Hey folks, Harry here. Junior Mintz happened upon a rare and radiant jewel of an animation dvd the other day... the BEANY AND CECIL special edition DVD. The key jewel in addition to the hours of great entertainment from the two leads... is behind the scenes extras including designs and pencil animations for an abandoned JOHN CARTER OF MARS serious series in conjunction with Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have ordered this dvd about 5 minutes before I posted this... For animation geeks, this is a must have. DVDEXPRESS has about 50 copies left... oh wait, that's probably less by now....
Yo, Harry!
Earlier this week I was ranting against the Walt Disney Co. for their mindless butchery of the video/DVD release of MAKE MINE MUSIC. Ever fearful of encurring the wrath of outraged parents (and thereby alienating potential consumers) the Disney trolls have been systematically going through their animation library and deleating images, scenes, and in the case of "The Martins & The Coys" entire sequences they have now deemed too politically insensitive for today's young minds. To digress for a second, I want to point out Disney seems do be doing a fairly slap-dash job of it, for on the back of the MELODY TIME DVD package they accidentally still left in a small image of Pecos Bill with the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Ha, ha, Mousekadolts! Not so easy to erase history as you thought, eh?
Anyway, now I'm happy to report some good news regarding an animation DVD release. While heading home from my day job at the Cinerama Dome candy counter, I bopped into my local DVD dealer and discovered Image Entertainment's superior BEANY & CECIL - The Special Edition. If you are a fan of cartoons, puppets, or coolness in any form, you must buy this right away. Beany & Cecil, for those few of you out there sadly not in the know, started life as an early TV puppet show in the late 40's. The show was the brainchild of genius animation director Bob Clampett, creator of such classic Warner Bros. shorts as PORKY IN WACKYLAND, THE GREAT PIGGY BANK ROBBERY and a zillion others. Each day loyal viewers (including Albert Einstein) would tune in to watch Beany-boy and his pal Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent match wits with their running enemy, the caped and smirking con-man Dishonest John. The characters were revived in the early sixtes for a popular cartoon series and the DVD contains the best of the puppet and animated incarnations.
The puppet segments are works of loopy genius, the writing boasting a very hip, almost improvised style of banter. The voice work by Daws Butler and Stan Freberg is flawless - their deadpan delivery shooting the concept of a boy and his talking sea serpent out of the boundaries of a kiddie show and into the realm of absurdist theatre. It's no wonder Groucho Marx used to watch this show every day.
The cartoons are gorgeously styled and designed with limited but expressive and imaginative backgrounds. The writing, similar in approach to Rocky and Bullwinkle (but not as good as the B&C puppet segments) generally has enough appeal for kids and adults, though the non-stop puns grow wearisome after a while. Even so, there are a few real gems here, including THE WILDMAN OF WILDSVILLE, featuring early 60's comic Lord Buckley as beatnik Go Man Van Gogh, Clampett's systematic deconstruction of all things Disney in BEANYLAND, and Clampett's second-great parody of Snow White, SO WHAT AND THE SEVEN WHATNOTS, which places the classic story in the Rat Packish environs of 1962 Lost Wages.
The disc contains much, much bonus material, including footage from a WILLY THE WOLF SHOW pilot, sort of an "American Bandstand" hosted by puppet William Shakespeare Wolf and Don Ameche (!) and development artwork and test footage from TWIG, a propsed 1957 series that placed a live boy on an island of puppets a full tweleve years before the Krofft Bros. would hatch Pufnstuff. Of special interest to animation geeks will be the abandoned test footage from Clampett's proposed but aborted JOHN CARTER OF MARS series. Created back in 1936, the surviving pencil and color tests show hints of a series that could have easily outshone the Fleischer SUPERMAN cartoons in terms of its artistic vision and quality of animation. It's even more remarkable to think that Superman himself had not yet appeared in print and the Man of Steel's animation debut was more than five years in the future!
That's just the beginning. Bob Clampett was widely known for keeping extensive archives so everything from his earliest animation drawings to Cecil gag sketches by Ren & Stimpy creator John Krcifalusi (reportedly a Clampett protogee') is included herein. The good stuff on this DVD goes on and on, seemingly without end, not unlike Cecil himself. Kudos to Robert Clampett Jr, Greg Carson, Milton Gray and everyone else involved with this looney labor of love. I give it three big serpent-slurps.
Junior out.
