DRAWING FROM LIFE
It’s hard to create a character out of nowhere, so sometimes the people who make cartoons go to the movies, or turn on the TV… and make an animated version of what they see on the screen.
TROY McCLURE
You might remember him from such shows as The Simpsons, where he appeared frequently (voiced by the late Phil Hartman) as a washed-up B-movie actor. With his glory days long behind him, McClure was forced to star in school educational films and host infomercials. He’s an amalgam of lots of briefly popular and forgotten actors, especially the two that are his namesakes: Troy Donahue and Doug McClure.
YOGI BEAR
Art Carney created the voice he used to play good-natured but dimwitted Ed Norton on The Honeymooners by imitating old Borscht Belt and vaudeville comedians. And Daws Butler created the voice he used to play good-natured but picnic-basket-thieving Yogi Bear in the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series by imitating Carney’s portrayal of Ed Norton. (It seemed that Hanna-Barbera “borrowed” the name from New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, but the cartoon studio claimed it was just a coincidence… when Berra brought a lawsuit against them. Berra later withdrew the suit.)
TOP CAT
One of the most popular (and edgiest) sitcoms of the late 1950s: The Phil Silvers Show, also known as You’ll Never Get Rich and Sergeant Bilko. Bilko was a con man, always trying to run scams out of his sleepy military base with the assistance of his troops, including Private Doberman, played by Maurice Gosfield. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon Top Cat, which hit the air in 1961, just two years after Sergeant Bilko went off the air, is more or less an animated remake of that show. Arnold Stang portrayed Top Cat, a con man always trying to make a buck, and he just imitated Phil Silvers. Another character, Benny the Ball, is based on Private Doberman, and Gosfield stepped in to voice the part.
Which do you prefer? There are 1.2 million Brians in the U.S., and only 312,000 Bryans.
Before the scantily clad, flapper-based cartoon character Betty Boop—with her round face, cropped hair, and “boop-oop-a-doop” catchphrase—became a sensation in the 1930s, Paramount Pictures had a popular contract player named Helen Kane. Her calling cards: a round face, cropped hair, and the catchphrase “boop-oop-a-doop.” Kane sued Betty Boop’s animator, Fleisher Studios, but a judge ruled that her persona wasn’t distinctive enough to have been illegally lifted.
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
How to draw from life: cartoonists say start by figuring out a person’s basic face shape—round, thin and narrow, pear-shaped, etc. Then draw a center line, from top to bottom, to use as a reference point for placing the nose, eyes, and mouth. Once you’ve got them in a good spot, work on exaggerating them. (You’re making a cartoon, not a portrait.)
BUZZIE, FLAPS, ZIGGY, AND DIZZY
With their moptop haircuts, playful attitudes, and Liverpudlian accents, the singing vultures that Mowgli encounters in Disney’s 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book were pretty blatantly based on the Beatles. Animators came up with the birds, and the film’s chief songwriters, Robert and Richard Sherman, suggested that producers hire the actual Beatles to voice their cartoon counterparts. On behalf of his bandmates, John Lennon said no.
FOGHORN LEGHORN
Audiences who saw Looney Tunes cartoons in movie theaters during the 1940s probably would’ve recognized that the loud, Southern-drawling, know-it-all, extra-large rooster was a takeoff of the name and character of Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a blowhard of a politician from the South voiced by Kenny Delmar on The Fred Allen Show, an extremely popular radio show of the era. (Animators and writers even lifted one of Claghorn’s signature lines—“That’s a joke, son!”—directly, and used it for the cartoon character.)
FOOD NEWS
Chocolate bars are vegetables! Well, sort of. Chocolate derives from the cacao bean, which is technically classified as a vegetable. White chocolate has a similar consistency to chocolate and uses similar ingredients, except for a major one: cocoa powder (also known as chocolate solids). So technically, it’s not chocolate.
Until the 16th century, wedding rings were worn on the thumb.