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David Perlmutter and Powerpuff Girls
45 Plays1 year ago
This week writer and encyclopedist David Perlmutter takes Mark and Joe on a deep dive into the history of cartoons.
Find out more about this episode, including the Road Runner rules, at https://re-creative.ca/powerpuff-girls/ (don't forget the hyphen!)
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: [email protected]
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Transcript
Childhood Cartoon Rituals
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey, Mark. Joe, how are you? Eagerly awaiting my inevitable question. Your inevitable question. Yeah. So knowing a little bit about David, our guest today for butter, I was going to ask you what your cartoon ritual was as a child. Sounds like a religious thing. I know the young Joe. What did you have any kind of ritual? I mean, I can start if you want. Sure. Yeah, that'll be the primer. Go ahead.
00:00:32
Speaker
So for me, I was thinking about what my favorite cartoon was when I was a kid. And of course, I was a big fan of Batman as a comic book character, but you can only really see Batman on Saturday mornings, which was the best morning of the week. Oh, yeah. Yeah, my folks didn't get up with my brother and I and we just would, you know, ransack the kitchen and have cereal, whatever cereal we wanted and watch cartoons. But I think probably my favorite cartoon was the Flintstones.
00:00:58
Speaker
Was the Flintstones on Saturday morning? No, it was not. It was not related to Saturday morning. So that's why I was kind of torn on this one. I think for me it was like lunch times. I was lucky enough to live close enough to go home for lunch and I watched the Flintstones was on at lunchtime. So I watched it like religiously, like it was our second language at the school. Who didn't like the Flintstones? Was there anyone?
00:01:23
Speaker
I don't know. Nobody I knew. Did you know that, um, like if you get like an earworm in your head, like a song that you can't get out. Yeah. You need like a, some kind of a audio musical chaser. Well, the Flintstones theme is that chaser to get it out of your head. Yes. If you have another song stuck in your head, just start singing the Flintstones. Okay. I like that. All right. So what was yours?
00:01:49
Speaker
Then of course you're going to get the Flintstones that we had. Yeah, I know. I was, that's why I changed the topic. Cause I knew what was about to happen to my brain. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Mine was Sunday evening. Bugs bunny. Ah, that was the one night of the week that my mother would let us take our dinner downstairs and eat it in front of the television. Yeah.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I have to this day, I have memories of boiled potatoes cooked perfectly with butter. And I forever associate that with Bugs Bunny. That's very Irish there, Mr Mahoney. Lovely white flowery potatoes with perfectly boiled with butter. Lovely. Bit of Bugs Bunny with that. Okay. I was fourth generation, so we didn't talk like that. Oh, okay. Sorry. No, that's okay.
00:02:36
Speaker
So yeah, but an excellent segue into our guest today, David Perlmutter. We'll do our usual tradition of allowing David to introduce himself along with his work and what it is that he would like to talk about today, the art that inspires him. David, hello.
Introduction to David Perlmutter
00:02:52
Speaker
Hi. Hi, Dave. Yeah. Yeah. I'm David Perlmutter. I'm a historian and speculative fiction author from Winnipeg. Germain did this discussion as to why I was invited here. I'm the author of
00:03:05
Speaker
America tunes in the history of television animation and encyclopedia of American animated television shows. The speculative fiction that I write is very, say, cartoon influenced. And that sounds like a massive amount of work putting that together. How long did that take to write? For both of them, it took a very long time to do. I can believe it, yeah.
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm autistic and part of being autistic is being dedicated and doing something, making sure that it works out. And I have people in my life who are willing to look through several drafts of things as it goes along.
Academic Focus on Animation
00:03:42
Speaker
So America Turns In was like the better part of 10 years until it got published in 2014. And then Encyclopedia came a couple of years later. Wow. So a real labor of love.
00:03:57
Speaker
Well, yeah, but that's what a lot of scholarship is. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And I was really trying to fill a void because it's not always taken seriously. Yeah, that's true. So it hasn't really had a lot of academia focus on it. Oh, no. Television as a whole wasn't really taken seriously in academia until the 70s and film just a little bit before that.
00:04:26
Speaker
So it's different now. There are some academic departments in Canada that study video games on a serious level. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of my colleagues, so I work at Western University. That's my day job.
00:04:46
Speaker
And a lot of my colleagues are media studies scholars and some of them, like actually one of our previous guests, Tim Blackmore, you probably would love to be him because he, I mean, he certainly knows an awful lot about cartoons and that artwork and the sort of intellectual importance of that artwork.
00:05:06
Speaker
I've been fortunate to be a member of the Society for Animation Studies, which is the organization of the people in academia that sort of take animation seriously. Yeah, sort of. The biggest problem is that I think that the vocational training and the scholarship element of it are fused, and it's very hard trying to tear them apart.
00:05:33
Speaker
a great number of the animation programs at universities are focused on vocational training. And scholarship is more of an afterthought. And it always bothered me hearing and reading stuff that equated television animation with bad morality and violence and whatnot.
00:05:57
Speaker
And, you know, it's almost like the people who took jazz seriously or took rock and roll seriously when it first came around. And people were seeing all of this sort of biased and racist stuff about the people who made it. It was the same sort of thing. When I was writing America toons in, I went and looked in some archival articles and I quoted from and say, these people
00:06:22
Speaker
were not actually looking at the programs. They were using hyperbole and distortion to advance their own agendas, basically.
00:06:33
Speaker
Would you say that that's true of a lot of new art forms that it takes a while for it to get out of the realm of popular
Animation as a Serious Medium
00:06:41
Speaker
culture? Oh, always. Into being taken as more serious. I mean, I play video games, and I have for quite a long time. And I feel like I took video games as a form of storytelling pretty seriously, even from a start. And it took a long time before I started hearing scholars talking about that.
00:07:01
Speaker
The thing is, it's like what Harold Bloom was talking about when he was talking about the canon of Western literature and the circumstances under which it was developed and how it evolved and who adds to it. How did the archetypal settings come about? How do they get rebelled against and all this? And I saw that when I was dealing with the history of the genre.
00:07:30
Speaker
Hanna-Barbera establishes a canon. J Ward develops a means of telling stories that's not the same at all. And then over time, you get a new generation come up. Matt Greening comes in, does his thing.
00:07:47
Speaker
You know, Seth McArland comes in and does his thing and then Craig McCracken, who I greatly admire, starts doing his thing. And it suddenly becomes, it's not something that can be easily categorized as easily as it could have been when it started. Yeah. And it also, it starts to absorb other genres too. So like, for example, one of my favorite Star Trek shows is the animated show Lower Decks. Hmm. Yeah.
00:08:16
Speaker
You know, and that, like, that doesn't exist without the crazy one with Morty and Rick and Morty. Yeah. Rick and Morty. Sorry. A pickle Rick baby. Uh, yeah, this is what I mean. Like it's yeah, that does it. Like Laura Dex doesn't exist until you have Rick and Morty first in a way, right? Well, yeah. And same sort of thing. Yeah. Simpsons wouldn't exist without Flintstones. Exactly. Yeah.
00:08:42
Speaker
Well, not like there. No, no, I think that's totally right. Yeah. Now, what did you love when you were? I'm a kid of the eighties. So I grew up in Canada. So I, you know, I grew up with what was on then stuff that was coming out of America. And that at that time, what would that have been? Well, it was a smurfs Alvin ship monks and Garfield and friends. That's when Hasbro got into the cartoon game too, right? Like they had. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:12
Speaker
Like that whole decade, it was a period where a lot of the fun, at least in terms of making it kind of evaporate a bit, and it didn't really come back until the following decade. I'm overgeneralizing a bit because there were some interesting programs in that.
00:09:29
Speaker
You know, animation is like jazz in that sense because it's not so much about who has the trumpet or the saxophone or the piano. It's what they do with it. Right. Yeah. No, I was going to say in that era was very commercial. I mean, this is just my impression because I'm not a child of the 70s, not a child of the 80s. So for me, it was like Flintstones and Spider-Man and the Justice League and all of that.
00:09:52
Speaker
But it seemed to me like in the 80s, you had Transformers and GI Joe, which I would occasionally watch the GI Joe series as an adult because I was a big fan of Sergeant Rock comic books when I was a kid. They weren't very good. They were commercialized and they're big long commercials essentially for the stuff they were trying to sell. Did you experience that?
00:10:20
Speaker
As a kid? Yeah, the 1980s are completely entwined with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yeah. And a lot of the television animation that was made during that time kind of reflects the way the world was then.
00:10:34
Speaker
Was he not a cartoon figure himself? I'm sure, I'm sure he was in an episode of GI Joe. I'm positive. So what did you want to talk about as something that is like, obviously you have literally an encyclopedia knowledge of this stuff. What, what piece of what particular piece of artwork would you like to talk about as something that has inspired you? Well,
00:10:59
Speaker
It's very hard to choose stuff that's- Yeah, I'm sorry for that question. I wrote an essay online, I said that trying to compare the Simpsons of the Powerpuff Girls, which are two of the shows I would put in that category, is like saying that Glenn Gould and Oscar Peterson were two Canadian guys who played the piano. It's a gross oversimplification of
00:11:22
Speaker
Because they both play the piano, but they didn't play it the same way. Yeah, no, they did not play the same thing at all. So, I mean, I mean, I think it's fair to say if you want to like pick something you liked, but then qualify it like with- Yes. For this category of thing.
00:11:37
Speaker
Here's the one that inspires me that like, so if you want to do rapid shot,
The Impact of Powerpuff Girls
00:11:42
Speaker
like, here's what inspires me with this one. I'm okay with that. How about you, Joe? Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe it's impossible to narrow it down. Is that the case? It might be. Yeah. Sometimes it's really hard. Yeah. And I think the other thing we should say to all of our guests is that they're not married to this decision. Oh, yes. Yeah.
00:11:58
Speaker
Well, what I admire about Craig McCracken, the original Powerpuff Girls, was the fact that he took this very overproduced genre. Superhero stories is very admittedly somewhat overplayed within the history of television animation. But the remarkable thing was that he had this way of doing it that was completely different than anyone else had interpreted it before.
00:12:27
Speaker
Now I've never seen that. Could, could you describe it for us and the people listening? Okay. Yeah. I'm desperately Googling as we talk. It's like a powerful crowd. I know what this is. They've got the big eyes, right? They've got different colors and big eyes. Yeah. Blossom bubbles and buttercup are the idigo and superego basically.
00:12:46
Speaker
One of them is very intelligent. One of them is a little bit of a naive and buttercup. I compare James Cagney in the thirties, but it's that same sort of take no prisoners approach, hitting people in the face and whatnot. And so they go out and fight these very broadly constructed bad guys. McCracken has said that the sixties Batman show is a big influence on him. And you really see that I can see a lot of
00:13:15
Speaker
that and a lot of the Dick Tracy, but the way that he did it, it's immersive experience almost. You feel everything that happens. You feel the hits. He's using a lot of very kind of stuff that live action filmmakers take for granted, but the television animation rarely employs.
00:13:38
Speaker
McCracken does this, and Jindy Tardikovsky, who is this contemporary, does a lot of that kind of stuff too. It's not static. It moves. You feel everything that happens. And was it very popular? What was the reaction to it? Oh, well, it was, it had quite a cult following. It was very popular.
00:13:59
Speaker
It lasted for six seasons in its original incarnation. Most shows are lucky if they get one. So obviously, you know, Cartoon Network saw something in it and they were right to do that. And it was late 90s. Is that right? Late 90s? Late 90s, 1998.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, like, for me, it was like, I'm used to escapist, black exploitation style, lack of substance, television animation. Suddenly, I get exposed to this is what was so good about me coming of age in the 1990s. I get to see the equivalence of filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa. Oh, yeah. For me, that's what McCracken is, you know, it's like. So he's like the Kurosawa of animation, basically.
00:14:47
Speaker
That's what you're saying. Carousel of television animation. Television animation. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What else did he do besides that? Well, he did Powerpuff Girls and then he did Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and then Wander over Yonder. And then most recently he's done Kid Cosmic for Netflix. So he's still active. Oh yeah. I mean, that's another thing that's interesting because he keeps coming back. What's his full name? Craig McCracken. Craig McCracken. Have you ever met him?
00:15:17
Speaker
I have not, no. Would you like to? One of these days, yeah. But I try and keep track on social media.
00:15:26
Speaker
And same thing with Robert and Zaddy, who did another very clever and unconventional superhero show called My Life as a Teenage Robot, which I'm also very- That's a great title. Now, something I didn't realize, I just found out recently, I should have known this, probably everybody else does. J. Michael Straczynski, I was a big fan of him for Babylon 5, and he got a start in animation cartoons. Probably you knew that. That's probably in your encyclopedia.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, I credit him as a writer on several of the shows on encyclopedia.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah. You mentioned that Puff Girls is, it breaks some of the forms. How does it do that? How does it play with the genre? Well. Cause I, I, sorry, I've, I've never seen them. So I don't know. Well, to start with the fact that they're three pre-teen girls. Okay. Kindergarten age. You don't expect them to be powerful. You don't expect them to be able to throw people around, hit them. You've never met my daughters. Come in like they own the joint and all this. Yeah.
00:16:29
Speaker
There was and is unfortunately a lot of sexism in the business, both in terms of making comic book narratives and making the animated programs. And Powerpuff Girls was a definite departure from that. Was it a conscious departure? Do you know? I believe it was. McCracken was very, was very sure of that and his right hand woman Lauren Faust
00:16:56
Speaker
was a big influence on that. She went on to do My Little Pony's Friendship is Magic. Why do you think McCracken chose that subject? Well, you would have to ask him, but I believe it's probably like it's a novelty thing. Did he have daughters or did he have a specific audience in mind or? He got into Hanna-Barbera basically after he dropped out of California Institute of the Arts. He took a job as an art director for Hanna-Barbera.
00:17:26
Speaker
Oh, okay. Wow. They did this program where they asked people who work at the studio and other people basically to make a series of short films and they would choose the ones that were said to them that they felt were going to work. And a lot of good stuff came out of that. Such as?
00:17:47
Speaker
Well, the Powerpuff Girls came out of that. And then there were a lot of the early Cartoon Network shows started like that. Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, Deckers Laboratory, that all came out of that. Is Hanna-Barbera still going today? No. What happened to them? Well, in 2001, it became Cartoon Network Studios. Oh, really? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Bill Hanna died in 2001. Joe Barbera died in 2006.
00:18:16
Speaker
Unfortunately, I discovered that their old animation studio is now an apartment building. It's now a what? It's an apartment building? An apartment building. What happened to their IP? What happened to all their snagglepuss
Canadian Contributions and Voice Acting
00:18:31
Speaker
and deputy dog? Warner owns most of that.
00:18:35
Speaker
And who lives in the apartment building? Like Snugglepuss and Woody Woodpecker? Oh, I wish. I wish. It's Deputy Dogg too, right? That's kind of arbitrary. No, that was Terry Toons. Oh, okay. Thank you. Yeah, I explained all that. That was one of the hardest things about doing the research is that who did what to start with and then how do you categorize it in terms of like this era and that topic and what sort of
00:19:04
Speaker
I need to read your book, obviously. That was where I found reading Harold Bloom and Northrop Fry helpful because they did a lot of that stuff with English literature and so they gave me kind of a model for what I wanted to.
00:19:15
Speaker
I find it fascinating that you're tackling animation in the context and on the same level as Northrop Fry tackled his subjects. Well, why not? Why not though? Well, because it, I mean, this stuff cuts deep, right? Like this is the stuff you're introduced to as a child. So this is, you know, got the same power as fairy tales and bedtime stories.
00:19:36
Speaker
Northrop Fry took everything that he wrote about seriously, whether he was writing about William Blake, or whether he was writing about religion, and then trying to take Canadian literature seriously at a time when nobody outside of Canada did. That's one of the reasons. So speaking of which, how does Canada fare in terms of animation? We have a lot more than we used to have.
00:19:59
Speaker
Well, nelvana is Canadian, isn't it? Nelvana, yes, yes. I was pronouncing it wrong. Is it nelvana? I believe it's nelvana. Before them, there was hardly any animation kind of, we were really on the fringes. There were some people working, but- What about rank and best, that kind of stuff? Rank and- Does that count as animation? Rank and best was a, yes. So it's stop motion.
00:20:22
Speaker
I think Wallace and Gromit, yeah. Yeah, okay. Does that count? Yes. Or is that a fringe sort of? Animation can be sub-categorized by the contents of the narratives, but it can also be sub-categorized by the forms in which it takes. You have traditional 2D animation and 3D animation. Right. Stop motion, which is what Rankin Bass did, and then clay animation. Davian Goliath. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh my God, you gotta watch those.
00:20:49
Speaker
And then there's the more experimental forms of animation that people like Norman McLaren were doing at the National Film Board. And some of it was truly sublime. I'm thinking of, like Frosty the Snowman, you know, I watched that recently. And that original version of Frosty the Snowman is note perfect, in my view. Yeah, that's where, you know, you need to have people who are taking it seriously and giving it a lot of thought and consideration.
00:21:18
Speaker
And that was Rankin Bass, wasn't it? Yes. Arthur Rankin, Jules Bass. Yeah. And they used a lot of Canadian talent too. Oh, yes. Yeah, that, yeah. The majority of the voice actors in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are Canadian. Except, of course, for Pearl Ives. Who surely must be an honorary Canadian.
00:21:37
Speaker
Well, we can consider him that certainly. Yes. But I was thinking of when Mark was asking me my cartoon ritual as a kid. Another one was a Spider-Man. I love the animated Spider-Man and was thrilled later in life working for CBC radio drama to meet the voice of Spider-Man, Paul Soles, who is Canadian and looks nothing like Peter Parker, but his voice was a perfect Peter Parker.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's the thing about animation voice acting. Yeah, you don't have to look like a Hollywood actor to be really great at it. That's right.
00:22:12
Speaker
Some of them is not that much of a stretch, but sometimes if you match the images of the voice actor with the animated cartoon character, it doesn't always match up. But the thing that always kills me about reviewing the careers of voice actors is how versatile a lot of them are. The best ones are like one-person repertory companies.
00:22:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Joe, you would know a lot about this because you've worked with some of these people. But I'm always amazed at the talent of voice actors in terms of what they can do with their voice and, and how they can figure out how to make a character with just a few things. All they have to do is go, Okay, I got this in the dialogue. Okay, so like, I can play with that idea. And they bring a few things in from like their experience or
00:22:58
Speaker
they go, okay, I'm gonna do a little George Clooney here, I'm gonna mix that with some John Benjamin, and this is gonna be the new character, except he's more insecure than both of them.
00:23:09
Speaker
You know, and it works. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Mel blank. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The older guys like Mel blank. Oh, he was a genius. He'd be going over to the animation studio and cut voice tracks during the day. And then the evening, he would be appearing as a cast member on Jack Benny and team, other radio programs, doing some of the same voice.
00:23:34
Speaker
But he was really in demand. They understood that very few people could do what he did. Oh, those guys work their butts off. And it's really hard work. You listen to Tom Hanks talk about playing Woody in Toy Story, and he says that's among the hardest work that he's ever done because you're always you have to be right on mic. Got to get the voice perfect. It's very intense, quite draining.
00:23:59
Speaker
What do you think about other people doing characters like Bugs Bunny, those famous Warner Brothers cartoons? I had a lot of trouble with that because to me, Bugs Bunny had that Mel Blanc sound and all those other characters, and then hearing somebody else do it, to me, it just didn't seem quite right. But maybe that's the same as people preferring different James Bonds. I would find that so intimidating as an artist because
00:24:27
Speaker
I mean, you're going to be derivative. You have to be because that's your job, right? You're like, you got to be Bugs Bunny. Yeah. Bugs Bunny was a certain voice for how many years? 60 years.
00:24:39
Speaker
Well, again, I go back to jazz. It's kind of like there was one Charlie Parker. There was one Dizzy Gillespie, one Hot Lips page. These guys developed a particular sound that was unique to them. And then anybody else who was trying to do it would have to contend with knowing that that template existed.
00:25:01
Speaker
It helps if you're familiar with the character yourself. Like if you versus yourself, again, going back, you spend enough time listening to Charlie Parker and you end up playing with saxophone like birds. But the thing that ends up creating a unique performer is their ability to transcend the influence. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I love how you talk about cartoons and animation in that context, in the context of jazz and these other
00:25:27
Speaker
great works because I think- Well, the classic cartoons were contemporaneous with the bebop movement, so the 1940s. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's some of those cartoons make fun of those things too, right? Well, the cartoons made fun of them, but Parker incorporated Woody Woodpecker's laugh into some of his solos, so it worked both ways. As it should.
00:25:54
Speaker
That's a vibrant culture when you've got different art forms reflecting one another and playing with one another's things. That's a good sign. That's right. Yeah, riffing off of one another. Yeah. This cartoon gets a lot of flack now, but when Bob Clampett did Cold Black and the Seven Dwarfs for Warner Brothers in the 40s, he was making a deliberate and I would say sincere attempt to reflect the jazz culture of Los Angeles at that time.
00:26:22
Speaker
I really want to read your book, actually, after talking about this. And I think I might even want to watch the Powerpuff Girls. Is there a version of a brony that's like for the Powerpuff Girls? I might be it as far as I know. There's one and it's you. Well, not exclusively me. I mean, people like the show for different reasons. Yeah.
00:26:51
Speaker
But I admire it because it was well-produced. It made an impression on me in terms of the fiction I started writing afterwards, that it was a powerful career in my life as a teenager. It basically made me fever the school of making my protagonists iron fists in velvet gloves.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah, this is what is always fascinating about animation is that you can make the people and the animals who are the least powerful in our universe, the most powerful people there. What does the animation and cartoons mean to you personally, David? The characters say and do things I wish I could, because I'm like, personally, I am like the least assertive person in the world. I'm not I'm not trying to pull myself down, but it's just I
00:27:41
Speaker
I'm not somebody who goes around throwing my weight around. I'm not trying to demand people take me seriously. I'm just somebody who shows up and does the work. But it's an entirely different thing for people to display a swagger and the style that a lot of them have. And it's always interesting to see
00:28:10
Speaker
how they get themselves out of the predicaments because I know that I would not react as boldly. Do you wish that you could or? I wish that I could, yes. It's almost like in my father's generation, it was the Westerns that were
00:28:28
Speaker
that were the dominant genre on television was about. It was like men are supposed to be like this, women are supposed to be like that, and so forth. But with cartoons, there isn't that binary. Do you think that's a good thing? Oh, yeah. Cartoons are more, in many ways, are a more accepting environment in real life. The way that the genre has evolved recently,
00:28:55
Speaker
show like Steven Universe that's very that has a very strong like trans vibe to it that would not have been possible at an earlier time.
Strong Visions in Animation Creation
00:29:06
Speaker
Again that is the result of the person in charge of the show being of that background and making a very conscious and unapologetic effort to make the show reflect that sentiment.
00:29:20
Speaker
Is that true of the genre in general? So I think about there's specific art forms where one artist and their vision kind of controls things. Writers, especially authors of fiction for sure. I sometimes think directors of a certain era, like late sixties, early seventies, mid seventies, like there's auteurs and that genre. Is that true of
00:29:50
Speaker
of animation as well, like does the vision of the... Definitely. Yeah. So that's kind of cool because there's not many places for that these days. But it's something that's always existed in animation right from the start, I would think.
00:30:04
Speaker
Going back to the silent era, Windsor McKay was a very auteurish figure in comic books, and when he did animation, it was no different. Walt Disney had a very specific agenda for what he wanted to accomplish, and he accomplished it. Actually, I can't believe it took this long to bring up Walt Disney.
00:30:27
Speaker
But that's good. That's a good thing. The Looney Tunes directors are the same thing. A Bob Clampett film is not the same as a Chuck Jones film and they're both not the same as a Fritz Freelang film. Yeah.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, the Chuck Jones list of rules for the coyote. I love, I love that list. Well, yeah. Again, like he was, he and Michael Maltese, who I think is the great writer and gag man, who I think was one of the secret weapons that they had. They were very precise about what they wanted to do with their films. They understood each other. Right. What was the list, Mark?
00:31:05
Speaker
Oh, I'm not going to remember all of them, but it was things like no dialogue. The coyote always loses. He always is his own worst enemy. He always uses acne products. Like it's like if you, if you read the list and I think my understanding is he wrote this list, maybe we can find a copy of it and post it with the show notes, but he wrote this list before they started producing these cartoons. Oh yeah. So it's not that it evolved. It was like.
00:31:32
Speaker
No, they had like a template, like almost like a template of like here's we kind of have this notion. Obviously, they evolve though, because if you watch them in order, back me up on this, David, they evolve. Yes. They get more sophisticated as they go. And they obviously is the one tune.
00:31:51
Speaker
Another and more significant thing is that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had that sort of relationship. They had a skill set that very clearly paralleled each other. Barbera knew how to write really good gags, and Hanna understood better than a lot of the directors at that time how to stage them well. Timing is everything in animation, just like it is in music and in life.
00:32:20
Speaker
and comedy. Yes. So all the Tom and Jerry cartoons that they did in the forties and fifties, you see that everything happens logically. Everything is set out directly. So there's a flow. There isn't a whole lot wasted space or words. And that became very important to them when they moved into television in the fifties.
00:32:42
Speaker
They got into television in the 50s basically because MGM shut down its animation department and they were out of work. Going back to the Flintstones, that's how that came about, eventually.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, that's a brilliant cartoon. It really is. The more we talk, the more I go, yeah, I see the influence of jazz on this, right? Because you start with the form with like, whatever it is, your set of rules, if it's the Roadrunner and the Coyote, it's going to be this thing when it's Tom and Jerry. And then really each individual show is just a variation of the form and just playing with it and finding new ways to surprise people.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a jazz singer is not going to sing a song completely straight. They're going to be scatting and they're going to be playing with the rhythm and putting all these weird interpolations into it. Animation the same way, unless the intent is clearly to tell the story in a straight fashion, which doesn't happen too often. What did you think of the latest Spider-Man animated feature? Well, it reflects the fact that animation is experimentation. There's no one way to do it.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, I love the way that it incorporated many different forms or possible approaches to animation. Now, I know that we're going to have to have you come back because I know this question is another whole podcast, but I know for a fact that there's got to be some influence of Japanese animation when it comes to the Powerpuff Girls.
00:34:11
Speaker
When we talk again, we're going to have to talk about Japanese animation. Ah, yes. Well, yeah. I mean, Mojo Jojo, their principal nemesis, is very, is a very anime character. I mean, just like the run on sentences that never end. That's like trying to convert Japanese into English.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, so that will have to be another podcast, I think, talk about the Japanese, because really, we've been talking about North American animation for most of the time. Yeah, anime is its own. Now, is it fair to say it's a separate genre or is it just a sub genre? It's the way they do animation in Japan, and it's absolutely not the same way that they do animation in North America. That's the short way of saying it.
00:34:55
Speaker
If we're thinking about the chart, like there's vertebrates and invertebrates. And then in terms of animation, there's a Japanese way of doing it. And then there's everybody else. Is that fair? Yeah, the way that Miyazaki makes his films is not the same way as the way they make movies at the Disney studio.
00:35:14
Speaker
Yeah, Howl's Moving Castle. I finally watched it, I don't know what it was, three or four years ago. I was like, I can't believe I didn't see this before now because it blows your mind when you see it. It's really amazing. Yeah, one of my favorite. Now, as we start to wrap things up here, David, what do you think of the current state of animation?
00:35:37
Speaker
Well, in terms of production, there's never been more of it. For the longest time, there wasn't enough. And now there's too much. The streaming services are kind of blamed for that because they want stuff to be made immediately and they don't care about whether it's good or
Challenges of Streaming Era Animation
00:35:56
Speaker
not. So you think the quality of suffering, do you?
00:35:59
Speaker
There is always a risk of the vitality being sapped out. I go back to the powerful squirrels here. There's one episode where they get multiplied ad nauseam and then they almost die because their life force is gone.
00:36:15
Speaker
sucked out of them. It happened because of greed, and because of avarice, and because of a person who's doing it, not caring about their value on an intrinsic level. I've written about this before, and I see the episode of the metaphor about you have to understand that this is a valuable thing that can't be overworked. It can't be misunderstood. It can't be done in a way that will cheapen it.
00:36:46
Speaker
There are other programs and other episodes that reflect this. The people who make animation understand, a lot of them, they understand that they have a mission and they want to do it correctly. They want to create something that has value. What a great call to action to finish on. Yeah, that's great. David, any final thoughts on this subject?
00:37:06
Speaker
I'll just say animation has reached my life. There's a lot of things about my life that would be very different without animation. I would not be as anti-racist and pro-feminist as I am. I would not respect animals as much as I do. I would not have as much of a firm sense of what I think good and evil are, although that part of it is part of being autistic because we have that kind of binary.
00:37:35
Speaker
There are a lot of extremely admirable and equally despicable people in that genre who I would never have known about and who would never have influenced me in the way they do.
Animation's Influence on Worldview
00:37:49
Speaker
And my own fiction would not have been what it is.
00:37:55
Speaker
if it were not for animation. It would be very different and it would not possibly not be as vital because I would not have understood what kind of spark I would need to cultivate in order to develop it. The African American writer Ishmael Reed described what he writes as boxing on paper and a lot of what I was trying to do is
00:38:17
Speaker
draw the same sort of narratives of animation in prose. Yeah. I love that quote box again paper. Mark, any final thoughts, questions? No, I think that's just, it just shows you how every art form has so much in it that can inspire you. It's really cool. Thank you. I'm so appreciative of you, David.
Podcast Break Announcement
00:38:40
Speaker
I really, it was a pleasure to meet you. Yeah, same. And I'm going to have to read your books.
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for being on Recreative. Thank you, guys.
00:39:02
Speaker
Joe, I'm really enjoying this. This has been fun, but I don't want to do this podcast anymore. You're talking about stopping the podcast. No, I'm just kidding. But I do want to take August off. I just had like a heart attack, Mark. I was just trying to get that rise out of you. So yeah, I think we should take August off. I think we should end of July and come back after Labor Day. I think that's a terrific idea. Why don't we do a special episode to finish the whole thing off? A very special episode? Very special episode, yes. And we're going to launch your book, right?
00:39:28
Speaker
Yes, we're going to launch my book Adventures in the Radio Trade with a special live edition of Recreative. That sounds perfect. So we'll do that on the 30th. Sunday the 30th will be a special live edition of Recreative, after which we'll take August off. And then we'll be back on... After Labor Day. After Labor Day. I'll take my white pants off at that point. Your white pants. Right? Because you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Do I look like someone who pays any attention to that kind of... Do I look like someone who has white pants?