Somebody’s made a snarky/poignant collage music video to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 cold-war burlesque, “The Merry Minuet.” (Hard to believe, but the song was written by Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.)

I was once, briefly in the presence of theater/film/game-show legend Kitty Carlisle Hart, at a local rally for and with 1988 Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Afterwards, my female companion of the afternoon quipped, “Will the real Michael Dukakis please stand up?,” encapsulating this successful governor’s inability to “brand” himself on the national stage.

According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of “Top US Erotica Important Cities.” NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what’s left of Playboy’s head office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: “Adult Websites.” (Maybe they didn’t hear that IEG/ClubLove went pffft years ago.)

Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three “visitors to adult websites” are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online. Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of “Worldwide Pornography Revenues,” fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” (The latter stat I’m particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)

I’ll remember the Hollywood singing star from Preston Surges’s last great movie, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and also from such bold-as-brass pop singles as “Orange Colored Sky” and (the Bjork-covered) “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Hutton was one of the all-time great entertainers.

…flashier than ever in HD, but were still as generally dull and self-congratulatory as ever. And WTF wasn’t Adrienne Shelly mentioned during the obit reel?

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In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio.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.

Feel free to chatter simultaneously amongst yourselves.

…from the past two decades I’d literally fallen in love with, Adrienne Shelly, has suddenly died.

General Electric’s gonna slash 700 jobs at NBC and Universal Studios. More importantly, but buried in this linked story, is that NBC will drop all dramas and comedies from the 8-9 PM prime-time hour, presumably starting either next season or this next midseason, presumably filling the hour with more cheap “reality” shows.

No longer will McDonald’s offer Disney movie character toys. The company’s theme parks will turn off all burger grills and French-fry cookers. Even Incredibles Pop-Tarts will go away (merch collectors: that’s your cue to start hoarding).

In other words, a big, fiscally troubled American company’s decreed that three of its biggest divisions (theme parks, feature films, and character licensing) will choose to forego some proven revenue generators for the sake of polishing the company’s brand image. Sounds like a noble gesture, or at least a sharp PR ploy.

But going to an amusement park without cheese fries, cotton candy, or vomitous amounts of imitation lemonade? That sounds as much fun, kid-wise, as a WASL-training sleepover camp.

…about tough fiscal times for “the Aging Independent Filmmaker.” (That’s the makers of real indie films, not the contrivers of formula crime thrillers for the Hollywood majors’ pseudo-indie divisions.)

…Jim Emerson really needs to get a better picture of himself on his site, but the content makes up for it–a veritable cornucopia of film-related fascinations. Chief among his current obsessions: the opening shots of favorite films.