![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerDescribing how I’d found and bought a copy of Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic, I wound up mentioning some particular old cartoons I was now more interested in watching, including Tex Avery’s work for MGM. Then, not all that long after that, I happened on a notice some of those shorts would be released on a Blu-Ray. While I did implicate myself to the point of ordering the disc from Amazon rather than seeking out some other, less overwhelming source, I was ready to start watching it.
This new interest hadn’t sprung just from Maltin’s enthusiastic descriptions. In my cartoon-consuming childhood, the Tom and Jerry block I watched on the TVs at my grandparents sometimes included shorts without the cat and mouse. After a while (and with previous trips through a library copy of Maltin’s book back then), I sorted out MGM hadn’t just employed William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, but also a director who’d worked at Warner Brothers before now downplaying recurring characters and pushing the classical gag formulas to their utmost.
So far as pushing the envelope went, the Blu-Ray just happened to lead off with “Red Hot Riding Hood.” Maltin’s book had mentioned how attractive the all-grown-up “Red” had become as a nightclub performer (along with the overenthusiastic reactions of the big bad wolf in the audience). Having watched a definite amount of animation from a later time and different country that trades on “attractive female characters” (even with an undercurrent of fan reaction burbling from knowing snickers to full-blown moral panic and back again), I was at least interested in a different take on the subject.
What I hadn’t known, though, was that the third character of the old story was also included, with the grandmother taking a rather aggressive interest of her own in the wolf. Somehow, it didn’t agree with me, although I do have problems articulating why such that I can imagine any attempt to “criticize how anyone not almost the same as you is to be made fun of” might only amount to “revealing how I’m not getting things myself.” (As I was putting this post together, anyway, I went back to Of Mice and Magic and now noticed the grandmother mentioned.)
That first reaction did slow me down getting through the disc, which doesn’t help thinking back to try and understand it. When I was watching HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries Avery’s shorts did offer vital relief, but the miniseries was only five episodes long. As I pushed on in occasional bursts afterwards, I did get to thinking “Bad Luck Blackie” agreed with me the best, even if I had the impression I’d seen its tale of a kitten, a bulldog, and a path-crossing black cat years before. By the end of the disc, though, Avery’s most major character at MGM Droopy was showing up, and those shorts might have appealed to me a bit more as well. (In any case, there was one evening I watched an Avery short, then got out a Looney Tunes Blu-Ray set to watch a short off it, beginning to think Bob Clampett was another animation director I could become more familiar with. Then, I listened to the commentary for another short, and only after all of that did I turn to a regularly scheduled episode of anime... at which point I was very conscious of its limited animation.)
This new interest hadn’t sprung just from Maltin’s enthusiastic descriptions. In my cartoon-consuming childhood, the Tom and Jerry block I watched on the TVs at my grandparents sometimes included shorts without the cat and mouse. After a while (and with previous trips through a library copy of Maltin’s book back then), I sorted out MGM hadn’t just employed William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, but also a director who’d worked at Warner Brothers before now downplaying recurring characters and pushing the classical gag formulas to their utmost.
So far as pushing the envelope went, the Blu-Ray just happened to lead off with “Red Hot Riding Hood.” Maltin’s book had mentioned how attractive the all-grown-up “Red” had become as a nightclub performer (along with the overenthusiastic reactions of the big bad wolf in the audience). Having watched a definite amount of animation from a later time and different country that trades on “attractive female characters” (even with an undercurrent of fan reaction burbling from knowing snickers to full-blown moral panic and back again), I was at least interested in a different take on the subject.
What I hadn’t known, though, was that the third character of the old story was also included, with the grandmother taking a rather aggressive interest of her own in the wolf. Somehow, it didn’t agree with me, although I do have problems articulating why such that I can imagine any attempt to “criticize how anyone not almost the same as you is to be made fun of” might only amount to “revealing how I’m not getting things myself.” (As I was putting this post together, anyway, I went back to Of Mice and Magic and now noticed the grandmother mentioned.)
That first reaction did slow me down getting through the disc, which doesn’t help thinking back to try and understand it. When I was watching HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries Avery’s shorts did offer vital relief, but the miniseries was only five episodes long. As I pushed on in occasional bursts afterwards, I did get to thinking “Bad Luck Blackie” agreed with me the best, even if I had the impression I’d seen its tale of a kitten, a bulldog, and a path-crossing black cat years before. By the end of the disc, though, Avery’s most major character at MGM Droopy was showing up, and those shorts might have appealed to me a bit more as well. (In any case, there was one evening I watched an Avery short, then got out a Looney Tunes Blu-Ray set to watch a short off it, beginning to think Bob Clampett was another animation director I could become more familiar with. Then, I listened to the commentary for another short, and only after all of that did I turn to a regularly scheduled episode of anime... at which point I was very conscious of its limited animation.)