Gandy Goose's Sandwich Trauma

Here's a clip from a story Tom Minton wrote for Bakshi's Mighty Mouse. This scene foreshadowed some of what was to come in Ren and Stimpy.It's one of the first domestic squabbles I ever directed. It takes place in Mighty Mouse's apartment (where Robert Mitchum is praying in the hallway). MM has invited homeless Gandy to stay with him until he can find a job and get his own place.

There's one of those beautiful double frames I love on some modern DVDs.

Gandy is doing his best to be a doting companion to Mighty Mouse. Sound familiar?
Mighty comes home through the trap door. A lot of the visual gags like that were added either in the storyboard and some in the layouts. Jim Smith storyboarded this episode and you can see some of his boards in the supplemental side of the DVD.
MM looks around to see what Gandy has done to his apartment.

This was the first cartoon show in decades where the bosses actually encouraged specific expressions that weren't on the model sheets.
I stole those tit eyes from Chuck Jones. Couldn't resist.

When you watch the animation clips you can see that the execution is pretty crude - kinda like the first few Ren and Stimpy episodes. Part of it is because the layout drawings had to be sent overseas to animate and assist. Those 2 steps tend to lose something in translation.
Partly the crudity just came from the fact that we didn't have much experience drawing functional drawings that told a story visually and we were teaching ourselves. A lot of this scene was drawn by Lynne Naylor and I who at least had some practice on the new Jetsons.
Just for context...here's what was going on in the mainstream animation world around us:

Nothing was allowed to be remotely cartoony, let alone expressive

It was an era of pink and purple, and flesh colored eyes and bobbing heads

believe it or not, these 2 frames (above and below) are 2 different shows

There were a hundred shows with the exact same characters in them
Doesn't this look like fun stuff to animate?

Ralph Bakshi rescued the cartoon world from this stuff.

It took me awhile to get rid of the pink and purple color schemes too...one challenge at a time...
Here's a a little butt slapping action.
We had a lot of fun doing the layouts on MM because we did get to create at least some expressive poses.

An early stab at emotional tension

This kind of scene was not actually inspired by other cartoons as much as by my love for classic sitcoms like The Honeymooners and intense melodramatic live action movies from the 30s and 40s. It doesn't totally come off yet, even though we killed ourselves drawing very specific emotional poses. I realized that you needed more than just story and drawings to make emotion totally work in film. I had to squeeze some extra angst out of the voice actors who were not all used to doing anything but the driest formulaic 80s style Saturday morning cartoon acting. Luckily they all liked trying this new approach and were good sports about doing extra takes and having me act everything out and grab them and yank them around the recording booth to try to get them in the mood.
Here's an idea I'm pretty sure we added in the layout stage. I thought it would be funny to have MM try to restrain himself from beating his companion by rolling the sandwich back and forth on the table, while speaking patiently to him through gritted teeth. This is the kind of thing that would normally prompt executives to say "I didn't see that in the script." But Ralph somehow kept us from ever hearing that.
The other thing the scene needed beside stronger animation and execution was appropriately emotional music. Music that matches the mood of the scene. I didn't get to try anything like that till Ren and Stimpy. The music scores on Mighty Mouse were scored with a lot of purposely off-key parts, I guess to be wacky because everything in a cartoon is supposed to be wacky and grating. It irritated the crap out of me, but that wasn't my department.
Believe it or not, though it might seem mild now, drawings like these were completely radical in 1987.

This was totally my fault. I drew the mouth charts for MM, and for the "L" mouth, I drew the tongue sticking way out. The animators used it and never inbetweened into or out of it, so tongues are always popping and vanishing all through the series. Later, on Ren and Stimpy we added many more mouth positions, but after awhile I just drew lots of them right into the layouts because the whole idea of stock drives me nuts.





Here's a slight irony. Ren and Stimpy lettering on the DVD menu.
COMING HOME TO WITLESS BLISS

THE SANDWICH THAT RESTRAINED ITSELF

More Saturday Morning treats:this was what the cartoon world was

the funny thing is that while MM and Ren and Stimpy chased this look away from kids' TV, it soon found a new home in fully animated cartoon features
that's some lively stuff, ain't it?

More Mighty Mouse Articles

DIGTAL CHUMPS REVIEWS BAKSHI MIGHTY MOUSE 87
Wired Put Up The Interview With Pics

BUY IT THROUGH MY CARTOON STORE!

THE WHOLE DIGITAL CHUMPS INTERVIEW

Digital Chumps Interview

INFLUENCES
1. Where did it all begin for John Kricfalusi? What were you influences growing up? Did you know that animation would be your life?

I loved almost all cartoons when I was a little kid: Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Looney Tunes, Disney and early Hanna Barbera cartoons. Cartooning was about all I was ever good at, so yeah, that’s what I knew I was gonna do.

WHAT DID YOU WORK ON BEFORE MIGHTY MOUSE?

2. Looking through your resume of animated shows you were involved with, pre-Ren & Stimpy/Mighty Mouse, what did you have fun working on the most? What shows were you happy to get away from? Also, whom should I blame for The Snorks coming on at 5:30am in the Atlanta market when I was a kid?

Ha ha. I worked on the Snorks but got kicked off for drawing too flat.

Well when I got started in the 1980s, cartoons weren’t very much fun anymore. Either to watch or work on. It was depressing time for cartoonists then. Not many of us were proud of what we were doing – but we had no control over any of it.

FILMATION MIGHTY MOUSE AND TOM AND JERRY REMAKE

Now and then I’d get a job on something that was theoretically cartoony, like remakes of classic cartoons-but they always took out whatever made the original cartoons fun in the first place. I worked on Filmation’s remakes of Tom and Jerry and Mighty Mouse.



I had some fun doing layouts for Tom and Jerry, and I would try to be creative despite the boring scripts and the rules against slapstick, but when the final shows were finished I could barely see my input.

I realized that the whole system was just geared to ensure that nobody’s individual contributions ever made it to the screen. Each department would take out anything interesting that the previous department might have drawn. That was their duty.

The action packed, expressive style of Filmation

JETSONS REMAKE

I had more fun on the remake of The Jetsons because Bill and Joe gave me more control over the look of it – at least my episodes. But the stories were still formulaic and not very funny.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/11/jetsons-1984-george-ghoul-and-trends.html

MIGHTY MOUSE CHANGES THE CARTOON PRODUCTION SYSTEM - RETURN TO TERMITE TERRACE

If I was ever gonna really be proud of any cartoons I worked on, I’d have to change the whole way cartoons were being made. The 80s cartoon production system was a big factory assembly line with no one person in charge of any cartoon.

All the best cartoons were made in the 1930s to the 1950s using a director-headed “unit system” and I wanted to bring that back if I ever got my chance.

They also used to write the stories on storyboards, not scripts. Artists wrote the stories and they used full advantage of the cartoon medium. They weren’t trying to imitate live action. Cartoons used to be magic. That was completely gone in the 1980s. Stories were written on scripts by people who couldn’t draw. Not only were they boring and didn’t take advantage of the medium, but they were full of technical problems, just because the writers hadn’t ever actually made any cartoons and were just guessing about what could be done. This was a horrific problem. Cartoonists had had our medium stolen from us by amateurs and people who just didn’t care.

MODERN CARTOON WRITERS THINK THAT A GOOD CARTOON IS THE ONE WITH THE BIGGEST CROWD SCENES

CARTOONS SHOULD BE WRITTEN BY CARTOONISTS

GOALS OF BAKSHI MIGHTY MOUSE? - TO PUT CARTOONS BACK IN CARTOONISTS' HANDS

3. In the late 80s you were reunited with Ralph Bakshi for Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. How did you approach the series and what did you expect out of it?

Ralph and I both wanted the same thing. We wanted cartoons to be cartoons again. The only way that was going to happen was to give control back to the cartoonists. So I set up a unit system, much like how they made cartoons in the 30s and 40s and put directors at the head of each unit. Me, Kent Butterworth, Eddie Fitzgerald, Steve Gordon and Bruce Woodside. The directors would follow a cartoon through from start to finish, supervising every aspect, including directing the voices, the storyboard artists, the designers, color and backgrounds. In the other studios, all these supervisory jobs were split up among different department heads who didn’t collaborate with each other on the stories and production. We changed all that.

All (well most)of our stories were written by cartoonists, mainly Tom Minton, Jim Reardon, Eddie Fitzgerald and myself. We wanted to write them the old way, directly on storyboards, but that was too radical for CBS. It was still a huge leap forward just to have stories written again by actual cartoonists.

Storyboard artists like Jim Smith added a lot of gags and visual ideas in the boards. Ji also did many great layouts and designs.

RALPH AND JOHN'S ROLES

4. How was it working with Ralph Bakshi again and what were your respective roles in the production?

Ralph was the Producer, I was the supervising director. I handled the studio setup, most of the hiring and oversaw all the creative aspects of the show. I also directed 8 of the episodes myself. Ralph was involved in the stories and main creative elements of the show. He added gags, characters and story ideas all the time. He also kept the network people off our backs. I never saw any network notes. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to keep people from interfering with this grand experiment that broke all the rules about how to tell stories, what cartoons were supposed to look like and how technically, cartoons were made.

One very big change to the production system was the way we used the layout department. First of all, by 1987 most studios in LA didn’t even do layouts anymore. They didn’t think this was a creative department so shipped all the work to Asian studios, just as they did with the animation itself.

USING LAYOUTS AS A KEY CREATIVE STEP

I knew we weren’t going to be able to afford animating in LA because of the low TV budgets, but I did create a lot of jobs for star cartoonists to do layouts. The layouts were where we drew all the acting and posing. MM had way more drawings in it than other cartoons at the time. And each drawing was a custom-designed pose and expression that only worked for the particular instant happening at any given moment in the cartoon. This was totally radical. Ever other cartoon used “model-sheets” to control the look of their characters. They would design 3 or 4 poses of a character so you could see what it looked like from all sides and then every animator and artists had to draw the characters “on-model”. Exactly the same every time. This made the cartoons look like mannequins were sliding along the screen. Mighty Mouse brought cartoon characters back to life. Without the layout department, this would not have been possible, no matter how funny the scripts might be. I also encouraged each artist to draw the characters in their own styles – which was outlawed at every other studio.

To me, the performers in the cartoons, were not the characters themselves, but the layout artists: Jim Smith, Lynne Naylor, Ken Boyer, Istvan Majoros, Jim Gomez, Bruce Timm, Mike Kazaleh and more. These are the people who draw the acting and excitement, bringing the characters to life.

I have to tell you I had been pitching this way of producing cartoons for years before Mighty Mouse and everyone thought I was crazy. To Ralph, who had made many personal cartoons himself and who got his start in the old system – on the original Mighty Mouse, it was just a common sense way to make cartoons.

MM WAS REHEARSAL FOR REN AND STIMPY
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Ren%20and%20Stimpy

This was the precursor to Ren and Stimpy. Everything we tried on Mighty Mouse, I refined for Ren and Stimpy – and kept refining it. This way of making cartoons came to be known as “creator-driven” in the 1990s, but since then the system has devolved back into a similar assembly line production approach like the 1980s.

HIGH AND LOW POINTS

5. What were the high points of the Mighty Mouse series for you? The low points?

The high points happened every day. Working with top cartoonists and knowing that their work was actually going to end up on screen was the biggest thrill. I loved being involved in creating new characters and writing the stories with the other writers. I Iiked working with color and trying to use new color combinations with Libby Simon and Vicki Jensen. I directed the voice actors for the first time, and that was frightening at first, but I learned how important this step is to the entertainment value.

Eating breakfast at 7 in the morning and then supper at 12 midnite every day with Ralph at Twains was a high point.

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES AND EVOLVING

Being able to add gags and creative ideas in every department along the production was great.
Low points? Well, it was very hard. We all worked long hours and didn’t sleep a whole lot. The lowest point came when the first cartoon came back from Taiwan and we watched it on the moviola. It (Me-Yoww) was basically a generic Looney Tunes type story, but without the great execution of Bob Clampett or Chuck Jones; it just played like a bad imitation – a fake cartoon. Luckily the stories we did after Me-yoww first one were much more personal and I started getting more confident as a director and trying to do my own thing, rather than imitating my heroes.

FAVORITE EPISODES

Some of the stories were just too chaotic and had no plot and little characterization. The most exciting times for me was when I would see cartoons come in that actually played like I imagined them in my head and that had emotional scenes and rich personality.

I was very happy about Night Of The BatBat, Mighty’s Benefit Plan, Night On Bald Pate, The Ice Goose Cometh and the Littlest Tramp because they weren’t random chaos or just gags for gag sake. You could actually follow them and were pulled along with the characters and their plights. They had truly intense moments. That was a real insight for me. When I saw which cartoons were really working and which ones just seemed to be abstract weirdness I was able to analyze the difference and gradually improve.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/littlest-tramp.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/10/mightys-benefit-plan-1.html

That was another high point: seeing cartoons evolve again. We tried all kind of ideas and approaches and you could see the cartoons changing, literally from week to week, just like they did back in the early days of animation. That was tremendously exciting.

FCC BRINGS DOWN NETWORK SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS AND PASSES CARTOON POWER ON TO CABLE

6. In 1990 the FCC instituted the Children’s Television Act, which basically required cartoons to have some educational/informational value to them, would Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures have been the same if it had rolled over into that time period? What did this act mean to you, personally, in regards to creativity in the animation field?

It meant Saturday Morning Cartoons were doomed, which was good for me because I was doing Ren and Stimpy for Nickelodeon. My cartoons are educational anyway, maybe not for the audience, but for all the people making the cartoons, and for the executives too.
(The FCC should put homework in your ice cream while they are at it.)

WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO RELEASE THESE CLASSICS?

7. What do you think of the new/upcoming (depending on time) of the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures on DVD?

I’m glad it’s finally happening. I’ve been pushing for it for 20 years now. Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse was a major turning point in modern cartoon history and started the whole ball rolling again. It was before Mighty Mouse, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, Sponge Bob and tons of other cartoons that benefitted from the pioneering work on the series.


WHAT NOW?
8. Finally, what’s up next for you?
I’m developing some cartoons with a couple networks. Here’s a link to some storyboards:

http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/

I’m also working on a coffee table book called “The Art Of John K. and Spumco”. It has a nice fat chapter on Mighty Mouse.
I also have a college blog where I share all the secrets of how to make cartoons:



http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/


Thanks very much for your time. Hope the holidays are treating you well.

-Nathan Stevens


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