I’ve watched three of the four discs in the box set Harveytoons, The Complete Series. These 1950-1962 cartoons have proven to be just as perverse, violent and corny as I remember from my childhood.

In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio. I also learned that, despite at least two of the films depicting the studio as situated in sunny Hollywood, it was really one of two animation factories in New York. (The other was the even less-respected Terrytoons.)

When Paramount parceled out its old theatrical shorts to TV distributors, it told those buyers to remove the Paramount name and logo from all distributed prints. Thus, when Harvey Comics bought one of the Paramount cartoon packages (plus the rights to all the starring characters therein), Paramount’s “Noveltoons” jack-in-the-box logo became “Harveytoons.”

These retitled films were first televised Sunday afternoons on ABC in 1959. I first saw them three or four years later, when they were syndicated onto local weekday kids’ shows. (As I recall, they aired locally with Brakeman Bill on KTNT, later KSTW.)

I’m surprised at how many moments from the films have been part of my brain’s hard-wiring, after all these decades:

• Casper drinking lemonade and turning pink.
• Herman the mouse turning Katnip into a Christmas tree, then sticking the cat’s tail in a power outlet to light him up.
• In another film, Herman (disguised as a mouse St. Peter) threatening Katnip with a toss into “the fiery furnace” (really a coal-fired home furnace).
• Baby Huey mistaking lab chemicals for “sody pop” and burping fireballs.
• A one-shot musical set in a “candy town” nightclub, with a gun-toting sourball cutting in on a dancing lollypop: “All right Lolly, drop that gum!”
• The “Crazytown Manufacturing Co.” factory, where an entire log is mechanically whittled away to create a single toothpick.

Some aspects of the films which I hadn’t remembered:

• The drawing, animation, backgrounds, and music are all of a much higher quality than I realized as a kid–at least in the package’s earlier films. Starting with the shorts bearing 1956 copyright dates, the budgets started going down. Full character movement gave way to simpler “cycle” animation.
• And Casper, the dominant character in the Harvey package (Popeye was Famous Studios’ biggest star, but those films were sold to a different syndicator) seemed overly infantile to me when I was six, but it resonates more strongly now.

Casper, as first created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1945, was a cloying object lesson in “fair play, overcoming peer pressure and being accepted for who you are (not by how you appear),” to quote a reviewer at imdb.com. As the Famous crew over the years turned the premise into a repetitive gag formula, its life lessons seemed a bit shallow–particularly when juxtaposed against the brutal hijinx of Herman and Katnip.

But in today’s sociocultural context, it makes more sense.

Casper is a sensitive, intellectual (the films often open on him reading a hardcover book), optimistic kid, who wants to spread amity, love, and cooperation in the world–in short, a progressive Democrat.

The other ghosts (later standardized in the comic books as the Ghostly Trio) are snotty schoolyard bullies who thrive on propagating fear, misunderstanding, and discord–in short, conservative Republicans.

Most of the “living” humans and animals in the Casper films have been indoctrinated by anti-ghost propaganda into fleeing at first sight of Casper, even though Casper has only the best of intentions. Heck, the other ghosts are never seen performing anything more harmful than frat-boy pranks.

But those pranks are what the other ghosts “live” for. The other ghosts not only want Casper to be perceived as scary, they want Casper to become scary. By refusing the ghost agenda, Casper is a rebel against, and a threat to, the dominant (ghost) culture.

Ironically, Casper usually gets out of trouble when the predators threatening his new-found friends see Casper and flee in fright. Casper’s curse is also one of his gifts.

But Casper’s bigger gift is perseverance. One new friend at a time, he effectively spreads his message of togetherness. For a non-corporeal being who’d apparently “died” at a presexual age (an aspect of his story that wasn’t discussed until the 1995 feature film), he’s got a lot of interest in helping corporeal humans live better lives together.

I could think of worse role models.

…with probably the best Christmas cartoon from the Golden Age of the movies, Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth. (This is the one where the last battle that destroys the human race is the war between the vegetarians and the meat eaters.)

I met the legendary cartoon producer-mogul circa 1993, at a gallery opening during the height of the collectible-animation-cel craze. He could recite every Tom and Jerry short scene-for-scene, but had trouble remembering the titles of some of the TV series that had come out under his name. (Hey, I’d have forgotten any past involvement with Inch High, Private Eye and The Funky Phantom, let alone Scrappy-Doo.) He also sighed about how he and everyone he knew wanted to get out of L.A., and mentioned the possibility of retiring to the Northwest. He did nothing of the sort, of course; until almost the end, he was still pitching projects and working as a consultant to Warner Bros., even after the conglomerate changed Hanna-Barbera into “Cartoon Network Studios.”

…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

…speculates on potential reasons why the next version of Windows is late. His chief suspect: Dilbertian office politics.

…lives. The Boondocks comic strip, alas, might not be back for a good while, if ever.

…on the latest e. coli scare? Everyone agrees: Bluto did it.

form of time-wastin’ is going away, as YouTube.com systematically deletes all the classic cartoon shorts that had been posted there by animation historians and fans.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

For the second time, my ol’ UW Daily colleague Mike Lukovich has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Congrats.

…for discussion amongst yourselves: Why 9 Chickweed Lane has become the best comic strip in the dailies. (Hint: The cartoonist, Mr. Brooke McEldowney, took the risk a year ago of dropping the comics convention of unchanging, un-aging characters and introduced real plots, to the extent of moving everybody out of the titular address.)

Let us now praise The Boondocks, the animated series.

Parts of the first two episodes have been too dark and disturbing for even an ol’ hardboiled viewer like me to watch as light humor. But it’s expertly written and animated.

I’ve always said every work of satire contains, within its internal aesthetic, a view of the satirist’s ideal world. The internal aesthetic of Boondocks is one of solid storytelling, fine draftsmanship, attention to detail, and a careful sense of beauty. This is nothing like the cheap slapdash computer cutout worlds of most Adult Swim shows. Nor is it the jagged-edged aesthetic of the gangsta culture Boondocks’ young protagonists both sneer at and aspire to.

The aesthetic of Boondocks is the culture creator Aaron Macgruder obviously would like to see–a world of talented people who give a damn about what they put out into the world.

…to what’s on the Wall St. Journal editorial page. But I must concur with animation historian John Canemaker’s eulogy to the demise of Disney animation as we’ve known it.

The puppeteer, cartoon-voice legend, and artificial-heart inventor (really!) was, according to his estranged daughter April, “a very troubled and unhappy man.” One could hardly expect any less from the voice of Gargamel and Dick Dastardly.

…to Thurl Ravenscroft, whose deep resonant voice was heard in Disneyland singing-robot-animal shows, old time radio, religious albums, Elvis records, the animated film The Brave Little Toaster (as Kirby the vacuum cleaner), the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas (singing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”), and in commercials for over half a century as Tony the Tiger.