Thursday, July 10, 2003 |
10:39 - ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
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There are times when I really feel like I just don't get something. Like I'm totally out of the loop, like I'm missing some huge piece of the puzzle, leading me to do things that I just can't sensibly rationalize, like (for instance) continuing to torment myself with NPR every morning.
A few days ago, over the weekend in fact, there was a show that I heard a part of while driving somewhere, whose subject was the animator/director Gene Deitch. The hosts had on a few guests, such as Deitch's son, and various other luminaries of the animation world, and they spent the hour according Deitch the same kind of praise that Den Beste (rightly) heaps on Genndy Tartakovsky.
This I don't understand. Gene Deitch, acolytes of animation know, is a man most notorious in mass-market circles as the guy who scored a contract from Hanna-Barbera in the late 60s-- dawn of the the Dark Age of Animation-- to do six Tom & Jerry cartoons at his studio in Czechoslovakia. These cartoons were unspeakably awful. They're the ones where the characters grow big puckery vertical Cathy Guisewite mouths under round perky cheeks in their asymmetrical faces, uttering sounds that were apparently recorded inside a tin garbage can rolling down a hill. Ever see "Dicky Moe"? How about that one with the Carmen Miranda dancer who appeared to be drawn out of an Ed Emberley book? The steel-drum tropical one? The one that inexplicably took place in ancient Greece? I think what happened is that nobody bothered to explain to the estimable Mr. Deitch exactly what Tom & Jerry was supposed to be about; granted, it's not going to be a complex writer's bible, but in order to screw up such a simple concept as badly as he did, the situation would have to be explained by nothing less scandalous than a set of hastily scrawled model sheets wrapped around a brick with a roll of unmarked bills and dropped from a long black limousine into an alley in Bratislava. Remember "Eastern Europe's favorite cat-and-mouse team, Worker & Parasite"? That's what we're talking about here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Deitch's work is exactly what it was a parody of.
So how exactly did this guy get to stand among the giants with Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and Ub Iwerks and Ralph Bakshi? ...Oh, wait. I think I just answered my own question.
See, there's experimental art, and then there's crap.
On the NPR show, the sycophantic tribute to Deitch covered things like some project about jazz that he had done, presumably with lots of impressionistic geometric shapes airbrushed onto a foggy, gray background. There was probably a lot more, too-- after all, it was a full hour show. I admit I don't know more of the man's work than just those painful Tom & Jerry episodes, but in the opinion of this philistine, nothing else he's done can absolve him of those crimes against humanity.
If you're going to "reinvent" a beloved old show, just go all the way and take it to the level of merciless parody, as John Kricfalusi did with Yogi Bear. Now that's at least funny.
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