Today’s Dead of the Day are two animators whose cartoons were a big part of our Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons: William Hanna and Walter Lantz.
Walter Lantz was the creator of Woody Woodpecker, the anarchic bird (based more than a little on Warner Brothers Daffy Duck), whose cackling laugh was immediately identifiable, showing up, among other places, on an Academy Award-nominated song and a tune on the Beach Boys 1967 album, “Smiley Smile.” (While Woody was voiced by a number of actors over the years—including Lantz’s wife, actress Grace Stafford—his signature laugh was created by Mel Blanc, who voiced Woody’s first appearance, 1940’s “Knock Knock.”)
While Woody was his best-known character, Lantz had a hand in many famous cartoons. He started his studio taking over the “Oswald The Lucky Rabbit” cartoons—originated by Walt Disney—after the winning the rights to the character from Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle in a poker game. He also created the character Andy Panda, Space Mouse, and Chilly Willy. He kept his studio going into the 70s, moving over to TV in the late 50s with “The Woody Woodpecker Show,” finally shutting down in 1972. He was awarded a special Oscar in 1979 for “bringing joy and laughter to every part of the world through his unique animated motion pictures”
With his partner, Joe Barbera, William Hanna was half of the most successful television cartoon studio, responsible for prime-time animated sit-coms featuring the modern stone-age family “The Flintstones” and their space-age counterparts “The Jestons,” as well as the characters of Top Cat, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Magilla Gorilla, Scooby-Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and the Smurfs.
The most famous of their creations remained the cat and mouse duo of Tom and Jerry, originally created for MGM. From their first appearance in 1940’s “Puss Gets The Boot,” they were featured in 114 shorts, including 1942’s Oscar-winning “Yankee Doodle Mouse,” and branching out into live action features, dancing with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh” and swimming with Esther Williams in “Dangerous When Wet.”
These cartoons are as wild and filled with crazy sight gags as the Warner Brothers Loony Tunes by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, but are too often overshadowed by their television work, which introduced their most enduring innovation: the technique known as limited animation. Utilizing fewer drawings than traditional cartoons, they allowed the studio to produce their shows faster than cheaper. Limited animation features flat characters on repeated backgrounds; the heads usually only drawn in profile or full face (this is why so many Hanna-Barbera characters feature some kind of neckwear: ties for Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear; pearls for Wilma Flintstone. It hides the line between the head and the body.) While less “artistic” than the classic cartoons of Disney and Warner Brothers, it’s still in use today on shows such as “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy”; “South Park” has made it part of its aesthetic.
Also leaving this mortal coil on this day: Movie producer (and Liz Taylor husband) Mike Todd (1958), high-wire artist Karl Wallenda, founder of the Flying Wallendas, who fell to his death in 1978, Cleveland Indian pitchers Steve Olin and Tim Crews, who died in a boating accident in 1993, and A Tribe Called Quest’s rapper Phife Dawg, who passed in 2016.
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