Comic Art &repeated posts 14 Jun 2008 08:25 am
RecapSat: The Toonerville Trolley
_____This is a recap of a post I did in June 2006 though I added more strips
_______________to the end of the piece.
- I’ve been a big fan of the “Toonerville Folks” for a long time. I didn’t find the strip for a while. When I was young, a local TV channel, an ABC subsidiary, ran a lot of old silent Aesop’s Fables. They had classical music backing them up; usually Bizet filled the bill.
One year they upgraded by throwing a number of the Van Buren shorts in betwen the Terry silent films.
These Van Buren films, many of them directed by Burt Gillette or Tom Palmer, were odd. There were a number of films with Greek gods as their stars. Then came the shorts with Molly Moo Cow and those with the Toonerville Trolley characters.
I liked these and learned from the credits that they were adapted from a comic strip by Fontaine Fox. So, I sought out the comic. Of course, in those days, prior to computers, all you had was the library to research things. My local branch had only one or two examples of the comic strip which ran from 1915 through 1955.
The animated shorts were made in the mid-thirties when Van Buren tried a run to improve their films. Neither sound and color nor the acquisition of the rights to this strip didn’t help; even the “terrible tempered Mr. Bang couldn’t help.” The studio closed before the decade had ended.
In 1978 I worked with R.O. Blechman as his Assistant Director to put together the PBS show, Simple Gifts. This was a packaged of six segments adapted around Christmas with a number of different illustrators designing the segments. One of them, the one I was most attracted to was The Toonerville Trolley. Blechman bought the rights from King Features (at an enormous price) for a four minute film in the middle of the program. I’d worked hard to get the piece to animate. I even did a one minute sample of the film in my off time at night, and I thought it was pretty good. However, Blechman was afraid of losing me in the operation of his studio. (We were doing more commercials than show, and I hated it.) Bill Littlejohn did a nice job of animating the entire piece which was completely subcontracted out to him. That was probably appropriate since Bill worked at Van Buren when they produced these shorts.
__________(Click any image to enlarge.)
on 15 Jun 2008 at 5:46 pm 1.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Fox was a terrific cartoonist. When I was a kid every amusemnt park had a Toonerville Trolley ride for kids, even though the strip had disappeared from the papers. We kids used to love those rides!
It’s funny that Fox did a whole strip around the idea of taking a ride in a trolley. What imagination and insight on Fox’s part! Written out with words on paper the idea wouldn’t sound very interesting, and yet I’m willing to bet that every reader of the comics’ section never failed to read this strip. Some experiences like horseback riding or trolley riding are primal and immensely satisfying and romantic. It takes a genius to ferret out these big events disguised as small events and glorify them in print.