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A Political Cartoon
Directed byJames K. Morrow
Joe Adamson
Written byJames K. Morrow
Joe Adamson
Produced byJames K. Morrow
Joe Adamson
David E. Stone
StarringAlex Krakower
Liam Smith
Marshall Anker
Allen Lieb
George Stapleford
Bob Kingsley
Mel Blanc
Joe Adamson
Lindsay Doran
James K. Morrow
Narrated byJoe Adamson
Music byHarry Buch
Animation byDavid E. Stone
Mark Kausler
Manon Washburn
Production
company
Odradek Productions
Distributed byThe Creative Film Society
Release date
  • 1 October 1974 (1974-10-01)
Running time
22 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

A Political Cartoon is a 1974 American satiric independent short film produced by James K. Morrow, Joe Adamson and David E. Stone, under the name "Odradek Productions". Combining live-action and animation, the short follows a political campaign manager and a cartoonist who decide to run an animated character for President of the United States.[1][2][3] It was distributed by The Creative Film Society and released on October 1, 1974.[4]

The short won awards and prizes at many film festivals;[5] it was exhibited at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was nominated for a Gold Hugo for Best Short Film, and won the Francis Scott Key Award at the Baltimore Film Festival,[6] the Judge's Prize at the Santa Barbara Film Festival,[7] the Jury's Prize at the Columbus Film Festival,[7] and the Audience Prize at the Midwest Film Festival.[8][9][7] The Los Angeles Free Pass rated the short "film poetry of the highest order".[4] It was broadcast on television in the 1980s and released on VHS by Kino Video on September 24, 1996 as a part of Cartoongate!, a compilation reel of animated shorts.[10][3] Another rare VHS release of the short, signed by Morrow and Stone, was put up on eBay years later.[11]

Plot

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The film begins with Bugs Bunny campaigning on behalf of equal rights for cartoon characters everywhere. At night, a political campaign manager named Lance Mungo enters a laundromat and meets an unemployed cartoonist named Bernie Wibble. Lance enlists Bernie's aid in creating a vague-talking, innocuous cartoon character named Peter President and running him for President of the United States. After Peter's election, people begin to have negative reactions to cartoons because of him, which includes Bugs being put on sale at a pet store as an Easter rabbit. Peter unexpectedly takes a firm stand against an evil business conglomerate named the Consolidated Commerce Conglomeration, who respond by sending all the India Ink back to India, rendering him catatonic. After an unsuccessful attempt to revive Peter by transporting ink through a tube, Lance and Bernie decide to reuse the latter's animation of Peter for his next press conference. Later, the Consolidated Commerce Conglomeration hires two 1930s gangsters to kill Bernie. Bernie runs into a printing factory in order to escape them, and ends up getting turned into a comic book named The Wonderful World of Wibble, so Lance replaces him with a puppet master.

Cast

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  • Alex Krakower as Bernie Wibble
  • Liam Smith as Lance Mungo
  • Marshall Anker
  • Allen Lieb
  • George Stapleford
  • Bob Kingsley
  • Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny
  • Joe Adamson (uncredited) as the Narrator, Bingo, Bongo, Peter President, Cartoon Characters, Mailman and Gangster #2 (voice)
  • Lindsay Doran (uncredited) as Waitress
  • James K. Morrow (uncredited) as Astronaut and News Reporter

Production

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The short was written, produced and directed by James K. Morrow, Joe Adamson, and David E. Stone. Morrow, Adamson and Stone were young filmmakers who all knew each other and collaborated on each other's films (some of which won awards) at Abington High School in suburban Philadelphia. The short was shot in 16mm, minimally financed, and made on a shoestring budget in the Boston suburbs during Richard Nixon's second inauguration in 1972-1973.[12][2][13][3] They shot principal photography (all the Lance and Bernie scenes and the Consolidated Commerce Conglomeration) and the Panacea commercial on the campus of Drew University and around town in Madison, New Jersey. The living marionette at the end and the press conference were the only scenes shot in Boston environments (actually closer to Nashua, New Hampshire).[3] The marionette was played by a 12-year-old girl, with a giant pinewood chair abetting the illusion where it manipulates its own strings.[14][9] Other pickups (aerial image animation, etc.) were done in New York City and in State College, Pennsylvania, where Adamson was teaching at the time.[3] The scenes with the 1930s gangsters were achieved using a black-and-white reversal original, a scratched and violated dupe negative, a positive copy with printed dust slugged into the A-and-B rolls, a carefully filtered voice track (with Adamson dubbing the second gangster's voice), and a hissing, thumping crackle supplied by an old 78 record.[15][9]

Stone designed and animated Peter President, as well as Bingo, Bongo, the astronauts and the other cartoon characters.[13] Much of the surreal quality of the short was inspired by Out of the Inkwell, which combined live action and animation.[16][9] The astronauts were stop motion models filmed against a blue screen in a video transmission.[17][9] Mark Kausler (who was the winner of the first Bobe Cannon scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute in 1968) did the Bugs Bunny scenes, animating Bugs and painting the backgrounds. He was only paid around $400.00 for the work. Kausler received criticism on his animation of the character from Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson, even though he used an old McKimson model sheet. The inker for the cels in the scenes was Manon Washburn. The original version of the script had Bugs as an old rabbit (like Jebediah Leland in Citizen Kane). At one point Bugs would say, "Will you send me up a couple of carrots? They won't let me have them anymore. Wrap them up to look like cigars or something." However, Warner Bros. did not want Bugs to be shown as old, so a new scene was written where Bugs was painting Easter eggs in the Bugs Bunny Easter Egg Factory. Bugs would then sigh that it was a rough life and that he was talking to Daffy Duck about it. He would say, "You think it's tough being a cartoon character. What do you think it's like being a black cartoon character?" Warner Bros. was finally agreeable to this scene, but Kausler objected and refused to animate it. He said that while the scene "fit with the whole concept", it "just made [him] laugh and cry at the same time" and was "silly". The scenes in which Bugs campaigns on behalf of equal rights for cartoon characters everywhere and is interviewed at the pet store were written and submitted to Warner Bros., and were included in the final version of the film. Mel Blanc recorded the voice while he was in the hospital with a broken leg. He propped himself up in bed and made about $300.00 for two minutes work.[18][9][19][13][20][3][21] Some of the cels and drawings of Bugs for the short went on the market as early as 1975, two years after production finished.[3][22] The short also features cameo appearances from Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse in a picture, and Clarabelle Cow, Porky Pig, the Big Bad Wolf from Pigs in a Polka, George and Koko the Clown as part of the crowd of cartoon characters revolting outside the White House; mentions of Dumbo, Bosko and Snoopy's "Joe Cool" alias as name suggestions, and Bambi, Betty Boop, Farmer Al Falfa and Krazy Kat as the cartoon characters in trouble; and references to Sylvester the Cat (the narrator says, "Paid for by Suffering Succotash, Washington, D.C.") and Looney Tunes's "That's all Folks!" (used by the narrator at the end of Peter's first press conference).

Due to the short's low budget, there was a sparse amount of sound effects added. Morrow, Adamson and Stone had not heard the term Foley at that point. The sound effects added were basic and supported the humor of the short.[13] At one point Stone and Adamson were in the editing room when the time came to cut the sound effects track for the scene in which Peter loses his India Ink and is catatonic, and Lance and Bernie improvise an ink transfusion. It was Stone's idea to begin the process simply, by dropping in existing sound from outtakes, adding that to the sync production sound, which never would have occurred to Adamson.[23]

References

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  1. ^ Rooney, Terrie M. (2000). Contemporary Authors, Volume 180. Gale Research International, Limited. ISBN 978-0-7876-3240-3. Retrieved November 2, 2024. Seven years later, Joe, Dave, and I collaborated on another satiric sally against the American republic, A Political Cartoon, a 16mm short presently available on home video (Kino on Video), and in retrospect I see it as a ritualized attempt to rekindle our old Man Who Owned America collaboration and maybe get it right this time.
  2. ^ a b "A Philosophical Chat with James Morrow". Literary Kicks. May 6, 2008. Retrieved November 3, 2024.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g ""A Political Cartoon": Looking back at the 1974 short film featuring Bugs Bunny". Night Flight Plus. Archived from the original on October 2, 2017. Retrieved April 2, 2024.
  4. ^ a b "Today's Film Maker, Volume 4". American Film Makers Magazine, Incorporated. 1974. Retrieved November 2, 2024. The Kodak Teen-age Movie Award Winners... Where Are They Now?: When Joe Adamson won a second prize in the 1964 Kodak Teenage Movie Awards, he remembers that he had just "given up" film making at the tender age of 18. Ten years later, he has studied, taught and written about film professionally. And together with two fellow teen movie graduates—Jim Morrow and Dave Stone—who worked with him on his '64 winner, he recently completed the combination animation-live action film, A Political Cartoon, being distributed by The Creative Film Society. Adamson, who says his teen award "sort oof convinced me I could do things," came out of his early retirement from film to attend UCLA where In the Mist of Life, one of the "slew" of films he made as a student, was rated "film poetry of the highest order" by the Los Angeles Free Press.
  5. ^ "Working for the Fleischers: An Interview with Dick Huemer by Joe Adamson". Dick Huemer's Animation Pages. Archived from the original on August 13, 2022. Retrieved November 4, 2024. Joe Adamson is the author of a current book on the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo) and a forthcoming book on Tex Avery, as well as being a prize-winning filmmaker (A Political Cartoon).
  6. ^ "Baltimore Film Festival 16 mm Films – Enoch Pratt Free Library". prattlibrary.org. Retrieved November 3, 2024.
  7. ^ a b c "Happy birthday to enigmatic James Morrow". Tachyon Publications. March 17, 2018. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  8. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 22. Retrieved November 2, 2024. A POLITICAL CARTOON, produced by Odradek Productions (a euphemism for Joe Adamson, Jim Morrow, and Dave Stone), has won prizes at the Midwest Film Festival and the Baltimore Film Festival and is distributed by Creative Film Society in Reseda, California.
  9. ^ a b c d e f Stone, Dave, Joe Adamson, and Jim Morrow. "Shooting A Political Cartoon." Filmmakers Newsletter 8.3 (January 1975): 18–22.
  10. ^ Cartoongate [VHS]. ASIN 6304198639.
  11. ^ "A Political Cartoon 1973 VHS Joe Adamson James Morrow Dave Stone - Signed [VHS]". eBay. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  12. ^ "Annual American Film Festival, Volumes 15-18". Educational Film Library Association. 1973. Retrieved November 2, 2024. A POLITICAL CARTOON 22 min., color, apply sale, $ 20.00 rental, Prod. 1973, Rel. 1974. Director: James Morrow and Joe Adamson. Distributor: Creative Film Society. Producer: Morrow & Adamson. Writer: Morrow & Adamson. Camera: John O'Connor. Music: Harry Buch.
  13. ^ a b c d Ament, Vanessa Theme (January 22, 2009). The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781136058370. Retrieved November 1, 2024. In 1972, three able young filmmakers went about creating a short film about what would happen if the American public elected a cartoon character for president. This idea was concocted during a tumultuous time in our history, and these young lads were inventive and playful. The result was A Political Cartoon, written and directed by Joseph Adamson and Jim Morrow. David Stone was an aspiring animator who was responsible for designing the character Peter President, as well as other sundry cartoon characters. The filmmakers got permission for Bugs Bunny to appear in the film, and Mel Blanc graciously added his voice. The film was self-produced and minimally financed, and there was a sparse amount of sound effects added. Certainly, there was no Foley. The young men had probably not ever heard the term Foley at that point. The sound effects added were basic and supported the humor of the piece.
  14. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 20. Retrieved November 2, 2024. "Bringing a marionette to life to manipulate its own strings." A giant pinewood chair abetted the illusion. Behind the Scenes: Crew member Bob Kingsley reveals the actual size of the living marionette, played by a twelve-year-old girl.
  15. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 18. Retrieved November 2, 2024. The gangster character had only two lines in the entire scene. One was finally cut out. The second was dubbed in by Adamson, still chanting his Warner Brothers Mantra. That was our Gangster effect. A black and white reversal original, a scratched and violated dupe negative, a positive copy with printed dust slugged into the A-and-B rolls, a carefully filtered voice track, and a hissing, thumping crackle supplied by an elderly 78 record having its last fling in its final groove. The effect is so total that everyone who sees it has the same remark: "Which picture did you take that clip from? I know I've seen it! Is it SCARFACE?" Do something right, and you'll fool everybody into thinking somebody else must have done it.
  16. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 22. Retrieved November 2, 2024. "Much of the surreal quality of A POLITICAL CARTOON derives from the Out of the Inkwell effect of cartoon figures interacting with real people." Here, Bernie the Cartoonist offers to share his pad with Peter the President (Alex Krakower, Peter President). Peter President assumes office.
  17. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 18. Retrieved November 2, 2024. This kind of panegyric was fairly characteristic of making A POLITICAL CARTOON. Our maniac 22-minute comedy was an attempt to turn Media Consciousness on its ear and accepted viewing conventions inside out, an exercise that involved: getting video-transmitted astronauts to share the frame with an animated politician, brining a marionette to life to manipulate its own strings, compressing one of our actors into a comic book, blasting a live-action figure with a cartoon explosion (and, of course, restoring him to normalcy one cut later), and filming a cinema-verite interview with Bugs Bunny.
  18. ^ Morrow, Jim; Adamson, Joe; Stone, Dave (January 1975). "Shooting A Political Cartoon". Filmmakers Newsletter. Suncraft International, Incorporated. p. 20-22. Retrieved November 2, 2024. One of our favorite gags was the idea of a well-known cartoon character behind the scenes to campaign benevolently for a disease or to gaze skyward with wrinkled eyes and reminisce about the old days, like he was Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart. "We'll put Bugs Bunny in an Old Folks' Home!" we decided. "We'll animate the scene to look like a documentary! We'll get permission from Warner Brothers! It'll be worth the trouble!" Reminiscing about a statement like that, you get kind of a thrill to think you'll never be that young again. Our first script had this scene in it: a withered and weathered Bugs, wheezing in an old chair like a CITIZEN KANE Joseph Cottentail, peering over his dark glasses and prodding his febrile memory for recollections of tranquility: "Sometimes I see our old films on the TV.... I like to see us, so young and everything.... It's hard to remember back that far." For his parting shot, he says to the interviewer, "On your way out, stop at the vegetable stand, will you, and send me up a couple of good carrots? And tell them to wrap them up to look like cigars or something, or they'll stop them at the desk." We read the scene to people and they fell down. We contacted an animator in Hollywood and he was anxious to get started on it. Mel Blanc was even willing to record the voice track. All he needed was written permission from Warner Brothers. But don't worry about it, he told us, they're very nice about these things. Warner Brothers was very nice, all right. Their New York office sent us a very nice letter informing us they could not allow "an ageless Bugs Bunny aged" in a movie that children might see, and "Best of luck with your project." We protested that Bob Clampett had aged Bugs in a Warner Brothers cartoon of the Forties called THE OLD GREY HARE, and that it had perverted no child's conception of Bugs Bunny as a character. We protested in vain. Warners had apparently never heard of THE OLD GREY HARE, nor of Bob Clampett, nor of anything but their precious commodity Bugs Bunny, who was never allowed to calcify into such a hallowed institution in his younger, more vital days. It was a problem of a sort that Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and the rest of the gang that had created Bugs in the first place faced all the time, in the form of supervisors whose creativity quotient fell below zero on a warm day. Warners was now exhibiting a syndrome Chuck Jones once ascribed to one of his bosses: "He was just one of those people who spend their lives saying 'No.' Which is a word anyone can use." So we wrote a whole new scene. This time, Bugs was painting Easter eggs in the Bugs Bunny Easter Egg Factory. "How about this, huh?" he would say, picking up an egg and creating a beautiful, intricate design with only three quick strokes of the brush. "Only a cartoon character can do that, ya know. You'd think that'd be worth $1.75 an hour, wouldn't ya? Oh, no! 93£ a day and a pat on the nose—tops!" Finally Bugs sighs, "It's a rough life, Doc. I was talking to Daffy about it the other day. You think it's tough being a cartoon character—whaddya think it's like being a black cartoon character?" Warners was finally agreeable to this scene, but now our animator kicked. "You had a good scene," he said. "It made me laugh and cry at the same time. It fit with your whole concept. This just makes me cry. It's silly. I won't do it." Knowing in our hearts this was no suitable substitute for Bugs in an Old Folks' Home, we sat down and wrote another scene and submitted that to Warner Brothers. This one propped Bugs in front of a glossy backdrop and saw him campaigning on behalf of equal rights for cartoon characters everywhere. "Fantasy is everybody's business," he declared. This one we objected to. It was several pages long, had a cast of about ten different voices, required some very complex animation, and lost its effect whenever an attempt was made to trim it. By this time, the rest of the movie had been financed, shot, and edited. Only a few touches remained to be finished. We seemed to have a choice between shooting the Bugs Bunny scene and getting the movie done. Short and sweet, that's what we needed. Bugs is on sale at a pet store, as an Easter Rabbit. Reporter: How did you feel, when you were put on sale here in this pet store? Bugs: How do you feel interviewing a rabbit? End. Finis. Conclusion. Bugs comes on, he goes off. Warner Brothers, with this fourth scene submitted to them, was probably convinced by now that we were not going to have Bugs Bunny f**king a zebra. (Either that or we weren't planning to shoot a scene at all, and bogus Bugs Bunny scripts would just go on arriving in the mail forever.) The completed scene, even in its Readers Digest Condensed version, is always a hit, and like a chorus, the audience responds with a single remark: "Did you have any trouble getting the rights to use Bugs Bunny?" Like Warners, we've found it easiest to just say, "No."
  19. ^ "Mark Kausler - Resumé". It's The Cat. Retrieved November 1, 2024.
  20. ^ "Animation Anecdotes #258". Cartoon Research. Archived from the original on September 28, 2020. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
  21. ^ McGowan, David (February 26, 2019). Animated Personalities: Cartoon Characters and Stardom in American Theatrical Shorts. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9781477317440. Retrieved November 1, 2024. The notion of a decrepit-looking Bugs persisting into the year 2000 would likely have been amusing to the artists who produced The Old Grey Hare, a film that was made in the 1940s when the rabbit was (in cinematic terms) just a few years old and by no means assured of such a legacy. Over time, however, Warner Bros. has become increasingly cautious about such humor. For instance, the co-directors of the independent film A Political Cartoon (1974) note that, even in the 1970s, there were already concerns about addressing the potential repercussions of Bugs's longevity: "One of our favorite gags was the idea of a well-known cartoon character behind the scenes... [gazing] skyward with wrinkled eyes and [reminiscing] about the old days... Our first script had... a withered and weathered Bugs, wheezing in an old chair [like Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane (1941)], peering over his dark glasses and prodding his febrile memory for recollections of tranquility: "Sometimes I see our old films on the TV.... I like to see us, so young and everything.... It's hard to remember back that far." Although Bugs does appear briefly in the finished version—a rare example of a post-studio-era production that managed to get the star on a loan-out—the directors note that their plans for the above scene were politely, but firmly, denied. The New York Warner Bros. office "sent us a very nice letter informing us that they could not allow 'an ageless Bugs Bunny aged' in a movie that children might see".
  22. ^ "A Political Cartoon Bugs Bunny Production Cels". WorthPoint. Retrieved November 2, 2024.
  23. ^ Stone, David; Ament, Vanessa Theme (July 29, 2020). Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter: A Case Study of the End of the Analog Age. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781000156041. Retrieved November 1, 2024. After college, we collaborated again on A Political Cartoon (1974), a short film shot in 16mm, which I co-directed with Jim Morrow. Dave and I were in the editing room when the time came to cut the sound effects track for a crucial scene: An animated cartoon character had been deprived of his vital India Ink. He was catatonic, and as close to death as a cartoon character could be, so his desperate creators had to improvise an ink transfusion. It was Dave's idea to begin the process simply, by dropping in existing sound from outtakes, adding that to the sync production sound, which never would have occurred to me. While working as an inbetweener at a Hollywood animation studio, Hanna-Barbera, Dave got involved professionally with sound editing and became a different kind of artist, creating funny combinations of sounds.
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