Crazy Classic Cartoons Festival #2: family cartoons if you're the Manson Family!
The underground, bizarre, weird and wonderful world of cartoons best watched while impaired. Don't drive after watching these!
Quasi at the Quackadero
This cult cartoon follows two ducks and a pet robot at an amusement park in the future where time travel is exploited.
No one before or since Sally Cruikshank saw animation quite the way she did. Quasi at the Quackadero was like being overwhelmed by a cartoon, it seems to take on a life of its own. She followed this with MAKE ME PSYCHIC
Make Me Psychic
Anita the duck buys a psychic device at a novelty store in an alternate universe and creates mayhem at a crazy party. By Sally Cruikshank, with music by Robt. Armstrong and Allan Dodge
With the help of underground comics legend Kim Deitch who did the voice of Quasi and did inking of the cartoons I think you’ll agree with me that her cartoons remain to this day unique AND bizarre.
Face Like a Frog
Frogs in a haunted house and other assorted craziness!
Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934
When censorship of films became a national instead of a state by state issue, going after Betty Boop became a top priority. After 1934 she would never be the same again.
Betty Boop is trying to sleep. Shutting all the windows isn't enough, so she lights a roaring fire in the fireplace and falls asleep on the hearthplace rug. The heat of the flames soon turns two roosting chickens into roasted chickens, and causes Betty to dream that her fireplace has become the gate to Hell itself. Betty explores the underworld, and sings "Hell's Bells" for the devil and his minions. When the devil tries to put the moves on Betty, she fixes him with a (literally) icy stare, freezing him and all of Hell. Betty wakes up to find the fire out, and she goes to bed, this time under a pile of warm quilts.
Red Hot Mamma
Popeye meets, and dances with a topless BettyBoop
The 1940’s Superman cartoons are beautiful and had budgets of up to $150,000 a cartoon, a huge amount in the 40’s. And it shows.
SUPERMAN THE BULLETEERS
The city of Metropolis has received an ultimatum, from a gang known as "The Bulleteers," that unless the treasury funds of the city are turned over to them that destruction will rain down from the skies, and proceed to prove it by destroying the city hall.
This short was the first of the three Popeye Color Specials, which, at over sixteen minutes each, were billed as "A Popeye Feature." It was also the first Popeye color cartoon in general. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor was nominated for the 1936 Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons, but lost to Walt Disney's Silly Symphony short The Country Cousin. Footage from this short was later used in the 1952 Famous Studios Popeye cartoon Big Bad Sindbad, in which Popeye relates the story of his encounter with Sindbad to his 3 nephews.
Producer and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen stated in his Fantasy Film Scrapbook that Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor was a major influence on his production of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
In 1994, the film was voted #17 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members in the animation field, and is the highest ranked Fleischer cartoon in the book. In 2004, Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves was produced while Fleischer competitor Walt Disney was entering the final months of production on his first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It made full use of Fleischer Studios' multiplane camera, which they had been experimenting with for some time. Disney had just released his Academy Award-winning Silly Symphony, The Old Mill, their first 3-D cartoon, and were advertising their upcoming Snow White as multiplanal as well. As such, advertising for "Forty Thieves" accented the fact that it was 3-dimensional. It was released just weeks before the seasonal Los Angeles premiere of Snow White and was essentially the only animated competition for the feature.
This short was the last of the three Popeye Color Specials, which were, at over sixteen minutes each, three times as long as a regular Popeye cartoon, and were often billed in theaters alongside or above the main feature. Unlike the first two films, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp is more Disney-esque in plot and pacing, and does not make use of the Fleischer Tabletop 3D background process. According to the film's press release, its making involved two hundred colors and twenty-eight thousand individual, full-color drawings; the press release also mentions 3D animation, but such footage was never used in the final version. However, a glimpse can be obtained in a Popular Science short, which documents the film's making, and reveals a sculpted model of the castle being photographed. Running at twenty-one minutes, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp is the longest entry in the "color feature" series, and the only one produced at the relocated Fleischer Studios facility in Miami, Florida. Footage from the short, with a new soundtrack and rerecorded dialogue, was reused in the 1949 cartoon "Popeye's Premiere," wherein it is presented as a motion picture that Popeye starred in.
Julius is put in charge of keeping the house free from rats. But when he falls into a still and gets drunk, the rats soon begin to take over. ALICE RATTLED BY RATS by Walt Disney in 1925.
Behind the paywall: PRIVATE SNAFU CARTOONS
Private Snafu cartoons were classified and only shown to the military in WW 2.
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