Saturday, April 17, 2004

Points of View

Here's a great example of why Dennis Miller isn't very funny these days. It's very hard to be funny when you take the side of those in power. It's like trying to do a Marx Brothers movie and have Margaret Dumont top Groucho. Anyway, here's a monologue joke that Jay Leno did last week about the White House Easter Egg Hunt...

The White House Easter Egg Hunt will be open to the public but President Bush will not be there. Well sure. How embarrassing would that be? It's bad enough he can't find weapons of mass destruction, what if he can't find any eggs either?

And now, here's pretty much the same joke a few days later but as rearranged to suit the sensibilities of its teller, Dennis Miller...

The White House held its annual Easter Egg Roll on Sunday. The traditional Easter Egg Hunt portion of the event was cancelled, however, because the administration didn't want to yet again be accused of hiding something.

In case it isn't clear, these are actual examples from their respective monologues. Leno's joke picks on Bush. Miller's picks on unspecified people who criticize the president. Unless you're pretty rabidly pro-Bush, Leno's is funnier.

• Posted at 10:17 PM · LINK

News of Vital Significance

I was told not to announce this until it was definite but a number of websites that cover new DVD releases are now reporting...

GARFIELD AND FRIENDS - VOLUME 1 - DVD — From Fox Home Entertainment, featuring the cartoon antics of everyone's favorite fat cat, Garfield, joined by Odie, Jon, and the barnyard crew of U.S. Acres, this DVD set collects all 13 1988-89 first season animated episodes of Jim Davis' Garfield and Friends. Scheduled to ship in July 2004. $39.98

I think the above may have the contents listing wrong but it is true that they're about to start releasing Garfield and Friends, written by Yours Truly, on DVD. And wait'll you see what a pain I'm going to be about trying to get you to buy this one.

• Posted at 9:27 PM · LINK

Pete Alvarado (1920-2004)

Damn. I needed to work tonight but this is too important not to post about...

Pete Alvarado, one of the most prolific comic book and animation artists of all time, passed away January 30 at the age of 83. He worked for almost every animation studio in existence including a long stint for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio during its Golden Age. The Animation Guild's newsletter, via which I learned of Pete's passing, notes that he worked for Warners, MGM, UPA, Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng, Krantz, Sanrio, Ruby-Spears, Filmation, Marvel, Disney and Hyperion, and that he was awarded the Animation Guild Golden Award in 1987.

That doesn't even begin to describe the long career of Pete Alvarado. Born in 1920, he attended Chouinard Art Institute and was soon hired as an assistant animator by the Walt Disney Studio where (he said) he worked on Snow White and Dumbo, but mainly on shorts. His Disney stint was interrupted by a 1939 trip to New York when he decided to travel and explore the market for other kinds of work. In Manhattan, he hooked up with a couple of artists working in the then-new comic book industry, and Pete labored for several months for different "shops," pitching in on assembly lines to produce comic book stories for an array of publishers. In later years, he could never remember what he did then or where it appeared but researchers have suggested he did some comics for Funnies, Incorporated, the firm which supplied Marvel (then Timely) with its earliest comics, and also worked in a shop that supplied material to Fawcett, publishers of Captain Marvel. Pete did recall that what he did was mainly in an adventure style and not the "funny animal" genre he would work for most of his career.

After eighteen months in New York, he returned to Hollywood and to Disney, then went to work for Warner Brothers in 1946, receiving his first screen credit on the second Pepe LePew cartoon, Scent-imental Over You (1947). He worked mostly in backgrounds until around 1950 and was especially proud to have designed and painted all the backgrounds on Fast and Furry-ous, the first Road Runner cartoon, directed (of course) by Chuck Jones. Later, Pete was a key layout man, primarily in director Robert McKimson's unit, and you can see his screen credit on most of the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons and many others.

Robert McKimson became a close friend, as did the director's brothers, Tom and Charles, who also drew. All three brothers were moonlighting for Western Publishing Company doing work on their activity books (coloring books, kids' books, etc.) and comic books, and Charles later became an Art Director for the firm. Starting around 1947, Charles and Pete drew the Roy Rogers newspaper strip which Western helped assemble, and which was signed "Al McKimson." Contrary to published reports elsewhere, there was no such McKimson. It was just their names put together. Later, Pete did a stint on both the Gene Autry newspaper strip and comic book, as well as drawing the Roy Rogers comic book, but he came to dislike the more illustrative work and soon switched over, pretty much forever, to the cartoony stuff. He later did the Mr. Magoo newspaper strip for its entire run, a long period of the Little Lulu newspaper strip, and many many weeks worth of the Hanna-Barbera newspaper strips (The Flintstones and Yogi Bear), as well as fill-ins for almost all the Disney newspaper strips, including an extended period as the main artist on Donald Duck.

But as impressive as all these credits may be, they represent a small part of the Alvarado output. Starting in the late forties, Pete was a mainstay of Western Publishing's comic books for Dell and later Gold Key, pencilling somewhere between 20 and 40 pages a month for them through the late seventies. He drew stories for almost every Disney, Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera and Walter Lantz title. Most notably, he did long runs on Chip & Dale, Andy Panda, Scamp, Yogi Bear, Tweety & Sylvester and Beep Beep the Road Runner. Up above, I included the cover of one of Pete's best-remembered Gold Key efforts — the adaptation of the movie, Gay Purr-ee — but I could have picked dozens of others, including most of the adapations of the later Disney animated films like The Rescuers and Robin Hood.

I always thought of Pete as the archetype artist for the Dell/Gold Key funny animal comics. As I said, he was in all of them — even the Three Stooges comic for a while — and he was especially adept at drawing "on model," which meant that the characters looked like they did on the TV show or in the movie, but usually with more expression and flair. When I began working for Gold Key in the early seventies, I was delighted to have several of my scripts for Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and other books drawn by Pete. I absolutely remembered his work from some of the favorite comics of my childhood.

Later, when I was editor-writer of some Hanna-Barbera comics, Pete was the first guy I tried to hire. He did a few shorts and one entire issue of Hanna-Barbera Spotlight. That's a Pete Alvarado cover at right above, with inking by Scott Shaw!, who was just as thrilled to be working with the guy as was I. Interestingly, when Pete found out we had credits, he asked to use a pseudonym, claiming that his name had never appeared on any of the hundreds of comics he'd drawn and he wasn't sure he wanted to start now. He couldn't explain why that was, and after a bit of coaxing, he relented. He got credit on a lot of the childrens' books he illustrated for Western Publishing but I think the few jobs he drew for me then were the only comic books on which his name ever appeared until Gladstone reprinted some of his old Disney material and identified the artists.

Pete continued working in animation until his last few years, primarily doing storyboards and layout work. We had him for a while on Garfield and Friends, and his work also appeared on Bobby's World, Ghostbusters, She-ra, The C.O.W.boys of Moo Mesa and many other shows. He also worked on the Fritz the Cat movie and also on its sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. He was a lovely gentleman who truly loved cartooning, and he was loved and respected by all those with whom he worked. And trust me on this: In the above piece, I haven't begun to itemize all that he did in his incredible career.

• Posted at 12:01 AM · LINK