If Gene Deitch Worked at Warner Bros.

Gene Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons are, if nothing else, distinctive. Oddly-proportioned characters, overly-reverbed sound effects, jerky animation, it’s all there. His Popeye cartoons made for television were the same (and seem to have used the same three tunes in the background over and over). No one would mistake them for the work of Hanna and Barbera or the Fleischer studio.

Deitch’s crew never got a chance to animate the famous Warner Bros. characters. But if they did, their cartoon would probably look like this TV commercial from Italy. The animation takes up the first minute and 18 seconds.



Reader Charles Brubaker posted this on his Facebook page, and got some background from Alfons Moliné, which I copy:

This belongs to "Carosello", a program block made up of commercials -live or animated- which used to run on RAI (the public Italian TV) each evening from the late 50´s to the mid-70's. Most great names in Italian animation, including Bruno Bozzetto, did a lot of work on "Carosello". Most of the "Carosello" commercials had original characters, but a few starred American cartoon characters -under license, but nevertheeless animated in Italy- such as Sylvester and Tweety, Speedy Gonzales, The Flintstones, Popeye, etc.

Calimero debuted in commercials in the "Carosello" block and later was spun off into his own cartoon series. Another character having debuted in "Carosello" commercials and later also obtaining his own series of 5-minute cartoons was Osvaldo Cavandoli´s "La Linea" (seen in the U.S. in the 80´s on "The Great Space Coaster").