Picnics Are Fun But This Cartoon Isn't

Okay, I get it. UPA was the anti-Warner Bros., the anti-Disney. But its cartoons became anti-entertainment.

I’ve just sat through “Picnics Are Fun” (1957). The only thing “fun” is the word in the title. The only audience it could possibly appeal to is those who want to drown in a vat of whimsical cuteness.

Fans of UPA artwork will enjoy the backgrounds. The background artist isn’t even credited.



And here are some backgrounds where I can’t snip out the character.



And whoever did the story (there is no story credit) tossed in an inside joke.



The animation’s as limited as anything you’d find in a Ruff and Reddy TV cartoon made around the same time. Lots of cycles of feet. And water from a hose (two drawings on twos, alternating, just like at Hanna-Barbera).

Lew Keller directed this. He went on to work with Rocky and Bullwinkle on of the funniest TV series ever made.

The Magic Fluke

In Tex Avery’s brilliant “Magical Maestro,” a magician uses his magic wand to turn opera singer Poochini into various demeaning guises (child, western singer, Hawaiian chanter). Several years earlier, the UPA studio put out “The Magic Fluke,” where a magician’s wand turned into various things in the unwitting hand of Lips Fox and starts doing stuff to the orchestra.

The animation’s well-timed and gags are set up very well. Things build to a climax. A bass turns into a woman and the bow becomes a saw. (Is this Pat Matthews’ animation?)



Pigeons fly out of the tuba.



A triangle becomes a coat hanger that suddenly attracts the triangle player's evening wear.



Violins become long rabbits that, in probably the goofiest gag ever seen in a UPA cartoon, start la-la-la-ing that old cartoon workhouse, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.



The fox turns his orchestra members into rabbits, then erases them with the wave of the wand.



Finally, with some spectre rabbits floating from the end in mid-air, the wand expires.



The cartoon was nominated for an Oscar but that didn’t matter to the Capital-A artists at UPA. The short featured the two things many people at the studio despised: funny animals and slapstick violence. So such things vanished from the studio’s cartoons.

There’s a great post about the art of this cartoon on Michael Sporn’s blog.

The Planet Moo

UPA cartoons became pretty much all about design, so let’s look at some designs from “Gerald McBoing! Boing! On Planet Moo.” First some backgrounds.



And character designs.



I still don’t understand why it’s called the planet Moo. The characters there don’t say “moo.” Shouldn’t they? (The King is voiced by Marvin Miller like something out of Amos ‘n’ Andy).

Lew Keller was the designer.

It's Brown. No, It's Green

Here’s “Willie the Kid,” another UPA cartoon with dissolving backgrounds. Ah, but that’s not all. The colour changes, too.



I’m sure because the UPAers intended this as Art, the colour change means something. For a while, I thought the green represented the real world, while the brown represented the pretend world. But the kids are playing Old West when it’s green, too. And then there’s a rose colour during some scenes. Oh, well.

Some of the animation is by Bill Melendez, who went on to make kid-character cartoons that actually had some charm, unlike this one.

Early Plaudits For UPA

In the 1950s, UPA was the darling of film critics and movie columnists who were wont to write about animated cartoons, thanks to a little boy named McBoing-Boing that the studio purchased from Dr. Seuss. But the studio received some compliments for what it was trying to accomplish some years before that, and from a not unexpected source.

PM Daily was a literate newspaper with a deliberate leftist slant. It should be no surprise, then, that it would support a film studio founded by former unionised strikers, who won contracts with the United Auto Workers, and created a sales pitch film to re-elect Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president in 1944.

It would appear someone at UPA, which was just getting off the ground and dealing with cash-flow difficulties, felt some free publicity was in order, and who better to give it than the politically like-minded PM? At least, that’s a safe assumption as the newspaper’s film critic was invited to a special screening of some of the company’s work. UPA had just finished The Brotherhood of Man, and its theme of racial equality in the post-war era was, no doubt, appealing to the editors at PM.

The paper’s movie critic was John T. McManus, later a two-time candidate for governor of New York and one of the founders of The National Guardian, another publication devoted to left-of-centre causes. Here’s McManus’ take on the early UPA studio. The photos accompanied the column; it’s a shame these copies are not very clear. It’s less than shocking that McManus takes a shot at Walt Disney but a pleasant revelation that he’s a fan of Bugs Bunny, though it’s easy to read the war-time version of the rabbit as a fighter against The Big Guy (and, therefore, Corporate America).

Speaking of MOVIES
Fun and Function
The most fun and the most enlightenment I have had out of films this year I enjoyed this week at a preview of some of the works of a promising young animated film company called United Productions of America.
UPA, as the outfit will be referred to hereinafter, may best be introduced as the organization which made the Vote-for-FDR cartoon featurette, Hell-Bent for Election, for the United Automotive Workers, CIO, in 1944. When the company undertook this project, its first, it called itself United Film Productions, but actually it was merely a group of fugitive artists from the Walt Disney studios who got tired of Mickey Mousing and cut loose for themselves to devote their animated artistry to useful purpose.
The result of their success with Hell-Bent for Election was a flock of instructional work for the Army and Navy. How they got their stuff past the brass hats who insist that entertainment and learning mustn’t mix is probably a military secret, but I can't recall when I had so much fun learning things as in watching a couple of films called Fear and Japan, each about five minutes long.
Fear let the GIs in on the biological fact that everybody experiences fear and then proceeded to show, in terms of St. George and his fabled dragon fight, how to turn fear into fearlessness. What interested me particularly, aside from the irresistible humor of the treatment, was the new departure in animation design evidenced in the silhouette-style settings of knights and castles.




Japan introduced the gentlemen in the illustrations at the top of the page, Sato-San or Messrs. Average Japanese and the way Japanese thought-control police operate to keep Sato-San thinking straight. The film ends with a regular atomic punch but up to then it is as delightful a rib of Japanese custom and formality as a scene from The Mikado, and a lot more meaningful.
What brings UPA into the news of movies at this moment is the fact that the company has just completed and is preparing for general release a 15-minute cartoon subject based on the Races of Mankind pamphlet bv Ruth Benedict and Dr. Gene Weltfish. The film is called The Brotherhood of Man, sponsored by the UAW-CIO. It is in full color and will be available in 16-mm, as well as theater-size prints.
We will report more fully on The Brotherhood of Man when stills from it are available for reproduction in these pages but in the meantime my advice to all organizations, church groups, unions and others who may be listening is to get your order in now for a booking of this film, because it is a real lulu, as funny as a Bugs Bunny and as urgent as the Atlantic Charter.
The eastern address of United Productions of America is 1 E. 57th St., the western headquarters are at 1558 North Vine St., Hollywood 28. Releasing plans are not yet complete for The Brotherhood of Man, but I believe it may tour the country coupled with The Open City in addition to being made available for the 16-mm. non-theatrical circuit. It will probably be booked locally in 16-mm. through Brandon Films, 1600 Broadway, which also furnishes projection equipment for groups not owning their own apparatus.
Another film innovation in which UPA specializes for classroom and organizational use is the “slide-film” or filmstrip. This is a series of scenes printed on a strip of film about a yard long and projected like lantern slides through a stereopticon machine, usually in conjunction with a disk recording of the accompanying commentary, sound effects etc. The record signals the operator, by musical note, when to change the slide.
I saw three of these—one called The Man in the Cage, an ingratiating and convincing argument for a permanent FEPC; another called Permanent Health Plan, made to help Henry Kaiser have the last laugh on reactionary medical authorities who opposed installation of health plans at Kaiser plants; and one called Svensons Seniority, which is a riotous exposition of how a shop grievance is handled by the UAW-CIO at the Ford Plant. I can't go into more detail about these today, but let's consider this an agenda for the near future, when we'll go into the problem of Svenson's Seniority et al with full illustration and advice on how to book slide-film lectures and have fun with functional films.

Boing Boing, You're Dead

Note: Since I bashed UPA earlier in the week, here’s a post for those of you who are fans of the studio.

There’s a pretty good chance you haven’t seen the 1950s cartoons “Prehistoric Eohippus,” “Jittery Deer-Foot Dan” and “The Unenchanted Princess.” The last one sounds like a Fractured Fairy Tale from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, and kind of looks like one (observe to your right) but these cartoons were all contained within a long-vanished TV programme called “The Boing-Boing Show.”

It starred Gerald McBoing-Boing (why it wasn’t called “The McBoing-Boing Show” isn’t clear) and was produced by UPA, the cartoon studio that bought the story rights to the character from Dr. Seuss, completely redesigned him in the flat UPA style, then won an Oscar. Like anything UPA, critics loved the show. Daily Variety’s review came in its December 17, 1956 edition.

A new television cult undoubtedly will spring up as a result of the arrival of Gerald McBoing-Boing on the video scene. And, as is the case with all cults, the vociferous supporters will meet with equally vociferous opposition. In the long run, however, “The Boing Boing Show” should settle down to enough of a following to more than justify its place on the television screens; it’s a light-hearted, humorous and frequently charming entry.
Initialler sets forth a format encompassing animated cartoon treatment of a pair of novel-tunes, “A Horse of Course” and "Miserable Pack of Wolves,” plus a pair of cartoon shorts. For the opener, one is the classic fable of the origination of Gerald and the other is fable based on the life of the French painter, Raoul Dufy. Latter packs some interesting art world information into its colorful and whimsical footage to provide an intriguing segment. The “McBoing-Boing” original, of course, still stands as solid fare.
Animation hews to the high UPA quality throughout, but there appeared to be some difficulty with the color on the original and some segments showed to better advantage on black-and-white screens. Show features an excellent original musical theme by Chico Hamilton. Bill Goodwin does an easy job as narrator. It is, for the time being, a CBS-house show.

The show ran for a half hour starting at 5:30 p.m. every other Sunday (2:30 on the West Coast). It was off the air by mid-March. Realistically, it didn’t have a chance. The reasons for the demise can be found in the syndicated TV Keynotes column of January 15, 1957:

Boing! Gerald's Comic But Expensive! $70,000 For 30 Minutes Viewing
By STEVEN H. SCHEUER
Probably the brightest and most ingenious TV show to come out this winter is the Sunday afternoon half-hour cartoon series, the Boing-Boing Show. The title is taken from UPA's first big cartoon hit, Gerald McBoing-Boing, the little boy who only speaks in sound effects.
Gerald plays host, introducing four cartoon segments, running from three to six minutes, with musical backgrounds about such people as painter Raoul Dufy, The Average Giraffe, a Sad Lion, the Twirliger Twins, and a little girl who hits wolves on the nose.
The appeal of the cartoons comes from the UPA approach known on TV first in commercials—the Harry and Bert ones, the Mr. Magoo beer ads, etc. The UPA approach is simplicity, a light touch, stylized drawings, and a fresh use of color influenced by painters like Picasso, Matisse, Braque. The approach also differs in that artists create the show.
$70,000 Show
The big problem for UPA on the TV series is the high cost, said to be around $70,000 for 30 minutes of animation, which CBS is putting up while looking for a sponsor. So in conceiving a segment, producer Bob Cannon, and color expert and choreographer Jules Engel have to eliminate as much production value as possible.
"It's a good discipline," said Mr. Engel the other day at the small UPA studio in Burbank near the huge Warner Brothers lot. "We have to get to the point quicker."
Getting artists who can work in the UPA style is another problem. Training them takes time. "We had one talented young man who was here six or eight months before he suddenly saw what we were trying to do," said Engel. "We spend our time trying to take things out of pictures."
So Simple It's Difficult
It's been a long pull for UPA trying to put their style over. War training films and their early cartoons helped a bit, but not many backers jumped on their side. Producer Cannon remembers vividly telling his wife when he began the first Gerald McBoing-Boing show. "We're going to do it this way or it's the end." Most of the Hollywood criticism after the show was, "but it's too simple — looks like anybody can do it."
Mr. Cannon says his job now is "in getting out of the way of the guys who do the work." The trouble, for a while, was trying to pick the artists who could do the best job. He gives credit to the artists, the story men and the musicians for the conception of the segments. "That's what attracted the musicians like Shorty Rogers," said Mr. Cannon, "the fact everyone could speak up out here."
A story idea is tossed about between all groups and someone might take off with it. "In the beginning several were too costly and we've learned now we never should have considered them. There are others," Mr. Cannon continued, "like a series we had pegged on painters, but we never finished. We either couldn't get the right artist, or the story dwindled, or the cost became prohibitive."

Stories, cost and lack of sponsorship all contributed to the show’s demise, though it was brought back for a short rerun. Let’s face it. Who wants to watch a half hour of charm and whimsey, other than maybe Bobe Cannon? (Bill Scott, the future Rocky and Bullwinkle producer fired by the studio during the Communist scare, returned to try to make the stories funnier. I can only imagine Cannon’s reaction).

Life magazine evidently profiled the show and assigned photographer Ralph Crane to the story. He took pictures of cels or layout drawings that had been tacked up on a cork board. As the cartoons themselves have never been released on home video that I know, this will give you a bit of an idea of the graphic style.



This is from one of the cartoons starring the Twirliger Twins. They appeared in “Follow Me,” “Alphabet Song,” “Average Giraffe,” “The Violin Recital” and “The Ballet Lesson.”



“The Unenchanted Princess.” Besides Bill Scott’s presence as a writer on the series, there’s another Jay Ward connection as this short was narrated by Edward Everett Horton, the man who performed the same delectable task on Ward’s Fractured Fairy Tales.



These are likely from “Martians Come Back.”



“The Historic Eohippus.”



Don’t know about the top frame but the second is from “Outlaw” (aka “Jittery Deer-Foot Dan”). Stan Freberg provides a voice.



I suspect the top drawing is from “The Painter.” The bottom may be from “The Merry-Go-Round in the Jungle.” I’m pretty certain I’ve seen that cartoon somewhere, perhaps it was one of those Jerry Beck rarities that was on line for awhile.

There are other photos from this shoot that you can see on line. Even if you’re not a UPA fan—and I’m not crazy about much of their stuff—the artwork is interesting and worth a look. Click HERE.

By the way, a number of cartoons on the Boing-Boing show featured inventors and other characters from history. I can’t help but think of the Mr. Peabody segment on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Many of the same artists and writers that toiled at UPA in its pretentious days toiled on Rocky, one of the least pretentious TV cartoon shows ever. From what I can gather about the “Boing Boing Show,” they tried to leave pretentiousness behind there, too.