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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Topic: Finally! WB remastering Looney Tunes
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-10-2003 02:17 AM
I wish I hadn't bought this DVD set. The images have been sharpened, saturated, noise-reduced, & the result is that cel dust has become a HUGE, distracting problem. Try dialog humor with busy crap going on upstage of the speaker, it bombs.
Originally, they weren't supposed to look like that, they didn't look like that, & they shouldn't have been altered to look like that. The supplementary material is really not so hot, especially the commentaries. Some cartoons have music-only audio tracks, which is neat, but they're not even the titles that have the best or most interesting scores! Keep the laserdiscs & videotapes; they are still the best home video versions of the WB cartoons.
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-14-2004 01:47 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
What's the one where Bugs and Yosemite Sam are in the desert, and Sam has a camel that won't "whoa" on command?
That's Sahara Hare, which was made a few years earlier by Freleng. It's a good example of how director Freleng & the writers would do or see something like a gag, piece of timing, storyline, or character, & then pieces of it would clank around in his mind as he'd work new & usually tighter implementations. The Sam/Camel thing was really good, stuck in his mind, & ground away some more useful implementations of it. It came back with new & improved stuff as an ancillary with the dragon in Knighty Knight Bugs.
Back Alley Oproar is a highly-tweaked remake of a much earlier cartoon that Freleng did with Porky Pig instead of Elmer Fudd. Overall, Back Alley Oproar is better, but I like better the way the finish was done in the earlier cartoon. It made my hair stand up the first time I saw it. The two cartoons really show Freleng teching his humor - the later one's got all the new & more effective techniques for timing, pacing, etc. he's learned; he's tweaked it by putting the more effectively, slightly more aggressive Fudd in there (but not Yosemite Sam, who'd be too aggressive & intelligent to let the gags play out satisfactorily). Freleng often said that Yosemite Sam was actually created to satisfy a need for heightened, more believable conflict dramatically with Bugs Bunny - Elmer was just a noodle. Lots of things work for Elmer, but you get more intensity & better situations involving Yosemite Sam.
If you run a bunch of WB cartoons, there's an effect that after a number of Chuck Jones cartoons run, the subsequent ones aren't as effective as if they'd been run in isolation. On the other hand, Freleng's keep up novelty & suspense. Jones had a sort of repertoire of gag timings, & the permutations came with the writing. It's independent of the story pacing.
Freleng timed his gags with greater attention to technical detail & novelty. The chief difference (I think) is that Chuck Jones worked with exposure sheets, but Freleng started with bar sheets (staff paper, like sheet music is written on) for the story & timing, then transferred it to exposure sheets. Freleng had an early technical, personal developmental phase working on the earliest sound cartoons, which were music/song driven, & that phase probably started him working with bar sheets.
Comedy's broadest algorithm is setup/suspense/surprise, & Freleng noted that it's not just that something that is done is surprising, but the moment it is done is a huge tweak of the surprise. He knew the cartoons would be musically scored, watched the rhythm, then set up the gag so it would come in slightly early or late from the setup of the music. Stalling had a huge technical sense of how things got funny, too, & could see how Freleng worked it scoring from the exposure sheets (they probably talked about it broadly some, too), & Stalling could collaborate musically in the setup & surprise.
You can sometimes tell Stalling is punching up some of Chuck Jones gags by having to work *backwards* scoring from where the surprise is, & Stalling shifting the music to punch up a stock Jones gag timing.
Stalling & Freleng were the supreme music/gag/movement team. They collaborated from similar technical knowledge. And not just by exploiting audience reference to rhythm by violating it, but when they worked gags that seamlessly fell right on it, by design.
"Take it, Sam!" One of the most excellent, rewarding, beautiful moments in movie history.
Freleng's strictly musical cartoons are always uniformly the best, too, those that put humor on top of a piece of music. Jones could do brilliant musicals, like Rabbit of Seville & What's Opera Doc, but you see that he had to go all out Belasco & lean on his "art director" & conductor/arranger/orchestra real hard. Freleng could do it with a pit band & in front of a street drop, or even just with one piano playing "Those Endearing Young Charms". Freleng can leave you with the feeling of having seen a big movie without having to smother it with production values.
Freleng said he didn't read music, but he was very musical, so the bar sheet technique from the early sound days not only gave him the analytical & structural tool that he worked so well from, but it allowed him to explore & analyze more closely what was obviously his enormous enjoyment of very meaty & successful short vaudeville acts. It's not hard to see Freleng kicked back at the Orpheum watching Weber & Fields, Gus Visser & His Singing Duck, The Nicholas Brothers, or any of that wide, weird expanse of highly effective short entertainments parading by, & just laughing his head off & eating it up. Then later, going to work & busting technique on the bar sheets. The displaced bricks is pretty stage-y when you think about it, very offstage voice or crash.
If you ever get a chance to see a collection of Vitaphone shorts made of popular vaudeville acts, don't miss it. Some's a little corny & dated, but it's effective entertainment still: the established acts hit the nail whenever they want & the variety is huge.
If you read music, which Freleng didn't beyond tempos, time signatures & beats per measure, & have some technical knowledge of staging & timing, it's mind-blowing to look at some of Freleng's bar sheets where he laid out cartoons. Life & movement seen through an orchestra score, & an orchestra score looking at life. And a huge, sharp brain putting it all together on paper.
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