First Things First

From the annals of forgotten cartoon characters, it's Fearless Fred! Starring in his own... commercial?

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.

I didn't make this video -- I'm not that talented -- but I can sympathize with the hundreds of millions of disillusioned Obama voters who bought his schtick:

I agree with John at Power Line that it's a little overwrought, but only because "we never fell for Obama's 'hope and change' scam."

We'll see a lot more of this, I'm sure. The bitterness is rampant on the left as well as on the right. May one suggest this as a candidate for your theme song?

Appropriate enough for the first post of 2010, yes?

I ordered this in 1985, which was when Back to the Future hit the big screen. Ordered it by mail! Envelope and stamp! Because email didn't exist except for us CompuServe or BBS geeks -- and merchants didn't have email anyway. (The web, and thus the total commercialization of everything, was still years away.)

And I'll have you know that this is no repro or knock-off, but the real deal. I can prove it:

The second line reminds me that it was a promotional tie-in with a candy-bar company.

And I still have it. I'm not sure why. It's kind of small (shrunk in the wash! That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!), but not in bad shape. What do you do with such iconic items? Why, you stuff them back into the dresser, of course. Why do you ask? (He asked a trifle defensively.)

Those were, in some weird retro way, The Days: you'd see a (printed!) advertisement for a product, and if it wasn't available at the local mall, you could either call them on the phone (from your house!) or send away for it (via snail mail!), and then wait patiently for it to arrive -- weeks! later. No Super Saver shipping way back when, boys and girls.

Not getting it? (sigh) You kids today -- okay, maybe this will help put it into perspective:

"With a stick. A stick!"