Let's all go to the lobby!
Friday, 8. January 2010, 15:44:32
Another gem from the seemingly infinite reserves of the Wayback Machine. I didn't embed it because it's long, but click on the image above and you'll get right to the commercial. (If you want to see the title, you'll have to rewind the video just the slightest bit.)
This is the kind of animation that was done in the late 1950s throughout much of the 1960s: rich, involved, hand-rolled, detail-oriented animation, carefully hand-drawn and -colored on individual celluloid sheets, and finally filmed. It didn't last, of course; things degraded to the cheaper-but-faster 'Speed Racer' school of slapdash, mostly-computerized animation, and eventually to CGI, which looks better than slapdash but, to me at least, lost its warmth. (I'd say "lost its soul," but let's not go overboard here.) Ah, well. It's one of those things where The Old Days were, in my opinion, actually better.
As I watch this, I'm trying to figure out just who animated it. Each artist, of course, had his own style, and if you watched enough toonage in your youth, you could readily identify the look of Max Fleischer (he of Betty Boop and Popeye), or perhaps his brother Dave, or Gene Deitch (Tom & Jerry), or Chuck Jones (Tom, Jerry, Bugs, Daffy, etc).
Two Tom Cats: Gene's version on the left, and Chuck's on the right.
Animators brought the same look to pretty much everything they drew, which is a treat for those of us with discriminating cartoon palates. ("Ah, reminiscent of the early Freleng, with a soupçon of Avery influence...") But I'm having a little trouble identifying Fred's artist. In this frame it kinda looks like a Fleischer drawing...
...but not exactly; here's a frame from Gulliver's Travels.
The styles are similar, but not exact. I'm not connoisseur enough to be certain. (Brothers?) But Fleischer is my guess and I'm stickin' to it, at least until (hopefully) someone chimes in to tell me otherwise.
Sadly, Fred's commercial appearance is uncredited. Also sadly, I find no tributes to Fearless Fred, no memorials, nary a mention. Both Fred and his beloved Toddy ("the chocolate drink that's just grand") have faded into the annals of history.










