In the early '30's, Fleischer Studios produced three Betty Boop cartoons featuring songs by the "Hi-de-ho" man, Cab Calloway:: Minnie the Moocher. Snow White, and The Old Man of the Mountain. Minnie the Moocher and the The Old Man of the Mountain are essentially the same movie: both pictures feature Betty Boop accompanied by sidekicks Koko the Clown and Bimbo, a sort of black puppy-like creature. In both movies, there is film footage of Cab Calloway, swaying eerily and dancing as if he has no bones in his body at all. Calloway shuffles about, performing a sort of moonwalk in which he moves without seeming to lift his feet and writhes his hips and shoulders like a snake. All three pictures show ghastly and monstrous apparitions -- eyeless cats, heaps of bones from which globular, mucousy ghosts spurt, strange skeletal duck-billed creatures and the like. Of course, everything transforms into everything else, figures morphing and shifting shape. Betty Boop runs away from her home where she is bullied at the supper table by her fat German emigrant parents -- he father's head turns into a mindlessly ranting gramophone. The real world outside turns out to be worse than her home with its bickering, haranguing parents -- there's a ghostly walrus who sways like an undersea plant (mimicking Calloway's weird swaying in the opening shot -- his image has been rotoscoped) who leads Betty and her friends into a cave filled with monsters. At the end of the cave, there's a horrible banshee who appears in the darkness and flies toward the camera: the banshee's mouth opens to swallow the camera and we see her tonsils animated as small ghostly figures at the back of her throat that also grow mouths and howl at us (and the heroine). Betty flees, diving into her bed at home -- she has left a message about running away from home, now ingeniously torn into a scrap of paper that reads "Home, sweet, home" on the fragment resting on her pillow. The lyrics of the song are bizarre, something about a prostitute or "hootchie cootch" dancer who takes cocaine and "bangs the gong" (apparently, meaning uses heroine), thus motivating the grotesque visions in the banshee's cave. The Old man of the Mountain reiterates this plot -- Betty goes up a winding mountain road with her sidekicks and encounters an old man with a long white beard and long white hair. The old man is lecherous and seems to chase Betty Boop in order to rape her. (Betty is a weird figure in her own right, all curves packed into a tight, short black dress with a kewpie face, big eyes with big eyelashes and shapely gams that come to a heeled needle point. She is sexualized from her spit-curls to the pointed stiletto tips of her shoes. She talks a strange lingo, some kind of "White jazz" punctuated with nonsense syllables: Boop-boop-de-boop. This gibberish aligns with Calloway's spectacularly fast and intricate scat singing in the songs.) Snow White involves the fairy tale story with an ugly stepsister preening herself in a sentient mirror. Koko and Bimbo are told to take Betty out and kill her -- she cries and, while they are sharpening their swords and axes on a whetstone, they are moved by her tears, ignore the task ay hand, and grind their weapons to a dark pulpy substance.. Betty escapes into the grave dug for her which seems to be about a mile deep. She falls through the shaft and ends up fleeing into a cavern labeled "Mystery Cave." Koko and Bimbo follow with the witch also in hot pursuit. In the cave, the characters encounter stalactites and petrified monsters of various sorts, the same creatures recycled from the other two cartoons: in this cartoon, Calloway doesn't appear on film but sings "St. James Infirmary". As far as I can ascertain, the tune of "St. James Infirmary" is the same melody played in Minnie the Moocher and The Old Man of the Mountain: the wailing lyrics with the skat interludes reminds us that White people originally perceived the Blues as a sort of unearthly, eerie howling -- this is very much the premise of these three short animated films. The concept seems to be that there is a brutish world of European (German) emigrants -- their domestic arrangements rest, however, on the backs of an underclass of ghostly spooks symbolizing I suppose some sort of repressed sexual instincts. Sex here equal death -- monster ghost walruses and the amorous apparition of the Old Man of the Mountain with his prehensile orangutan arms. The middle class bourgeois, it seems, are perched atop a teeming and comically grotesque underworld that is black -- the color of night, spooks, and African-American musicians who provide the bourgeois with access to that world. Ascribing meaning to these specimens of what Bob Dylan called "The Old Weird America" is a pointless task -- on their face, the cartoons are meaningless, a jazzy improvised melange of figures fluidly changing into other figures but the themes of these animated films: a white woman, drawn as a baby-whore, slipping off the straight and narrow path and, then, being pursued by various ghouls and monsters, I suppose, means something -- although it's hard to articulate what this is.
In World War Two, a series of cartoons featuring the Sergeant Snafu character (Snafu -- service jargon for "situation normal all fucked-up") were used to train recruits. Snafu is a wretched soldier and makes mistakes that often turn out to be fatal for him. (The character is voiced by Mel Blanc and sounds like Porky Pig). In Booby Traps, Snafu is warned not to fall for the enemies tricks. He narrowly evades various explosive devices, but makes the mistake of wandering into some kind of brothel. Here motionless, naked women beckon. A bomb has been wired to a piano, set to explode if a certain ivory key is tickled. Snafu sits down to play "All those Endearing Young Charms" on the piano but keeps hitting the wrong note and, therefore, avoiding depressing the key that will blow him to pieces. He fondles a curvacous mannequin whose buttocks are black globular bombs. (The figure is literally a bombshell.) The spherical bombs shift over to become her breasts. As he gropes her, Snafu discovers that he is about to be blown sky-high. He escapes and celebrates by playing "All those Endearing Young Charms," this time correctly, resulting in an explosion. The cartoon ends with Snafu sitting on a cloud with a harp on which he plucks out the same melody. In another cartoon, Snafu has failed to properly maintain his carbine and machine gun -- the muzzles of the weapons are filled with black goo. A brutish-looking Kraut crawls up to attack him with a hand grenade (the Hun looks like a Fred Flintstone with a pronounced beard-line). Snafu's weapons misfire. A machine gun on a tripod literally melts like wax when fired because the water-cooled mechanism fails. Snafu is captured and, as the villainous Kraut gloats, we see him cowering and naked in a cage.
Sally Cruikshank was an animator in the seventies and eighties. She made three psychedelic cartoons that are famous among animators: Quasi at the Quackadero, Be a Psychic, and Face like a Frog. As with the trilogy of Cab Calloway cartoons made by Fleischer studios, these short animes are all alike. In each, a trio of figures (like Betty Boop, Koko and Bimbo) venture from their dwelling to some sort of hallucinogenic fairground -- there they are menaced by monsters who seem to be inspired by Brueghel. Quasi is a sort of tuxedoed duck with a flattened head and "face like a frog" -- he has an enormous mouth and little bulging eyes. Anita, the dominant figure in the trio, is tall lanky figure, ostensibly female who speaks with a southern accent, muttering mostly nonsense -- she wears a kind of night gown qua evening dress. The third protagonist is Rollo, a deformed face on a bean-like body who moves around in a wheeled contraption. These cartoons are bright with day-glo Peter Max-style colors; the fairgrounds consists of crowds of worm-like figures and creatures that look like the old Mr. Potato-Head figures, globular heads with monocles and button noses embedded in them. The fair grounds feature strange tents that are shaped like tiaras -- some of the imagery looks like its derived from Saul Steinberg cartoons, calligraphic scrolls that broaden into figures, and caricatured men and women reduced to one or two salient features. In the tents, you can see yourself in "100 years" -- you look into a mirror in which there is an endless line of prancing skeletons; machines spool back and forth in time. Quasi ends up among dinosaurs pursued by ravening, if toy-like, predators. These cartoons also feature jaunty hipster tunes, a little like the music produced by the enigmatic Leon Redbone, a gent with a white panama hat ,sunglasses, thin as a rail, who sand diddy-wah-diddy tunes from the twenties. (His stage persona was that of a Jazz Era pimp.) Face like a Frog has a good song by Oingo Boingo (Danny Elfman's band here called "The Mystic Knights") -- it's "Don't Go Into the Basement", a mock-ghoulish ditty that, of course, accomplishes exactly what it purports to prohibit --Quasi and Anita go into the basement where all sorts of dire things befall them.
You can also see John Fahey playing "In Christ there is no East and West", the screen split to show his fingering on his guitar -- he produces a symphonic sound from the instrument. Sister Rosetta Tharp, drenched in sweat sings "Clean Train" -- it's the train to Salvation on which no gamblers, nor boozers, nor even tobacco chewing, cigar-smoking sinners are allowed. There's a video showing documentary style shots of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, illustrating Charles Ives' spooky and majestic "General William Booth Enters into Heaven", another artifact of the Old Weird America. Shot in extreme close-up, Lightning Hopkins performs a keening Blues song.
And that makes a night of it.
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