Word: cartoons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...take political sides but mused, sometimes acerbically, on the passing scene. Using the editorial "we," White once described how this process worked: "We write as we please and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print." He also turned his hand to cartoon captions ("Mother: 'It's broccoli, dear.' Child: 'I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it.' ") and to "Newsbreaks," those column-ending snippets of published gaffes, capped by New Yorker quips. A Pittsburgh paper once garbled as follows: "Gent's laundry taken home. Or serve at parties...
...turned into a barnyard. A stuttering pig, a frazzled black duck, a wily coyote, an amorous skunk, a pussycat with a paunch, a tiny yellow bird and, to be sure, the world's most "wascally wabbit" will invade MOMA for a four-month tribute to the Warner Bros. cartoon shop, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But that's not all, folks. Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester J. Pussycat, Tweety Pie, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Merrie menagerie will be starring in nine sublimely lunatic hourlong cassettes--the Golden Jubilee...
...every Warner's cartoon is so heavy on the cordite and flying feathers. Some go in for the big soulful eyes, pastel prettiness and comforting moral of the traditional Disney cartoon. Feed the Kitty (1952), the acme of Jones' career, is a fable about a bulldog who falls into mad maternal love over a winsome kitten. But even in Warner's usually violent cat-eat-bird, rabbit- humiliate-duck world, character is at the base of the comedy. Each nuance of eyebrow makes Bugs' almost inhuman sangfroid seem more endearing; each microsecond of exasperated deadpan underlines Daffy's status...
...year, MOMA visitors and cassette buyers should understand what Critic Manny Farber realized about the Warner's cartoons in 1943, "That ( the good ones are masterpieces, and the bad ones aren't a total loss." It would be fine if films with such titles as Porky in Wackyland (Clampett), Show Biz Bugs (Freleng), Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (Jones), What's Opera, Doc? (Jones) and Duck Amuck (glorious Jones) were embraced by the canons of academe. But imagining this, one can also hear Daffy grouse, "What a revoltin' development thith ith." Better, perhaps, for the Warner siblings...
Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels...