Cab Calloway, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer: "The Old Man of the Mountain"
Parenting in the Internet age is great: since I'm the one who gets up with the baby first thing in the morning (we're both early, 5AM risers), I entertain her until breakfast. Sometimes she'll carry my laptop over to me, climb up onto my lap, and we'll watch videos from the net; there's plenty of great stuff on YouTube, but lately we've been exploring the Internet Archive's collection of public domain animation and cartoons. This morning we had a great time with Max Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoon The Old Man of the Mountain with Cab Calloway.
What I'm really hoping to find is those old Max Fleischer sing along follow-the-bouncing-ball cartoons, like "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing" and "Give My Regards to Broadway," but haven't turned those up yet.
the latest
latest episodes
Sammy Timberg's music from the old Fleischer cartoons has been revived and re-recorded by his daughter. Visit http://timbergalley.com/ to learn more.
inb4 backseat parenters.
Thanks, Cory. These are great, and they'll thrill my grandmother.
gotta wonder...
The old man in "The Old Man of the Mountain" looks rather similar to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Could this have been an influence on Gilbert Shelton?
the Fleischer cartoon/live action film for 'Minnie the Moocher' is very scary and might be appropriate for Halloween time. Features Cab Calloway of course
http://www.archive.org/details/InMyMerr1932
not to mention http://www.amazon.com/Ko-ko-Song-Car-tunes-Clown/dp/B00013A0HO
If I had a baby, I would totally just start their visual life at the beginning of movies. Start with cartoons and work our way up. Then, when they're better with words, back up and start with silent movies. I figure they'd be up to current pop culture with a nice foundation around the age of 12.
Snow White, my personal favourite, but you have to wait till about 4:30 before it really starts getting good. BettyBoopToons.com for the complete list.
Personally, I've seen a few of the bouncy ball Betty Boop toons and hated them, but to each his own.
I've always loved the Boop cartoons...they're so timeless and eerie. Even cooler that they're in public domain now.
The old man's dance looked to me like early motion-capture. What's the earliest example of this that can be found?
My favorite part was when the tree touched her butt.
Ahh!! I was seriously thinking of this very cartoon tonight, as I was listening to some Cab just now. This cartoon has long been a favorite, and I'm glad to see that it really was Cab singing and that I wasn't just imagining it.
Binge drinking, implied and threatened rape and wow, are those the devil horns? It doesn't get much better then this!
So there's a moment around 4:50 when Betty asks "What you gonna do now?", to which the Old Man answers "I'm gonna do the best I can," and I had never realized it before, but this interaction is recreated in the Oogie Boogie song in The Nightmare Before Christmas, but with Santa and Oogie Boogie.
-zms
Torchinky and Glen have some great old movies too
These are old favourites of mine, which I discovered via the Vintage Tooncast, or something similar.
ISTR a german based internet TV station streaming them as well.
The Fleischer Studios were renowned for their use of Rotoscope - a process they patented - used in the Betty Boop sometimes in the Betty Boop cartoons. The Old Man of the Mountain dancing is actually Cab Calloway doing those smooth moves, drawn over by the animators.
The rotoscope process was also used in the Fleischer's feature Gulliver's Travels and extensively in their fabulous Superman series of cartoons - which served heavily as one of the "inspirations" for the Sky Captain feature. Gulliver's and all the Suoermans can also be found at archive.org.
I particularly love the rotating three dimensional background sets the Fleischers would sometimes use (most notably in their Popeye animations) - it was an answer to Disney's multi-plane process, giving depth of field and shifting perspective within a 2D animated scene. We used a similar process with cut-out water colour illustrations on a rotating platform to create the storybook backgrounds (combined with puppets via blue screen) for our children!s series Ruffus The Dog. Cheap and simple visual magic.
Love the Fleischers.
Cheers.
You picked a classic, my favorite Boop. The Old Man of the Mountain shows Betty at her sexiest, and Snow White's Mystery Cave scene is just over the top. Love those St. Jame's Infirmary Blues.
I have a box set of betty boop VHS tapes. When my son was 2 and a half he figured out how to work the VCR (with a little help) and used to watch the 'Surrealism" one on a loop. I believe it was that one that had Cab Calloway, Rudy Valley and Louis Armstrong on it to name a few.
He's 8 now and still loves my old jazz records and prefers Bugs bunny and Tweety and the like to cartoons of today which don't make him laugh outloud. Old cartoons are amazing.
let's all sing like the birdies do, tweet tweet....tweet tweet......tweet tweeeeeeet
There are some Mighty Mouse sing-alongs out there with an operatic glaze that will make your eyes bug out, but all the cat walloping may be too strong for babies.
A couple years back I picked up an old copy of The Fleischer Story by Leslie Carbarga (copyright 1976 , pub. Nostalgia Press). I just started reading it last week. I have enjoyed the rough but engaging and informative writing of the author.
From looking at the 'search inside' at Amazon, it looks to have been edited quite a bit in the reprint issued in 1988. I still think it is probably a good book for any Fleischer fan.
http://www.amazon.com/Fleischer-Story-Leslie-Cabarga/dp/0306803135
There's a delicous subtle weed-related subtext to this all 'the old man of the mountain' was Rashid ad-Din Sinan, one of the Hashshashin, from whom the name "Hashish" came from.
You can look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_ad-Din_Sinan
What is this "subtext" of which you speak? "You got kick the gong...to get along with me!"
The Old Man of the Mountain invented moonwalking. Who knew?
Also one of my personal favorites.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq-NKrC6itQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yYeZMx1Y7U&feature=related
It's the story of a very unfortunate colored man,
Who got busted down in old Hong Kong;
He got twenty years taken away from him,
'Cause he kicked old Buddha's Gong [....]
viz. Smoking opium.
Love this stuff. Loved it when I was too little to know what the hell I was watching, loved it in college when I was doing animation, love it now when my hair is growing gray!
One of my all time favorites is "Bimbo's Initiation". I'm also partial to the silent Out of the Inkwell "Koko's Earth Control". And let's not forget Popeye. There's that one where Sweepea goes crawling through a factory assembly line. It's all just fabulous crazy!
I never cared for Disney's stuff. I like some Warner Brothers stuff, the old stuff, especially when Clampett got rockin' and rollin'. But baby oh baby, Fleischer animation, Fleischer-when-they-were-still-in-New-York animation just can't be beat!
The rotoscoping at 5:00 is creepy! -wwiiggss