Funnyworld Revisited
I've begun posting scans of complete pages from Funnyworld. The first such are my reviews of Wizards and Raggedy Ann and Andy from No. 17 (1978) and my essay "Jones: From 'Night Watchman' to 'Phantom Tollbooth'" from No. 13 (1971).
The unique and historic interview with Carl Stalling, Walt Disney's first composer and the composer of the scores for well over half the Warner Bros. cartoons, has been posted at this link. It originally appeared in Funnyworld No. 13 (1971). The Stalling interview is also in print in the
anthology The
Cartoon Music Book, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Yuval
Taylor (a cappella, paper, $18.95).
Two of Dick Huemer's "Huemeresque" columns are now available, one of the great Disney story man Ted Sears, from Funnyworld No. 18 (1978), the other on "The Battle of Washington," Huemer's account of the selling of the idea for The New Spirit to the U.S. government, from Funnyworld No. 22 (1980).
Funnyworld No. 18 (1978) included a major feature on cartoon voices, "The Moving Drawing Speaks," with interviews of a half dozen important voice artists. I've posted three of those interviews, with the Disney voice artists Clarence Nash, Billy Bletcher, and Jim Macdonald.
"The Filming
of Fritz the Cat" from Funnyworld No. 14
(1972) and No. 15 (1973) was the longest and most
thoroughly researched and reported piece I ever published in the
magazine. It's divided here into two parts, five long Web pages,
matching the two parts and five chapters of the printed version.
Click here to go to Chapter
I, "Bucking the Tide," Chapter
II, "Up from Brownsville," Chapter
III, "Crumb, His Cat, and the Dotted Line," Chapter
IV, "Coast to Coast Animation," or Chapter
V, "A Strange Breed of Cat." Or click here to go to
an introductory
page with some thoughts on Ralph Bakshi's strange post-Fritz
career. You can also read what R.
Crumb thought about the first half of the article.
Also still available: an interview
with Bob Clampett, the great director of Warner Bros. cartoons
and creator of TV's Beany and Cecil, from Funnyworld No.
12 (1970). This is a large file that may take more than a minute
to load over the slowest Internet connections. Many visitors may
well prefer to print it before reading it. If that seems like an
inconvenience, my apologies; I'm afraid you're a victim of my prejudice
against stories (like many of those on the Animation
World Network site) that are broken up into small pieces.
Also still available are my first two offerings, both from Funnyworld No. 13 (1971): a 1969 interview
with Chuck Jones, another great director of Warner Bros.
cartoons, and a brief essay
on Robert Crumb by Harvey Pekar, best known now as the creator
of the American Splendor comic books.
Funnyworld began its life as mimeographed contribution to
CAPA-alpha, an amateur press association devoted to the comics.
With the twelfth issue, in 1970, I converted it to a professionally
typeset and printed magazine. It lasted for eleven issues in that
format under my editorship, appearing on average about once a year.
Reading Funnyworld now, I'm gratified by how well many of
the articles and reviews and interviews, by me and by contributors
like John Canemaker, Joe Adamson, Mark Kausler, Milton Gray, and
Bill Blackbeard, have held up over the years. I'm reprinting (somehow
that term doesn't sound quite right when applied to the Web!) some
of those articles and reviews and interviews here.
Other reprints from Funnyworld are available elsewhere,
on the Web and on paper.
John Canemaker's "Elfriede! On the Road with Mrs. Oskar Fischinger,"
from Funnyworld No. 18 (1978), is available on the Web at
www.iotacenter.org/Elfriede/OntheRoad.htm.
Joe Adamson's interview with Dick Huemer, "Working for the
Fleischers," from Funnyworld No. 16 (1975), is available
on the Web at the Huemer family Web site, www.huemer.com,
along with articles by and about Dick Huemer.
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