Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
Читать онлайн книгу.
music, something in which Warner Brothers was interested as the studio owned several music publishing companies and saw these cartoons as potential vehicles for the songs they were publishing.96 Looney Tunes were, however, still very much typical cartoons of their day, full of the same gags and sense of humour in general. The original Looney Tunes featured Bosko, a character created by Harman and Ising, who was originally portrayed as a stereotypical black character who spoke in the “minstrel show”-type dialect. He quickly evolved, however, into a rather close imitation of Mickey Mouse. Bosko was even given a girlfriend, Honey, who fulfilled the same function in Bosko’s stories as Minnie Mouse did in Mickey’s cartoons. This evolution in Bosko’s characterisation probably occurred because of the rise in popularity which Mickey Mouse enjoyed during the first year of the production of Looney Tunes. Although Bosko, as Harman and Ising first conceived of him, was to be featured in cartoons with a much greater emphasis on dialogue, because of the terms of their contract with Warner Brothers (obliging them to use the music available to them from the Warner Brothers’ music catalogues), the cartoons’ subsequent emphasis on music left little room for dialogue. Even the titles of the early Looney Tunes cartoons were either humorous takes on the titles of actual songs published by Warner Brothers, or else the cartoons had the same title as the main song featured in the cartoon.
Although the Warner Brothers music library was well-tapped by the Looney Tunes series, it was the Merrie Melodies series, beginning in 1931, which most heavily utilised the Warners’ musical resources. As Barrier points out, the Merrie Melodies took their titles directly from their featured songs, rather than spoofing song titles as the Looney Tunes tended to do. Also, as the cast of characters in the Merrie Melodies tended to change from one cartoon to the next, they came to resemble the Disney studio’s Silly Symphonies in their form and structure much more closely than did the Looney Tunes. The Looney Tunes, with their emphasis in the first three series on the re-occurring characters of Bosko and Honey, more strongly resembled the Disney studio’s Mickey Mouse cartoons.
By 1933, difficulties began arising between Leon Schlesinger and the partnership of Harman and Ising. In part, the tension seems to have resulted from money troubles. Schlesinger was paying Harman and Ising less money per cartoon by the 1932–33 season, only $7,300 per cartoon instead of the originally promised $10,000 they were to have received at that time. By 1 March 1933, when Schlesinger signed a new contract with Warner Brothers, his own payment for bringing in cartoons for Warner Brothers was further reduced to $6,000 per cartoon, meaning that he could afford to pay Harman and Ising even less than that.97 Additionally, the trouble between Harman, Ising, and Schlesinger may have been exacerbated when they were nearly sued by Disney for breach of copyright, on the basis of Bosko and Honey’s increasingly striking resemblance to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.98 Also, there seems to have been a degree of personality conflict between Harman and Schlesinger, and through Schlesinger with Ray Katz, Harman and Ising’s business manager and Schlesinger’s brother-in-law. The result of these difficulties for the partnership between Schlesinger and Harman and Ising was that Harman and Ising broke away from Schlesinger. Schlesinger signed a new contract with Warner Brothers, this time forming an animation studio which was directly controlled and owned by Warner Brothers (as opposed to a studio which worked for them under a contract, as Harman and Ising’s studio had done). Schlesinger proceeded to staff his studio by stealing as many animators as he could away from the other studios of the day, and then went on to let his animators get on with the business of animation (Schlesinger himself knew almost nothing about the process of creating an animated cartoon, and so concerned himself principally with acquiring funds for the studio, seldom interfering with the day-to-day running of the animation unit, its artistic decisions, et cetera).99
Although the new studio’s early cartoons were neither well made nor successful, by 1934 the role of director had finally been handed over to Friz Freleng, who started out directing Looney Tunes for Schlesinger but who quickly became the sole director for Merrie Melodies. Although some of his early Merrie Melodies can be compared to contemporary cartoons at Disney, the fact that the Merrie Melodies budget per cartoon was only around $7,500 (as compared with the $20,000+ which Disney spent per cartoon), meant that such standards were impossible for Freleng to maintain for very long. According to Barrier, the way that Freleng dealt with his limited budget was to think in terms of time, rather than dollars, and he determined that a cartoon needed to be produced by their studio every four to five weeks. Whilst his first Merrie Melodie was done in the two-colour process, his next six cartoons were done in black and white, which helped to stretch each cartoon’s budget during the initial period of Freleng’s leadership. Although the Looney Tunes continued to be made in black and white for some time, the Merrie Melodies from November 1934 onward were made in colour, which Warner Brothers made allowances for by paying Schlesinger an additional $1,750 per Merrie Melodie, bringing each cartoon’s budget up to $9,250.100
By 1935, another new director began working at Warner Brothers, Fred “Tex” Avery. Avery was an in-betweener at Universal’s animation department until he was fired from his job in April 1935. In May, Avery went to Leon Schlesinger, declared himself to be a director, and managed to convince Schlesinger to hire him, despite his having no previous directing experience before joining the Warner Brothers animation department. Just as Freleng was the director who proved to be best at organising the new Warner Brothers animation department, so did Tex Avery prove to be the director it took to help the animation studio move forward successfully in its transition from featuring mainly human characters to featuring animals as its stars. In many ways, Avery did much to forward the career of one character in particular who had made a small appearance in a Freleng Merrie Melodie called “I Haven’t Got a Hat” (March 1935), namely Porky Pig. Although it was Freleng who took credit for coming up with Porky Pig’s most lasting and memorable trait – his stutter – it was Avery who, in effect, became Porky’s “career manager” and really made him famous.101
It was also some of the members of the unit under Avery’s permanent direction – Bob Clampett and Charles M. “Chuck” Jones (along with Virgil Ross, and Sid Southerland) – who eventually became some of the Warner Brother cartoons’ most famous animators. Freleng continued to direct his own cartoon unit at Warner Brothers, as did Jack King, who worked with Warner Brothers until April 1936, when he left Warner Brothers for Disney to become the director of the new series of Donald Duck cartoons. Avery continued to feature Porky Pig as the exclusive re-occurring character in his cartoons whilst slowly introducing to the Merrie Melodies series as a whole a newer, more zany style that harkened back to the Felix the Cat cartoons which Avery admired, but still maintaining the more realistic style which had become the industry standard thanks to Disney’s insistence upon more realism in his own cartoons. In fact, it was not until April 1937, in the cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt”, that what was in many ways a revolutionary new character – one who differed from Porky in the sense that he was in the cartoon purely to serve as a source of gags rather than a source of story – was introduced into Avery’s work. Although he did not have a name at the time of his introduction, he would soon be called Daffy Duck, and, unlike Porky, he was created decidedly without any influence from the Disney studio. Daffy stood out at the time he was created precisely because he was created with the emphasis less on realism and more on gags. In many respects, Daffy, especially in his earliest incarnation, was the perfect hybrid between the earlier unrealism to be found in cartoons of the 1920s and the push for realism which was so important in cartoons from the mid-1930s onwards.
“Porky’s Duck Hunt” was a significant cartoon for Warner Brothers not only because of the advent of Daffy Duck, however. Supplying Daffy’s voice in “Porky’s Duck Hunt”, as well as giving Porky a new voice, was the soon-to-be-famous voice-over performer and Warner animation institution, Mel Blanc. Although “Porky’s Duck Hunt” was not Blanc’s first performance in a Warner Brothers cartoon, it was nonetheless an important moment for both Blanc and Warner Brothers. First of all, Blanc, a former radio actor, actually knew how to act with his voice, as opposed to simply reading the characters’ lines. He was also gifted with an amazingly flexible voice, and was able to provide most (if not all) of the voices necessary for each cartoon (indeed, Blanc’s vocal gifts would eventually earn