Well, we’re right down to it! ReFrederator sets up shop on Monday — the world’s first daily vintage cartoon podcast!
We’re jumping out of the gate with a week of films featuring a Mother Goose theme. Fleischer, Iwerks and Freleng are just a few of the pen and pencil giants spotlighted in our first batch of golden goodies, so don’t be caught napping. Check us out early and often. ReFrederator.com — a cartoon a day. It’s like a fairy tale come true!
Old time cartoon characters were nothing, if not inventive. Of course, their inspirations always seemed to require an endless supply of giant springs, enormous rubber bands, quick drying cement, bottles of super strength jumping beans, and other miscellaneous items not readily purchased at WalMart (unless, you know, you’re gonna settle for that really cheap, foreign made quick drying cement.)
These guys are from Bob Clampett’s classic Merry Melody “A Tale of Two Kitties” and are here to remind you about that our new innovation, a daily podcast of classic cartoons is just around the corner. Monday. April 17 marks the beginning of a new era, the age of ReFrederator. The Saturday morning of your youth, re-dispensed all week long in seven minute increments It’s kinda like that.
Whooo! Only six days to the launch of ReFrederator, the world’s first daily vintage cartoon podcast. Krazy Kat can’t wait for you to see him and all his alliterative pals (Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse, Daffy Duck, Betty Boop, Little Lulu, Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Felix the Feline… those guys.)
We’ll be digging in the vaults for the toons starring some of our greatest cultural icons, and films featuring a few fascinating footnotes as well. Our animated heritage, all squeezed out to you seven minutes at a time, Monday through Friday. Ya gotta love it.
Seen above; the protagonists from Tex Avery’s classic “Jerky Turkey” (1945) — a Pilgrim having something or other done to his nose, and the title character, who looks more like Jimmy Durante than an actual gobbler. See the cartoon. He talks more like Jimmy Durante than anyone’s Thanksgiving dinner too.
It’s a time honored tradition for cartoonists to build characters around established celebrities, but, man, animators flat out LOVED the great Schnozzola, my vote for the most relentlessly caricatured movie star in toondom. He pops up as birds, dogs, cats… even the likes of Mickey Mouse weren’t above bursting into a spontaneous impersonation.
Why Jimmy? First of all, it’s real easy to turn anything you can draw into Durante. A huge nose (or beak), some crazy teeth, a couple of “hot-cha-cha-cha’s” and away you go. But more to the point, Durante’s bigger than life persona begged to be animated. His style was broad [Read more…]
Wow! One thing about the Ub Iwerks cartoon studios in the 1930’s — they sure made dynamic movie posters! Love those bulbous fingers!
Celebrating world famous cartoons like Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies and the many Max Fleischer classics will be just a part of ReFrederator’s mission. We believe there’s a whole host of under-appreciated oldies just waiting for rediscovery. The output of animation mills like Iwerks, RKO/Van Beuren and Columbia/Mintz may not have introduced any enduring cartoon personalities (unless you consider the likes of Willie Whopper or Scrappy comic superstars), but each studio certainly had its moments. There’s a lot of good, solid, squirrelly fun in many of these forgotten shorts… much of it intentional!
Hang in there just a bit longer: ReFrederator is here for good April 17. Classic animation, a cartoon a day. Your daily dose of hand drawn history.
The big news is we have a launch date for ReFrederator! Monday, April 17, we kick off our daily podcast of vintage animation!
A Brooklyn bunny, a google eyed jazz baby, a vegetable enhanced sailor, singing and dancing ducks, dogs, frogs, hogs, bugs, bats, cats, rats… they’re all on the way. And mice. Hundreds of mice! Mice in little red shorts, mice with firecrackers, normal sized, tiny mice, big sized, suburban, own-their-own-home mice, mice with rounded, dimensional, little arms and legs, mice with skinny little stick figure arms and legs, mice with nice, cute generic faces, mice who do impressions of Hollywood actors, at least one mouse with super human strength…
Lots of mice.
The whole passing parade of animated history is less than two weeks away, so mark your calendars, set your clocks and hold your breath. ReFrederator is on the horizon. A classic cartoon every day. What a concept!
So here’s Betty Boop showing a picture of her buddy Ko-Ko coming to life via that creepy birth through pen nib process favored by the Brothers Fleischer. Nice legs, though.
When I was little, the early Max Fleischer efforts were, by far, the scariest cartoons I was watching. The weird imagery, the nightmarish ambiance, the sexual subtext, the alien sounding jazz scores, and those relentlessly odd post-sync voice tacks… all this and more was pretty disorienting stuff for a second grader. At face value, things like “Bimbo’s Initiation” or “Minnie the Moocher” are kind of like David Lynch for kiddies, very wild, very imaginative, very disturbing.
I loved ‘em.
I had a hard time getting my head around the whole out of the inkwell concept, though. Sometimes characters were “drawn” into life, or, at other times, they simply jumped out of an India ink bottle, completely formed. In either case, their existence could come to [Read more…]
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