Word: cartoons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...format betrays the fact that it started out to be something else: a musical intended as a TV special. When the producers switched to animated film, they made the dubious decision to use the conventions of Broadway staging. Hence solo turns and production numbers are dutifully reproduced cartoon-style. The songs by Joe Raposo, composer of TV's Sesame Street, are deft, pleasant and numerous (16 in all). Songs may be the heart of a musical; but when they start and stop this often, the show goes into what might be called suspended animation...
...even the featherweight conventions of family entertainment allow for more than the cartoon characterizations and obvious knockabout farce of Mr. Billion. Hill, the Italian-born European star who is making his U.S. film debut, is sometimes wistfully appealing as he tries to live a western-movie vision of America. His best moment occurs when he acts out a favorite fantasy by clobbering Slim Pickens in a Texas barroom brawl. But when he turns up in the old fight-to-the-death on the edge of a cliff (this time in the Grand Canyon), with Perrine lashed prettily to a nearby...
...give you an idea: a short called "Ass," by Tom DeMore, is built on the idea of a stag movie for donkeys, replete with all but completely graphic bestiality. A cartoon short called "Desire Pie," meanwhile, filmed by a group from the Carpenter Center, looks like an animated version of the amateurish depictions of coitus in bathroom stalls around campus (with a few touches reminiscent of The Yellow Submarine thrown in--for artistic merit...
...Wall advertises these shorts as non-sexist. Don't believe it. One of the funniest, "The Club," is a cartoon based on the idea of a very British eating club for phalluses; the viewer is led in through the door, and there are the penises, reading the Sunday papers, smoking pipes, doing vigorous push-ups in the adjacent gym. Another, "The Bed," by James Broughton, explores some of the possibilities of interaction with that piece of furniture, some unusual (doing a ritual dance around it), but others stereotypical and crude...
...Lampoon is surely not high on my reading list but they should be free to shape their own humor without apology to anybody. And anyway the militants among black students ought to take the massive problems of blacks more seriously than to waste sweat and energy over a silly cartoon of black boy shining John Harvard's shoes. I am surprised that their leader, Tony Chase, has lost perspective in these matters...