When the Warner Brothers animation department was at its peak in the 40s and 50s, they consistently churned out some of the best and funniest cartoons ever made. One of their most memorable comedy teams was the cute little bird Tweety and the always-hungry cat Sylvester, whose catchphrases ("I taught I taw a putty tat!" and "Sufferin' succotash!") are part of cartoon history. With Warner Home Entertainment's LOONEY TUNES SUPER STARS: TWEETY & SYLVESTER, fifteen of their classic shorts have been collected on DVD--some uproariously funny, others not quite hitting the bullseye.
The team, who had already appeared individually in several Warner Brothers shorts, scored an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) with their first pairing, 1947's "Tweetie Pie" (sic). This initial outing, in which homeless Tweety is taken in by a household whose cat sees the tiny bird as a mouth-watering meal, seems to be an answer to MGM's Tom and Jerry. The cat who would later be known as "Sylvester" is referred to here as "Thomas" just like the MGM character, and is similarly harangued by a generic housewife seen only from the waist down.
With Tweety's cage suspended from the ceiling, he sits in his swing warbling a strange little tune ("I love little putty, his throat is so warm...And if I don't hurt him, he'll do me no harm"). Meanwhile, Sylvester devises a series of ingenious methods of attaining his prey, giving the writers a chance to come up with some pretty funny material while establishing the basic formula for the series. Sylvester causes more and more chaos and destruction with each attempt, either by his own ineptitude or the playful deviousness of the little bird.
Next comes "Bad Ol' Putty Tat" (1949), the classic situation in which a cartoon cat lays siege to a bird perched high up in a birdhouse, and "All Abir-r-r-d!" (1950), with similar antics taking place in the baggage compartment of a passenger train. These initial offerings are mid-level Warner Brothers stuff, well-drawn and animated but not all that outstanding.
With "Canary Row" (1950), the characters have come into their own and the gags are snappy and clever. "Friz" Freleng's direction also gets progressively sharper and more inventive. As always, musical maestro Carl Stallings' score plays a major part in making the action a lot funnier as Sylvester tries to sneak into a hotel to get Tweetie. Thanks to voiceover legend Mel Blanc, we hear the cat speak for the first time as he impersonates a bellboy: "Your bagth...madame?"
Blanc's speeded-up voice is charmingly funny as Tweety sings his theme song over the titles:
"I'm a sweet little bird in a gilded cage
Tweety's my name but I don't know my age
I don't have to worry and that is that
I'm safe in here from that old putty tat."
Tweety's kindly old protector, Granny (first voiced by Bea Benederet, later by June Foray), makes her first appearance as well, thus rounding out the cast and giving the series a more distinctive character. Thankfully for us cat lovers, it's not as painful seeing Granny whack Sylvester with her umbrella as some faceless harridan beating him with a broom.
1951's "Putty Tat Trouble" opens with Tweety shoveling snow out of his nest ("This is what I get for dweaming of a white Chwistmas!") and catching the attention of two housecats, Sylvester and a roughhousing rival, who go at it tooth and nail over the tiny bird. This is the first real laugh riot of the collection and had me guffawing out loud several times. (Look for the cardboard box with the words "Friz--America's Favorite Gelatin Dessert", a self-reference by director "Friz" Freleng.)
The all-out hilarity continues in "Room and Bird" (1951), with both Granny and Sylvester's owner sneaking their pets into a "No Pets Allowed" hotel where they're joined in mischief by a belligerent bulldog, causing the house detective a huge headache. "Tweety's S.O.S." (1951), in which Sylvester spots Tweety through the porthole of his cabin on board a docked ship, gives the cat another rare early line of dialogue: "Hell-o, breakfast!" Later, when Granny catches him and he puts on an innocent act, Tweety exclaims "Ooh, what a hypocwite!"
"Tweet Tweet Tweety" (1951) takes place in a national forest with Sylvester trying to cut down the tree in which Tweety's nest is perched. We hear his catchphrase "Sufferin' succotash!" for the first time here as he grows increasingly more talkative. "Gift Wrapped" (1952) is an amusing Christmas-themed story.
In "Ain't She Tweet" (1952), a pet store delivers Tweety to Granny, who also keeps a hundred or so vicious bulldogs fenced in her yard. The sight of Sylvester repeatedly falling into this roiling mass of teeth and claws in his attempts to get into the house are somewhat nightmarish.
"Snow Business" (1953) is the first time we see "Tweety & Sylvester" billed together as a team. They start out as friends this time, until they get snowed in up in Granny's mountain cabin with nothing to eat but bird seed. While a starving Sylvester tries to trick Tweety into a boiling stew pot, he must also avoid a hungry mouse who's after him. For some reason, the cat never thinks of eating the mouse.
"Satan's Waitin'" (1954) suffers from an unwieldy premise--Sylvester gets killed while chasing Tweety, goes to Hell, then finds that his punishment will be delayed while his other eight lives are snuffed out one by one. An unfunny bulldog-Satan eggs them on in a series of tepid gags, each climaxing with another death. Geez, getting hit with a broom is bad enough--I don't really want to see Sylvester being cast into a fiery lake of devilish bulldogs for all eternity.
1961's "The Last Hungry Cat" shows the more modern influence of later WB cartoons with angular backgrounds rendered in an appealingly creative way. High concept strikes again in this spoof of "The Alfred Hitchcock Show" in which Sylvester thinks he has "murdered" Tweety and is sought by the police. The guilt-ridden cat suffers a torturous, sleepless night, constantly needled by the Hitchcock-like narrator, until he discovers Tweety is still alive and reverts back to form. While this short is nice to look at, it just isn't funny.
The trend of over-thinking these stories continues with "Birds Anonymous" (1957). Sylvester is initiated into an "AA"-type group for bird-crazed cats, who are presented as helpless addicts. ("I was a three-bird-a-day cat," one of them testifies.)
Increasingly preoccupied with being clever, the writers of these later cartoons sometimes forget to pack in the funny, fast-paced gags that made this series so popular in the first place. Here, Sylvester endures yet another mental ordeal, with a grotesque bloodshot-eyes closeup that's almost a duplicate of the one from "The Last Hungry Cat." Why the heck has Sylvester suddenly turned into Ray Milland?
The final short in the collection, "Tweety and the Beanstalk" (1957), is a fun take-off on the old fairytale (June Foray can be heard as the unseen woman who throws Jack's magic beans out the window). The idea of Sylvester running around the giant's castle trying to nab a Tweety who's the same size as him, while eluding a monstrous bulldog, sounds tiresome at first but actually manages to generate some old-style sight gags with an outrageous ending.
The DVD is in standard format (no choice of matted widescreen this time) with Dolby Digital English and Spanish mono sound, and subtitles in English and French. The titles on this disc have appeared previously in other Warner Brothers DVD collections.
While uneven in quality, the fifteen shorts in LOONEY TUNES SUPER STARS: TWEETY & SYLVESTER are examples of some of the finest theatrical cartoons ever produced by one of the top animation studios of its time, in an era when such fare was designed to be enjoyed and appreciated by audiences of all ages.
Currently watching: the complete DVD collection of one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons as a kid, SPACE GHOST (1966-1968).
(Full DVD title: "Space Ghost & Dino Boy: The Complete Series" from the Hanna-Barbera Classic Collection. 20 episodes on 3 discs, 42 7-minute Space Ghost segments in all. Bonus feature is a movie-length documentary, "Simplicity: The Life and Art of Alex Toth.")
I love Cartoon Network's later comedy reworking of the character in his own talk show called "Space Ghost Coast To Coast", but that takes nothing away from my feeling for the original action-adventure space opera designed by comics legend Alex Toth.
It was only Hanna-Barbera's second adventure cartoon after "Jonny Quest", and their first superhero series. "Laugh-In" star Gary Owen did the voice for Space Ghost, and his teen sidekicks Jan and Jace were voiced by Ginny Tyler and Tim Matheson.
Other voice talent includes Ted Cassidy as Metallus, Vic Perrin as Creature King, Alan Reed as Glasstor, Keye Luke as Brak, Paul Frees as Brago, and Don Messick as Blip, Space Ghost's cute monkey companion who often gets him and the kids out of trouble.
Alex Toth's character designs and layouts are eye-pleasing, and the show was done while Hanna-Barbera were still doing quality animated shows. The music is great, too.
The secondary "Dino Boy" segments don't do anything for me--I don't even remember bothering to watch them when originally aired.
Super villains Zorak, Moltar, and Brak would later become regulars on the talk show, along with occasional appearances by Metallus, Tansit, Lokar, and Black Widow. It's fun seeing them play it straight as they do here in their introductory appearances.
Space Ghost, whose subterranean laboratory can be found on the Ghost Planet, is sort of an interplanetary policeman whose main powers are supplied by his power bands, which are worn on his wrists, and his inviso-belt.
Jan and Jace alert him of suspicious activity while on patrol in their scout ship and often get captured by the bad guys so that Space Ghost must fly to their rescue in his spaceship, the Phantom Cruiser.
The stories are flashy and colorful, with lots of explosions, and are kept very simple and formulaic so that they can be easily followed by younger viewers.
As far as light entertainment with a strong sense of nostalgia goes, I just love this kind of stuff.
Sizzling with supercharged action, the simple plot of director Takeshi Koike's sci-fi anime REDLINE (2009) serves as a backdrop for some of the most mindblowing, audacious cartoon animation to ever blaze its way across the screen.
The pre-titles sequence features a qualifying "Yellowline" race in the desert that already makes the podrace from THE PHANTOM MENACE look like a frog-jumping competition. We meet J.P., who resembles a brawny Ricky Nelson with a skyscraper pompadour and, thanks to his crooked partner Frisbee, has a reputation for fixing races. Sure enough, Frisbee's in deep with the mob on this one and sabotages J.P.'s car near the finish line, landing him in the hospital.
When some of the qualifiers for the Redline drop out, J.P.'s back in the game along with his heartthrob Sonoshee, a lovely lass with more interest in machines than men. But the location for the race turns out to be Roboworld, a militaristic society whose leaders are so opposed to the competition taking place on their world (and possibly having some of their military secrets broadcast galaxy-wide) that they declare all-out war against the racers. In order to win this one, J.P. will have to battle it out against ruthless drivers (including Sonoshee), the entire military force of Roboworld, and perhaps even his own sidekick Frisbee.
Fans of non-CGI animation should have a ball reveling in this 100% hand-drawn visual feast, whose creators invested seven years and 100,000 drawings in its making. Each frame of this dazzling tribute to old-school cartoon wizardry is as insanely detailed as panels from the more extravagant underground comix of the 60s and 70s, and unlike digital cartoons you can see the artists' and animators' hands in every painstaking detail.
The dynamic, hard-edged drawing style, a eye-pleasing mix of both the futuristic and retro, yields a wealth of beautifully-rendered character designs and backgrounds that are then brought to vivid life. Surreal touches, such as J.P.'s gravity-defying hairdo and an endless parade of grotesque aliens, rub shoulders with the hard-edged yet wildly-imaginative hardware of cars, spaceships, and other machinery.
The over-the-top character design (by co-writer Katsuhito Ishii, who also worked on the anime sequence from KILL BILL, VOL. 1 and helped create REDLINE's outstanding soundtrack) goes well with the film's larger-than-life cast of oddballs. These include J.P.'s multi-armed canine mechanic Pops, the towering cyborg Machine Head, and the various other racers whose bizarre appearance and unique personalities keep things interesting. Even the crowd scenes are filled with a vast array of colorful "extras."
While the plot busies itself with various concerns such as J.P.'s wooing of the reluctant Sonoshee and Frisbee's conflict of loyalties between him and the mob, REDLINE roars to life during its many spectacular action sequences. The imposing Colonel Votron and his Roboworld army launch a full-scale attack on the racers that begins when they leave the mothership and attempt to land their shuttle vehicles on the planet. The race itself is a non-stop series of thrilling setpieces which lead to the activation of the Roboworld president's ace in the hole, an out-of-control behemoth known as "Funky Boy" who proceeds to destroy everything in sight.
The DVD from Anchor Bay's "Manga" label is in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks in both Japanese and English, with English subtitles. Extras consist of a 24-minute making-of featurette and the film's trailer.
Thrilling, funny, and endlessly watchable, REDLINE is chock-full of some of the most visually-stunning racing action and futuristic warfare ever created for an animated film. Best of all, it's a return to the glory days of hand-drawn animation which, in the words of its creators, offers something new by doing things the old way again.
Danish director Birgitte Stærmose (DARLING, ISTEDGADE) and prolific screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (PERFECT SENSE, ACCUSED) have set out to make us all sad, contemplative, and mesmerized with their gloomy drama ROOM 304 (aka "Værelse 304"), which is like one of those long, detailed dreams that skirts the boundary between the nightmarish and the mundane.
It all takes place in a high-class hotel where all the characters or their relatives work, but instead of being the story of the everyday behind-the-scenes drama of managing a bustling hotel, which I initially expected, it's really a fairly simple account of the romantic and interpersonal relationships between some troubled souls who happen to work in the confined spaces of a big, oppressive hotel.
To make the simple storylines more interesting, screenwriter Aakeson has gathered up all the scenes and laid them out like jumbled jigsaw puzzle pieces for us to try and sort out ourselves. That way we see things that will occur much later and don't understand them until they reappear in a different context, when everything finally starts to come together.
We see the little details of married (but not to each other) co-workers sneaking around cheating on their spouses, daily compounding the lies and suspicion that will gradually come to light in tragic ways. We see a fervid subplot about a laundry room worker avenging himself on a guest who once raped his wife, which introduces a loaded pistol into the mix.
And we see the desk clerk covered in blood after a shocking murder, but, like all the other main plot points, we won't find out what happened until we've been slowly and subtly teased.
If it sounds anything like an Arthur Hailey story, it isn't. ROOM 304 is slow, somber, and achingly sad, and we see almost nothing of the hotel's guests or the usual practical concerns of running the place. It serves instead as a sort of dreamlike territory of the subconscious, where characters yearning for various unreachable things wander through their unfulfilling lives like fish in an aquarium.
Hotel director Kasper (Mikael Birkkjær) and front office manager Nina (Stine Stengade) are having a torrid affair that, we fear, will end badly. Just how badly is revealed to us as the puzzle pieces drift maddeningly into place, and one person's obsession and desperation override rational thought while other collateral damage is wrought.
Loneliness is another element casting a pall over such characters as emotionally needy stewardess Teresa (Ariadna Gil), who picks up men in the bar for unpleasant sex in her room. And then there's the daily grind of service workers such as two Filipino maids who toil on the periphery, observing and chatting about it all and never knowing when some sudden twist of fate might sweep them into a maelstrom of tragedy.
My favorite character is Martin (David Dencik, 2011's TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY), the withdrawn, hypersensitive, obsessive (he's always washing his hands) desk clerk. When Nina calls him into her office and tells him that, while very efficient, he needs to "smile more", the nonplussed Martin considers this for a moment and, straightfaced, assures her that he will "make a note of it." He's the one who ends up with blood all over him after the murder occurs.
The visual mood inside the hotel is consistently oppressive, rendered with a richly dark palette and much Rembrandt-style lighting. Stærmose's direction is fluid and artistically expressive, and remains interesting throughout even when the plot is moving along at a snail's pace.
It took me two viewings to fully appreciate ROOM 304, one just to wander around getting my bearings, and another to piece it all together and realize what a carefully wrought and thoroughly satisfying work of cinematic storytelling it is. The fadeout illicits much contemplation and, for me, a bit of emotional decompression.
