Lantz himself was a nice man who was pleasant to work for. I've never heard or read a bad thing about him, though Tex Avery and Jack Hannah both complained about the economics of the studio.

While Lantz was a good boss, he didn't influence his cartoons the way other studio heads did. Because the Lantz studio only had one unit in the 1940s, the studio's output changed radically whenever there was a change of director. From Burt Gillett to Alex Lovy to Shamus Culhane to Dick Lundy, there's a wide variety of styles and approaches.

Our impression of the Warner Bros. cartoons is based on the range of directors' styles, but imagine how we'd think of that studio if all the cartoons were directed by Bob Clampett and then later by Friz Freleng. That's a pretty big change, but at Lantz, it was the standard.

Dick Lundy was a talented Disney animator who helped shape Donald Duck and later directed Duck shorts. He was certainly capable of making cartoons that were slickly drawn and timed. His Lantz cartoons may be, overall, the best looking cartoons the studio ever produced, though I'd never claim that they were the most entertaining Lantz cartoons.

Lundy, like Culhane, was saddled with Ben Hardaway as a story man. Hardaway was a gag machine. He never cared much for characters' personalities or building a succession of related gags. If he found a gag funny, he stuck it in whether it fit or not. Lundy worked to make the gags flow smoothly, but he couldn't get them to make sense.

Why is there a two-headed musician? How can Andy fall for so long in scene 18 when the platform looks to be no more than a few feet off the ground? Why are some performers human and the rest animal? How did the drunk get on the high wire? How does the Count, who starts out diving inside the tent, get outside it in scene 50? Nobody at Lantz seemed to care.

The lazy story work is disappointing as this cartoon was made 12 years after The Band Concert. Compare the stories. In the Disney short, there is a well-defined conflict between Mickey the conductor and Donald the heckler. When the storm hits, the musicians struggle to continue to play regardless of the absurd circumstances they find themselves in. That's a simple structure, but it's enough to organize the events and gags in the cartoon so that they make sense. The Bandmaster has no sustained conflict between characters and no large event to organize it. Lundy is left with choreographing the action to the music track, which he does well but which doesn't provide enough structure to save the cartoon. With the exception of Andy Panda himself, the other characters appear or disappear as needed for the random gags.

Had Lantz hired a better writer or if Lundy had a stronger personality as a director, their cartoons would have been better. Instead, they're handsome but generic.

The Bandmaster Part I

Unfortunately, I can only find a portion of this cartoon online, though the complete cartoon is part of the DVD set The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection. The clip below is courtesy of Kevin Langley.

The Bandmaster-Drunkard
Uploaded by klangley

Thru the Mirror Part 4

History isn't fair. Bob Wickersham had the misfortune to animate at Disney in the 1930's, when there were no screen credits. In the 1940s he directed at Columbia on series like The Fox and the Crow, but those cartoons were never highly visible on TV, VHS or DVD. According to Alberto Becattini, Wickersham has a pretty good filmography as a Disney animator. He worked on The Band Concert, Pluto's Judgment Day, Lonesome Ghosts, The Flying Mouse, Who Killed Cock Robin?, The Old Mill, Little Hiawatha and Wynken Blynken and Nod. It must have been tough to work on the cream of the crop with no public acknowledgment whatsoever.

In Thru the Mirror, Wickersham gets the entire opening of the cartoon, setting up the situation and taking Mickey through the mirror, up through jumping rope on the telephone cord. Wickersham knew how to draw appealing poses. His drawings don't have the same strong rhythm as Fred Moore's, but the proportions are very pleasing and the poses are well balanced. Wickersham's Mickey is also extremely flexible and he has a functioning brain. If you keep your eye on Mickey during these opening scenes, you see that Mickey reacts to everything that happens to him in a variety of subtle ways.

When the animation passes to Dick Lundy, Lundy's proportions are not as appealing as Wickersham's; Lundy draws Mickey's eyes, nose and ears somewhat smaller. When it comes to animation, though, Lundy is as good as anyone in this cartoon. He does three dance sequences: one on the top hat, one with the gloves and one with the Queen (a Garbo caricature). Each dance is completely different from the others. Animating dance is difficult enough, but Lundy had to master three different styles all for a single cartoon. That's a real achievement.

Leonard Sebring is less well known than Wickersham. According to Becattini, he only worked in animation from 1933-36 and only at Disney. I wish I knew why he left the field. While his dance animation isn't as sophisticated at Lundy's, he meets the challenge of dealing with a deck of cards and matching a musical beat. These scenes are not simple by any means and Sebring handles them flawlessly.

Hardie Gramatky is best known as a childrens' book author and illustrator. He created Little Toot as a book, which Disney adapted to animation in Melody Time. Is there a case where anybody else left Disney and created something that the Disney studio then animated? I can't think of any.

Gramatky's animation isn't as controlled as the other animators. He doesn't have a good sense of weight and his animation feels a little twitchy, as if he didn't understand spacing fully. His drawing of Mickey is also the crudest in this cartoon. Mickey's exit in shot 33 feels like he's being pulled out of the scene rather then moving under his own power. I don't think that it's any mistake that Gramatky was given the broadest scenes to animate, where his looseness would be least noticeable to the audience.

Wickersham handles the end of the cartoon, and his scene of Mickey growing back to normal size is done completely differently than the shrinking scene he animated early in the cartoon. Like Lundy doing dances, the Disney animators of the time had multiple solutions to any problem and didn't need to repeat themselves.

This cartoon, like many mid-'30s Disney cartoons, gets by on charm. The story is slight and there's not much acting. However, there's no shortage of gags or imagination and each idea is so well timed and executed that it captivates the audience. There's a level of skill and confidence in this cartoon that leaves most other studios of the period in the dust.

Thru the Mirror Part 2

While animation fans are still looking at Disney and other cartoons from the 1930's, they're not always aware of how the cartoons were influenced by what else was happening in the movies at the same time. Animators were going to the movies just like everybody else, and when it came time to create cartoons, they often referred back to films that they'd seen. Steamboat Willie is heavily influenced by Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr, both in terms of the setting and also the relationship between Buster/Mickey and the captain of the ship. In Thru the Mirror, the Disney artists were working from the two dominant strains of musicals in the mid-1930's.

After the initial flurry of musicals at the dawn of the talkie era (roughly 1927-1931), musicals fell out of favour. They were revived in two different ways later in the 1930's. At Warner Bros. in 1932, 42nd Street contained musical numbers created by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley wasn't interested in dance so much as he was interested in patterns of motion. He was more interested in moving people, props and the camera around on the screen than he was in presenting fancy footwork. He was also noted for his overhead camera shots. 42nd Street was so successful that Berkeley created the climactic musical numbers for a whole series of Warner musicals as the 1930s progressed.

The other branch of musical was dominated by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers starting in 1934 in Flying Down to Rio. Dance in their films was an expression of romantic feelings between the pair or else was played as a novelty. Astaire often danced without Rogers, instead working with props.

Thru the Mirror blends both branches of 1930's musicals, though it leans more heavily on Astaire than it does on Berkeley. Leonard Sebring's scenes (particularly shots 26 through 28) and Ugo D'Orsi's (shots 39 and 40) present masses of cards in patterns of movement in a Berkeley-like fashion. Shot 28 by Sebring is a typical Berkeley overhead shot.

Footlight Parade (1933)

Thru the Mirror (1936)

In Thru the Mirror, the Astaire influence is heavily felt in Dick Lundy's Mickey scenes. Mickey is surrounded by the accessories of Astaire's costume: the top hat, gloves and cane. Berkeley's dancers might be wearing anything, but Astaire was usually found in formal wear. In particular, there's a very strong influence from the title number in Top Hat (1935) in Mickey's dance animation. Mickey uses a matchstick as a cane in a similar way that Astaire handles his cane, smacking it on the ground for rhythmic effect. Mickey uses it to make the top hat he's dancing on rise and fall. Furthermore, the climax of the "Top Hat" number is Astaire using his cane as a gun, shooting the other dancers. In shot 22, Mickey shoots at the top hat with his cane in a similar way.

Top Hat (1935)

Thru the Mirror

You can see the complete Astaire number from Top Hat here if you're interested.

A Letter from Dick Lundy

I wrote a history of MGM cartoons for issue 18 of the film journal The Velvet Light Trap, which appeared in 1978. I don't recommend searching out the article, as it has been done better by many others since then. However, in researching the article, I contacted several former MGM animation staffers who were kind enough to answer my questions.

One who replied in depth was Dick Lundy (1907-1990). The picture of him here is from his time at Hanna Barbera. What's below is his letter in full, which is a summary of his entire career. Anything in square brackets is an annotation by me, the rest is Lundy.

Feb. 6, 1976

Dear Mark,

Thank you for your interest in me and my history. You must have gotten some wrong information on the Woodland Cafe direction. If this was a Disney picture, I probably animated on it and it was probably directed by Jaxon. I have no record of directing a picture by that name. [Lundy is correct. The cartoon was directed by Wilfred Jackson and Lundy animated the Apache dance in it.] It is true I started at Disney in July 1929. I started in the ink and paint dept. Six weeks or 2 months later I was put in as in inbetweener or assistant animator (at that time they were both the same thing). In March 1930 I was promoted to animator. I established the dance in the 3 Pigs going around in a circle singing "Who's afraid." This same routine was used in the other pig pictures which followed. I also established the antics of the Duck in Orphans Benefit [1934]. I animated the duck thru out this picture. They changed the model of Donald and made him more cute. I also animated on Snow White.

In 1937 they made me a director. Here is a list of the duck pictures I directed at Disney: Sea Scouts, [The] Riveter, Good Time for a Dime, Don[ald]'s Camera, Village Smithy, Don[ald's] Garden, Fly[ing] Jalopy, and [Donald's] Tire Trouble. I also directed about 10,500 feet of Navy training pictures. I left Disney's in Oct. 1943.

I started at Walter Lantz in Nov. 1943 as an animator. I animated 6 months and started in direction. Maybe you don't want a list of pictures I directed at Lantz, but if you do here is the list. These were Wooody Woodpecker, Andy Panda and some of Lantz's Silly Symphonies [the Lantz music series were Swing Symphonies and Musical Miniatures]. Sliphorn King of Polaroo, Crow Crazy, Enemy Bacteria (1300 ft 1/2 live for Navy), Poet and Peasant, Apple Andy, Bathing Buddies, Ready [should be Reddy] Kilowatt (a commercial) 1070 ft, Wacky Weed, Smoked Hams, Coo Coo Bird, [Musical Moments from] Chopin, [Overture to] Wm. Tell, Well Oiled, Solid Ivory, Circus Symphony [released as The Band Master], Top Hat [released as The Mad Hatter], Woody and the Beanstalk [released as Woody the Giant Killer], The Story of Human Energy (880 ft commercial), The Egg and I (commercial for live action picture), Banquet Busters, Kiddie Concert, Pixie Picnic, [illegible](344 ft commercial), Wacky Bye Baby, Playful Pelican, Dog Tax Dodgers, Wet Blanket Policy, Wild and Woody, Scrappy Birthday, Droolers Delight, Puny Express [credited to Walter Lantz as director], 12 two minute Coca Cola commercials. I also timed out 3 more pictures when the studio closed down at the end of 1948.

I worked for Raphael S. Wolff Productions as supervisor and director 4-'49 to 5-'50. There I received an award from N.Y. for a Kelvinator 1 minute commercial.

I started at MGM on 5-15-1950. I directed there for one year and a half, leaving there at the end of October 1951. The following titles are the pictures I directed. Caballero Droopy (This is the only picture that wasn't a Barney Bear. Droopy the dog was a Tex Averty creation.), The Little Wise Cracker [released as Little Wise Quacker], Cobs and Robbers, Heir Bear, Busy Body Bear, Barney's Hungry Cousin, Wee Willie Wildcat, Half-Pint Palamino, Impossible Possum, Sleepy-time Squirrel, Bird-Brain Bird Dog.

From MGM I went to Dudleys production managing and directing. Then I freelanced animation for about 9 months and in 1959 (March) I started at Hanna-Barbera animating. I retired the end of 1973 and have been working everyone [everywhere?] I can since. Now to answer some of your questions.

I started at MGM 5-15-1950. Tex Avery and Quimby had a little squabble and Tex left. According to Quimby, Tex would not return. I also knew that Quimby had wanted to start a third unit for a long time. So I thot that even if Tex did come back, Quimby would have his 3rd unit. It didn't turn out that way.

I was working at R.S. Wolff Productions and Quimby called me and offered me more money and a better deal than I had or hope to have had.

I already listed the titles I directed. (I went to MGM as a director.) The first one I directed was a Droopy Dog which was created by Tex Avery (I believe).

Barney Bear was already established when I got there, both drawing and personality wise. I thot the Wally Beery type character was a loveable and sympathetic personality, so I went on from there. I stepped into Avery's unit with the same animators - Walt Clinton, Mike Lah, Grant Simmons with Bob Bentley as a new animator. I also used Ray Patterson from the Cat and Mouse unit every other picture. It was a pretty good crew.

The story men were there also. Heck Allen and Jack Cosgriff. Quimby had a layout man that he thot had a good reputation - Art Heinemann, who I had worked with before at Lantz's, so I said that was okay by me. After about 3 pictures he crossed Quimby in the wrong way and was let go. Then I had Quimby hire Hal Doughty (I think that his how you spell it).

I auditioned for a voice and finally settled for Paul ----I can't remember his last name. [Lundy is probably referring to Paul Frees, who supplied the voice of Barney Bear.] He was very good. He is doing voices for Hanna-Barbera off and on now. As I remember the budget, I think it was around half way between Lantz and Disney, about $30,000?

When I was animating at Disney's I was considered a personality animator. I always tried to give the personality a comedy twist, with a gesture, a body action or a twist of the mouth or head. When I animated dances I tried to put in the same thing. Now with a funny personality leading up to a physical gag which was funny (usually the way a character reacted) you usually ended up with something twice as funny. Tex's pictures were mostly gag type pictures with a good timing, with a little personality thrown in. The Cat and Mice had personality with slapstick gags. Both of these series were set at a very fast pace. I wanted Barney to have a slower pace and likeable appeal to the audiences. Disney has this type of action in the Silly Symphonies. That is what I was striving for in Barney. Sometimes I achieved this and sometimes I failed.

If you look at the history of animation, you will notice as the animated cartoon got into a slump, there was always something that was developed that made cartoons raise up and become in style again. Around 1928-29 the cartoons were in a slump and sound and Disney came along and revived it again. In the 1940's television came along and revived it again. In the late '50's Hanna Barbera revived it with limited animation. Animation had reached a cost per foot which wasn't commercial. The limited animation was the answer. Now it is in the decline and something or someone will bring out something which will bring cartoons into their own again.

I have never had a desire to direct a feature. I guess I never even thot of it. The cost is great even in shorts and a feature would really be up into dough. Nobody ever offered to put up that kind of money - to me at least.

I hope this helps you out and answers some of your questions. I am retired now. I spent 44 years in the industry and am now satisfied to let the younger people take over. I've had my fun, let them enjoy it.

Sincerely,

Dick Lundy