Quasi at the Quackadero

Just watched this Sally Cruikshank animated short on YouTube. Recently awarded the United States National Film Registry list by the Library of Congress, this film has the title character of Quasi invited to go the the Quackadero by his girlfriend along with a little buddy. Lots of weird and wonderful things happen when they go to this place and they're not very easy to describe though if you're a fan of many '30s animation that came from the Max Fleischer studios, you may have a really tripping good time watching this, at least I did. The music also seems to be from the period I just mentioned and, well, just watch the thing if you're in the mood. Okay, so once again this thing is on YouTube...

First of all, the music in Quasi was by Al Dodge and Robert Armstrong, who have no connection to Oingo Boingo. However, Danny Elfman did do the soundtrack to Sally's film "Face Like A Frog", which included the Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo song "Don't Go In The Basement" (Actually, even here there's confusion...not sure if it's an old MKotOB song, or a new Elfman song, but it's credited simply to "Mystic Knights") Second, there is no "Ego Trip" scene in this, though it does sound like something that WOULD be in it. This may be from another of Sally's films...I have not seen them all.

Whoever said that the "same guy" (Sally's a she!) must have done some Sesame St cartoons is correct...though most of the ones I've been able to find are from the late 80's and aren't familiar to me. I assumed she was responsible for some of the trippy 70's ones.

I first saw Quasi on PBS late one night in the 80's. I was excited to see it pop up on Youtube recently...posted by Sally herself along with some other works. She also sells DVDs of them.

Sally Cruikshank has always been a huge influence on me ever since I was really little watching her work on Sesame Street. This is one of the most unique art pieces I've ever seen, I truly mean that! The fact that this took 2 years to animate and like 4 months to edit is astonishing! Sally animated it all with other people helping with inking it and voicing it. I love everything about this, except for the fact that it's to short. I want more of this world and it's characters and it breaks my heart to know that nobody in the 70s and 80 wanted to pick up "Quasi's cabaret" for a full movie. I would have jumped at the opportunity to produce that. (I'll one day try my best to get that to be).

This must be what tripping balls feels like.

"Quasi at the Quackadero" paints a world of . . . well, it's like "Yellow Submarine" on acid. The colors are vibrant, the character designs are macabre, and it starts to sear into your brain after a while. I'd seen this before (middle of the night, in a theater setting) and I don't think my assessment has improved with being fully alert. And it just seems to go on and on. I'm not really sure it it's arty or some deranged '70s children's show, but I'm not getting the joke.

5/10

Two duck-like entities (Quasi and Anita) and their robot (?) colleague visit the Quackadero, a side-show carnival where attractions include memory projection, mind reading, prognostic mirrors, and one-way windows into the past and future (the latter Anita takes advantage of to deal with the obnoxious Quasi). The imagery and the erratic, surreal, pulsating animation have the look of the era's 'underground comic' movement. The weirdly creepy futuristic Quackadero psycho-temporal amusement-park resembles somewhere that, in another generation of cult cartoons, Rick and Morty would visit. Bizarre but entertaining. One of the few 'post-golden age' (and post Timothy Leary) cartoons represented in the '50 Greatest Cartoons' (at #46).