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Archive → October, 2009

Spooky, Isn’t It?: a cartoon medley

Flip the Frog is heckled by the Looney Tunes and others.

Disney Dali: cartoon from Walt via Salvador

In 1946, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney planned a cartoon together. But the short subject Destino was left unfinished after Disney and its partner, RKO, decided it probably wouldn’t make any money.

But as David D’Arcy reports, Walt Disney regretted the decision. And Disney’s nephew Roy Disney, who now heads the company’s animation division, decided to revive the project.

Destino is a six-minute film set to a Spanish song, devoid of dialogue and without a clear story line. It follows a dark-eyed ballerina on a journey among strange objects through a desert landscape in a dreamlike atmosphere.

A completed version will appear at festivals around the world before Oscar-nomination time, and Disney plans to release it next year on a DVD with a documentary that tells the whole story.

SplurgenShitter

“I Want To Tell You How Terrible My Life Is”

Phone manners are important.

French subtitles by someone who doesn’t know French

As Boys Grow (1957)

Prior to the period of frankness that began in the mid-1960s, relatively few sex education films were actually produced in the United States. Most of these films concentrated on the physiology of sex and reproduction and were replete with animated “plumbing” diagrams. It was unusual to show children speaking relatively freely about sexuality, and because of the necessity of educating girls about menstruation, more addressed girls than boys. As Boys Grow, produced in the relatively liberal San Francisco Bay Area, presents regular boys asking regular questions and contains frank discussion of such topics as nocturnal emissions.

WATCH PART 2:

Apparently the gym is a safer place for sexual discussion than within the family, and we get a strong sense that Fifties men were supposed to learn about sex in and around the gym while Fifties women worked it out with their mothers. (The coach just seems to carry charts of the female reproductive organs where ever he goes. Handy!)

As Boys Grow also differs from other sex ed films (and most strongly from those directed at girls) by admitting specifically that sex is linked with pleasure. It speaks explicitly of sexual excitement, of erections and the “hard penis”; and addresses male masturbation without mystery. While girls’ films (like Molly Grows Up) focus on menstruation to the exclusion of sexual pleasure and speak of coping with the physical preconditions of gender rather than coming to terms with desire, As Boys Grow admits the existence of pleasure and its gratification. Following the liberal line that was emerging at the time, Coach states “Sometimes you hear that masturbation affects your mind or your manhood. It isn’t true. For kids your age, it’s just…something normal.”

William Buckley interviews Hugh Hefner

William Buckley Interviews Hugh Hefner on Firing Line (1966)

Carlton teaches Breakin’ and Poppin’

An old MTV clip from ’85 starring a very young Alfonso Ribeiro

One Night in Bangkok

What’s My Line: Walt Disney

Walt Disney is found out fairly quickly due to voice recognition from a panelist who had a social lunch with him recently despite Disneys best efforts to disguise his tone in his answers, choosing to go low instead of high so Micky wouldn’t slip out. “I was afraid to do the falsetta because that’s the mouse”. Afterward he discusses his appreciation and future future plans in television and also Disneyland California.