Sappy New Year (1961)

Sappy New Year (1961)
Dir.: Dave Tendlar
Cel Bloc Rating: 4/9

It's a new year, and if there is one thing for which I am glad, it's that 2015 is over. What a crappy year. I don't usually look at years in such a way, but I don't really have a choice this time. The end of 2014 was bad enough (with half of my team departing at my job for mostly insidious reasons, and then our dog died in December), but so many things went wrong for me in the past twelve months that I can truly look at this period in time and feel the solid need to just write it all off in my head. Or at least in this post.

Over this past year, I lost my job of the past decade (for absolutely insidious reasons), and then got sucked into the Pit of Despair that is the search for new gainful employment, and have still not come out of it. I am either too overqualified for the low-paying gigs that might help keep me afloat a little easier or underqualified (according to the employers) for the jobs in which I spent the past ten years gaining what I thought was valuable experience. This is all just conjecture on my part, since in most cases I never even get to the interview stage. It has been exceedingly frustrating. I am not a lazy person, though lately it might seem that way. I have had two real jobs in my life, and the first I held for 22 years until I moved out of state. Otherwise, I might be there still. The second, the one I just lost, I held for just two months shy of ten years. I do my jobs well and know how to keep them. Now I just can't seem to get one.

But there was a bright side at the tail end of 2015. The only thing that has gone right for me is a biggie, perhaps the solution to my whole problem, and something that I needed to do for a long, long time. Even though my therapist told me for over a year and a half that I really needed to get back to writing (not counting the fact that my job, to a large degree, was based around my writing talent), I couldn't quite do it. I toyed with getting back to writing on a personal level, even with just merely journaling. But I couldn't do it. There were numerous false starts and real stops. I hemmed and hawed, figuratively kicking my foot in the dirt, and always finding excuses why I couldn't.

Finally, after another false start this past summer where I posted a couple of things on my long dormant main blog, I had a breakthrough. I knuckled down in September, the day before my birthday, and knocked out a couple thousand words on a subject not just close to my heart, but to my health. The words formed a diatribe against the price gouging going on a big box store in regards to gluten free bread choices. The diatribe was going to be a letter to the company, but then some quick reediting turned it into my first new online post in ages where I felt comfortable with the content.

Then there was a movie review. And then a trio of movie reviews. In no time at all, blogging became easy peasy to me once again. The torture of putting my voice down on paper (or by digital means) had subsided fully. By the end of October, with my main website -- The Cinema 4 Pylon -- finally swinging in high gear, I turned to my other once popular blog, this one, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, where I concentrated fully on animated films. I got together with my writing partner, Aaron, who himself had let his blogging subside, and we started writing shared pieces in a series called Visiting and Revisiting, where we would review a movie that had great impact on one of us that the other one had never seen before. By mid-November, I was not only flying again through my increased writing schedule, but was even going back to older posts on the Cel Bloc -- you may have noticed if you follow me on social media -- and reediting and, in some cases, rewriting articles I had not even looked at in eight-plus years.

I tell you all of this because it is New Year's Day, and I am not one for resolutions. What is the point of saying you will commit to something on a day that is popularly known to be lousy with people making commitments they will undoubtedly break just a short while later? It's like Valentine's Day without stupid plush hearts and boxes of candy. I have friends that take to Facebook and pledge their vow to do this and lose that and stop this and start that. And all of it is bullshit.

And here now, celebrating an old New Year's Day, are our old friends, Heckle and Jeckle. You might remember them. The talking magpies? Magpies that actually look like crows and might be termed so by any other animation company except for Terrytoons, who decided they were actually magpies? If you continue to feign indifference to their existence, just go back a few days on this very blog and read the article I posted about their 1952 short, Movie Madness, which is a fairly decent example of what these insane bird buddies brought to the table in those bygone days. You definitely want to go through that piece (and watch the attached cartoon) before you read on if you want to get a real sense of how far they fell by 1961.

That was the year Terrytoons released Sappy New Year, their 51st and penultimate Heckle and Jeckle theatrical cartoon. After this film, it wouldn't be until 1966 that Terrytoons would release the final H&J short, Mixed Up Movie Makers. Sappy New Year finds Heckle and Jeckle in sorry shape when considered against their earlier films. The animation has grown far more static, to the point where there is little difference between their antics in this film and that of the limited style of animation being produced for television in the same period. So, too, has their humor grown stale, and that is a massive difference lies from that which came before from this pair.

After a jazzy music intro and shots of a clock tower that has reached midnight, with streamers and confetti showering down upon a completely static shot of crowds in the street below, we cut Heckle and Jeckle in their apartment. Heckle is busying himself with dumping out a box full of fireworks, TNT, and bombs into a barrel in the alley outside their window. "Well. there goes the last of our practical jokes, chum!" says the Bronx-voiced Heckle. "Are you sure we're doin' the right thing?" Jeckle sits writing at a desk, and in his affected British tone answers, "A resolution is a resolution, ol' feather-head! Listen to this..." He holds up the note he has been writing and reads, "We hereby resolve that as of this moment, throughout the new year, we shall abstain from all forms of practical jokes, gags, et-cet-era!"

As Jeckle implores his chum to sign the piece of paper with his name, Heckle has imbedded a pencil inside a piece of dynamite. He lights the fuse and hands it to Jeckle, saying in mock politeness, "After you." While signing, Jeckle realizes what is up and claps his hand (wing) over the fuse to put it out. He throws it back to Heckle and tells him to throw it away. Heckle tries to light it again, but Jeckle jumps down and blows it out. Heckle protest, but the other bird reminds him of their resolution. (I will point out that Heckle has yet to sign the paper, something which gets forgotten in the film totally.) Heckle decides to keep the dyna-pencil as a souvenir and stuffs it under his feathers, which he pulls out like a shirt. Jeckle goes to bed and says, "Goodnight, ol' feather-beak!"

The next day, the birds are roaming the street, and Jeckle is rambling on about the day being brighter because they have turned over a new leaf. While he expresses his desire that they act as model citizens, Heckle is already up to his old tricks, having stuffed a piece of dynamite in the back pocket of an unsuspecting man on the street. Jeckle again blows out the fuse, and they leave it in his pocket as they wander off, with Heckle begging for Jeckle to give him more time to adjust.

Jeckle spies an old bird-man standing by a bus stop and decides to seize an opportunity to commit a good deed. Thinking the man wants to cross the street, with the man recognizing them on sight and telling them to put him down, the pair pick the bird-man up over their heads and dodge through traffic. Once on the other side, the old bird-man yells at them and tells them he was just waiting for a bus, so they pick him up again and throw him through the back window of a bus. "Another one of your practical jokes!" he screams. "You put me on the wrong bus!" He whacks both of them on their noggins several times before the bus takes off for parts unknown, leaving the magpies in a cloud of exhaust. Heckle pulls out more dynamite to throw at the bus, but Jeckle intercepts it and tells him, "People need a little time to get used to the new us!"

A lady poodle seems to be having trouble starting the engine of her car, so the pair offer to give her a push. Suddenly, her car goes in reverse and flattens the birds. Then it jolts forward and runs them over again. Her car flies towards a roundabout where several other cars are parked, and from above, we see her car hit another car, which then hits another car, and so on through the cars like dominoes until the last one gets knocked back in the direction of Heckle and Jeckle, who get run over once again.

A police dog sees the two lying in the street all rumpled and disoriented, but only warns Heckle and Jeckle against trying any of "their tricks" on his beat. After he leaves, they are nearly run into by a normal kitten being chased by a normal barking dog (on all fours and with a collar, unlike the police dog). The dog chases the kitten up a tree, and the magpies rush to shoo the dog away. The dog growls at the birds, and then he chases them around and around the tree in a cloud of dust. When it clears, the birds are beat up and piled on top of each other. The dog departs, so they decide that they have done a good deed by saving the kitten. Climbing up the tree to rescue the poor little thing, it goes crazy and claws both of them up in yet another cloud of dust.

Heckle gives up and decides to go to "my old poi-sonality," but Jeckle blows out yet again the obligatory stick of recently lit TNT and tells his partner that they need to convince everyone that they have really changed for good. Heckle starts to smell smoke in the air, and the camera cuts to a house where there is indeed something wafting out of a window. We then see a very bored horse standing on a ladder who is lazily painting a house green. The ladder moves the horse past the building where he is working and through a section of open blue sky, without the horse noticing at all. But finally, he notices that he is moving, and starts yelling down at Heckle and Jeckle, who are running with the ladder to the supposed fire, to put him down.

He yells for help, which draws the attention of a bear to the window, who is smoking a pipe, which was the cause of the entire incident. When the ladder slams to a halt underneath the open window, the horse accidentally paints a green streak across the face of the very surprised bear. The bear dumps the can of paint on the horse's head, who slides down the ladder and lands on Heckle and Jeckle, who become trapped in his pants. The horse runs blindly into a telephone pole, allowing himself to slip out of the paint can. He runs to Heckle and Jeckle, who are brushing themselves off, and slams the can down over the entire body of Heckle. "You boys don't know when to stop with the gags!" he yells and stomps off. (I was, at that point, still waiting for the actual gags to begin, by the way.)

Heckle has had quite enough, and he lights another fuse to return to his old ways. Jeckle pleads for him to give it one more try, and throws the tempting stick of dynamite behind him. However, it lands near the barrel of other fireworks and bombs he had thrown out, and it hits a lit cigarette on the ground. Chaos erupts, with explosive devices shooting off in all directions. The barrel falls onto its side, and rolls down the street, causing all manner of destruction on both sides. It eventually ends up at the pier and falls into the water. There is a brief wait as the camera rests on the pier with a large ship offshore in the background. There is then a huge explosion, whereupon the ship breaks into two and sinks. The angered citizens of the town form a mob and try to chase down Heckle and Jeckle, heaving bricks and sticks and pipes in their direction as the birds make a break for it. "Oh, well," sighs Jeckle, "It was a good try, wasn't it?" The end.

As I mentioned, the animation here is a couple of notches what came before for the famous birds, and if I had to make a comparison, the short feels like it wouldn't be out of place being matched up against an episode of Tennessee Tuxedo or Underdog. Not that those television productions didn't have their charms, but it is still a far cry from animation's theatrical heyday. And the humor here is non-existent, with the barest sketch of an idea stretched out illogically from the start. We know from past films that the pair's idea of practical jokes extends far more imaginatively beyond simple explosives, so it is sad that their range has been diminished down to that of just mad bombers. (The subject matter also probably means this film will never get shown without massive cuts on any children's programming into the future, owing to the sensitive nature of everyone on the planet these days.)

Making a resolution most definitely did not work out for Heckle and Jeckle. Like most people who arbitrarily decide to do something to better their lives just because it happens to be a certain time of year, they failed at their attempt. (And I will point out yet again that Heckle never actually signs the resolution, so he really didn't fail at all, because he remained true to himself, however stupid that naturally destructive behavior happens to be.)

Thus, there will not be any announcements of a new resolution on my behalf for 2016. This is because there is no resolution left to make, for you see, I already committed to an unspoken one almost four months ago. I come into the new year already resolute in my need to use writing as the platform to my very sanity, and hopefully, to lead me to happiness once again. Whether I can springboard this commitment into gaining new employment remains to be seen, but it is better than surrendering to misery and a sour outlook for the future.

And if it doesn't lead me to happiness, then I still have writing to log every horrid detail of my descent into a soul-sucking hell of my own making. We all know what fun that can be. That's how we got some of the classics.

Sappy New Year, everybody!

RTJ

****

And in case you haven't seen it -- well, you really don't need to, but here goes:

Movie Madness (1952)

Movie Madness (20th Century Fox/Terrytoons, 1952)
Dir.: Connie Rasinski
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Movie madness? Yeah, I've got it. Had it for quite some time, in fact, and I would bet that nearly anyone that has happened upon these words on this page is likely to have movie madness as well. If you care enough about the movies to the point where you are looking up random titles and clicking on links to rather obscure films and cartoons, you must have some form of movie madness equal to mine. Welcome to the club, pals and gals!

Heckle and Jeckle? They don't just have movie madness. They are pretty much generally insane, or at least their behavior would tend to lead one to believe such is the case. You could look at any one of their films and simply add the word "madness" to any title and no one would blink. They could just have titled Heckle and Jeckle films, one after the other without any real thought behind it, "Golf Madness," "Thinking Madness," "Ocean Madness," "Hula Madness," Dancing Madness," "Fox Hunting Madness" (just in amending one slice of films from their catalog), and everyone would have just thought, "There's those crazy talking magpies that actually look like crows. Boy, are they mad!" When lunatic behavior is your stock in trade, who is going to question your methods?

Movie Madness, released pretty much in the middle of Heckle and Jeckle's theatrical career in 1952, the 34th of their 52-film output, and is fairly representative of their work. The boys (the birds, that is) find themselves right away, without any other buildup, outside the gates of Wacky Studios. Jeckle says to Heckle in his affected British accent, "I say, old bean. A cin-em-ah studio!" Heckle is equally excited by this prospect, adding, "That's where we belong. We're a couple of hams at heart!" They link arms and walk right through the gates.They are caught immediately (and offscreen) by a studio watchdog, in security uniform though he is a dog, who tells the pair to "Get out and stay out" and thrusts them by the scruff of their necks into the camera. We see them lying all disheveled on the sidewalk, and the we see the watchdog attempting to settle himself down in his chair to relax. However, the frantic honking of a car horn sends him scurrying to his feet and looking to see who it is.

A fancy red sports car chugs into view, with one of the magpies behind the wheel dressed as a chauffeur, and the other sitting in the back of the convertible in the disguise of a big deal movie director, complete with monocle and cigarette holder. The watchdog holds the door for the bird, who steps out, slowly pulls one glove off his own hand, and then tips the ashes from his cigarette into the watchdog's open hand. Thinking it is a tip without looking, the watchdog replies, "Thank you, sir!" The bird wanders off, and the watchdog looks down at the ashes, and realizes quickly he has been had. The watchdog leans against the sports car, but all he does is cause it to fall over, revealing itself to be nothing but a plywood facade of a car.

As the fake chauffeur catches up to the fake director, they spot the watchdog running after them, and they shoot so fast from the frame that their disguises are left in their wake. They run into a building marked "Wardrobe Dep't." and the watchdog follows suit. As a matter of fact, he runs right up to a suit -- a suit of armor. Wonder who is in it? As he turns away from the suit, the arm rattles and he turns back swiftly. Then the visor opens up and a black hand sticks a seltzer bottle out of the helmet and sprays the watchdog fully in the face with carbonated water. The suit of armor starts to run away, and the watchdog grabs a prop sword and takes several swipes at the suit. The torso section keeps leaping up at the right instant while the legs continue to keep pace below. Finally, the halves (each containing a different bird) separate and run into different folds in a five-part changing screen. In various combinations, the magpies and the watchdog run in different directions using the folds and sides of the screen as hiding places. At one point, the watchdog runs across the front of the screen with the magpies behind him, with one of them waving a handkerchief at the audience.

Finally, the watchdog comes around the side of the screen with a shotgun, and he seems to have Heckle and Jeckle trapped for sure. He sticks the barrel tight up against their beaks and tells the pair to "put 'em up!" Out of nowhere, Heckle spins his hand and is suddenly holding a very large pistol with a cork plugged into its barrel. "You put 'em up, pal!" he growls back in his Brooklyn accent. This action causes the barrel of the watchdog's shotgun to grow a pair of eyes and then faint dead away after screaming out loud! As the watchdog stares down at the limp end of his shotgun, Heckle pulls the trigger and shoots the cork right into the watchdog's eyes.

On the run again, the magpies duck into a soundstage where Romeo and Juliet is being filmed. The watchdog hesitates to enter, but then he hears Heckle's voice mangle some Shakespeare. "But soft," the bird entreats, "what light from yonder win-der breaks?" Going onto the soundstage, he sees Heckle standing on the stage in Romeo's garb, and up on a balcony stands Jeckle, dressed up as Juliet. The watchdog wanders on to the balcony as Jeckle/Juliet continues her lines. As he acts, Jeckle tickles the watchdog's chin and he gets very shy and embarrassed. However, as the scene continues, he ends up standing on Jeckle's dress. When a safety pin becomes undone, the dress is pulled off of Jeckle's without his knowledge. The watchdog saunters up calmly, the dress behind his back, to corner his prey. At the last second, Jeckle sees the fabric hanging down behind the watchdog, grabs the dress, pulls it over his enemy's head, and zooms off the balcony.

Jeckle climbs high up a ladder into the rafters of the soundstage, and walks stealthily across two wires high in the air. The watchdog follows, but when he gets to the end of the wires, it turns out they are electrical... and Jeckle is about to pull the switch. When the bird does, the electricity chases the watchdog back across the wires, where he jumps out of harm's reach onto a hanging sandbag. However, Heckle is sitting in the window of a castle facade and reaches out with a pair of scissors. He cuts the sandbag free, and the watchdog and the sandbag crash into a dressed living room set below. When the sandbag hits the rug on the floor, the hole it creates pulls all of the furnishings in the living room into the hole right after the watchdog, crashing on top of him and clearing the entire set. The watchdog crawls out of the hole with a lampshade on his head and a lightbulb glowing intermittently in his mouth.

The birds wander into another set titled "Arctic Adventures." When the watchdog goes in, he sees a line of penguins waddling across the wintry landscape of the set. The last two penguins, even with their best efforts at aping the flightless birds, look very much like Heckle and Jeckle. The watchdog is not fooled and walks right up and grabs the birds by their throats. "I say, old boy!" says Jeckle, "I believe we are caught!" "You can't throw us out!" protests Heckle. "We've got talent! Why, look --!!" They both tear themselves out of the watchdog's grip, and he is left holding what amounts to a pair of white paper dickies.

At a piano, with his back to the camera, one of the birds starts rearranging his face until he turns out and looks like Jimmy Durante. He wanders forward shouting, "Start the music! We're puttin' on an act! And who strolls across the planetarium but..." The camera pans left and the other bird struts across the stage, smoking a cigar and imitating Groucho Marx. "Well, that boy will certainly go a long way..." he says, "...and the farther he goes, the better I like it!" The camera zooms in for an extreme, eyebrow-wriggling closeup of the fake Groucho. "They say he's got talent, but how does talent feel about this?"

The watchdog seems to be enjoying the show, but then he is confronted by one of the birds putting on a tough-guy act (it could be generically either Cagney, Robinson, or Raft, but no one definite), chewing on a cigar out of one side of his beak while holding a revolver on the watchdog. "I don't have to take it anymore, see! You're through, finished, washed up... so there!" he says variously, and distracts the watchdog as the bird makes him walk backwards. The watchdog doesn't realize that he is walking onto a pair of skis, and the other bird pulls him until he is falling backwards down a long snowy hill on the arctic set.

Our hapless studio guard skis completely backwards down the hill, overcoming several obstacles such as a split in the set, while the magpies sit in a camera chair high above and mockingly direct his actions, telling him to "get more personality." The action ends when the skis hit the wood of a stage and the watchdog ends up face-first on the floor. Dazed, he barely has the presence of mind to escape when Jeckle holds a clapper reading "Scene 3 Take 2" under his chin and with the cry of "Cut!" from Heckle, tries to clap it down on the watchdog's neck.

The birds run away again, and straight into a dressing room. When the watchdog opens the door, one of the birds is wearing a wig and a girdle, and screams at the dog. He slams the door shut, gets red in the face, and says, "Pardon me!" Then one of the birds opens the door and slams the watchdog into the wall next to it, until he has been pancaked flat. Then the other bird comes through the wall, using the watchdog as a door. 

They run to an exit, and close a gate behind them. Jeckle mocks the watchdog by saying, "Toodle-oo, old bean! We enjoyed our visit!" Heckle adds, "You must come and see us sometime!" But the last laugh is on the birds, because the room they have run into is actually the back of a Police Patrol vehicle. The watchdog laughs loud and says, "With pleasure! With pleasure!" The birds hold the bars of the cage and look at each other as the police wheel them off to jail. Fade out.

For me, Heckle and Jeckle represent the same style of humor that has always attracted me to cartoons. I have always been drawn to the most anarchic elements in humor -- the Marx Brothers are the gold standard for me, and from my love for their early comedies (especially Groucho) sprang my deepened interest in Bugs Bunny, who in most cases had full control of any situation, and went with any means necessary to drive his foe or foes crazy by the end of a cartoon. Heckle and Jeckle are right there, though they have never seemed as cool as Bugs was.

Regardless of the cool factor, in Movie Madness, it is fun to watch the nutty birds simply march into a "cin-e-ma studio" and just take it over completely. Sure, there are repercussions, as there often are by the end of their cartoons, though I am sure that by the time the Police Patrol car arrives at the jail, Heckle and Jeckle would have either escaped readily (as only they can) or would have used the opportunity to simply start another wacky adventure where they run amok in a prison. (I can't even begin to imagine what they would employ for a shiv.) The gags run fast, and if it is not one of their best shorts, it is at least what you expect when you happen upon a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon. 

It is the watching of their cartoons where the problem lies, for both me and the civilized world in general. I have, when compared to other cartoon characters from the major studios, had relatively little exposure to the Terrytoons characters, including Heckle and Jeckle (not counting the bad original cartoons that they made in the '70s where the birds were cleaned up for toddlers). The talking magpies got a pretty good head start in my memories. I fondly recall an afternoon or three or two dozen in my youth after I discovered that there were such things as UHF channels in Anchorage, Alaska in the '70s, and spent some free hours discovering Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, Gandy Goose, and Sourpuss cartoons. The problem was that I saw some cartoons at that tender age that I have never seen again.

This is because there has been a scarcity of old Terrytoons shorts on DVD (or VHS, too, for that matter). The copyrights to most of this material are apparently owned now by CBS (once Viacom), and while the occasional rumor gets passed around that something might be released, they usually turn out to be just that. Hell, we can't even get a halfway decent Tex Avery set to come out from Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment (who own those copyrights, and they put out everything on the Warner Archives. What chance do you think the release of a box set of Terrytoons will have without some massive public outcry? (that will never come...) 

Which is a shame, because the history of Terrytoons goes all the way back to the silent era in 1917, continues straight through the growth and popularity of cartoons in the sound era, marches right into the early television era wth Tom Terrific, introduces Ralph Bakshi to the world in the 1960s. As I mentioned before, some of their characters were retooled for Saturday morning television in the '70s, and then Bakshi brought Mighty Mouse back in a big way in the late '80s. There is a chance here to add a nice collection for fans of animation with even a partial overview of their output on a Blu-ray or DVD set, that would give a sense of appreciation and history. 

The biggest problem is that the audience for such a release is relatively small in comparison with a normal video release, making the cost of remastering these older cartoons a less attractive option to the rights holders. I always ask if holding the rights to something is worthwhile if you just let your supposedly prized material sit and moulder for decade after decade. And my second ongoing question is always: in this age when you can stream just about any form of entertainment online, why not just make these old cartoons available, scratched up as they might be, for the audience that wants to see them without putting out a DVD set? Then you can see the size of your audience based on their views, and determine if it might be worthwhile to take the extra step in cleaning up the shorts and releasing them in a wider way. And the longer you wait, as your fanbase gets increasingly older, the less of an audience there will be that remembers the likes of Farmer Al Falfa, Gandy Goose, Dinky Duck, and Sourpuss.

At this late date in the game, we are talking about a niche audience, and it's a niche that won't be scratched any time soon. Talk about being driven crazy with "movie madness". I might be up all night with this...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it (and you want to see a really downgraded copy, the same way that I had to...)