John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars is still a good 18 months away, but I figured now is as good a time as any to show the cartoon version of John Carter that never saw production. It was to be made by Bob Clampett back in the 1940's, but after test audiences saw this footage, the idea was canned as being too "out there" for the mid-west audience of retards.

Here's a shock, the same year that this project was canceled and Clampett moved on to other things, Universal Studios released Flash Gordon, which was a runaway hit and now a cultural touchstone. Even those poor mid-Western retards got it. You hear this a lot, in business in general but especially in early film. Some studio thinks that something is a terrible idea and tells the guys within the studio to stop working on it, until another studio does the exact same thing to great fame and success. The first studio than either eats it, or they desperately ask those same guys to do what they originally wanted to do, but impatiently ask for it on a reduced budget and schedule and it all fails.

We can now add Clampett to Fleischer in the list of guys who would have beaten Disney to the first feature-length animated film if only the studios for which they worked hadn't been daft.

P.S. both John Carter and Flash Gordon have vixens in them that I plan on producing one of. Deja Thoris and Dale Arden.

AHHHHHH!!!!

I just lost five hours worth of work. I'm so pissed at Adobe Fireworks. Fucking Adobe had to go and buy Macromedia and, big surprise, they're putting almost nothing into the development of the old Macromedia tools. They either outright dropped them, like Freehand, or they just stopped giving a shit, like my precious Fireworks.

I loved Fireworks. For web development it was the absolute shiznit. Adobe is so fucking desperate to differentiate Illustrator and Photoshop that tools that BOTH OF THEM SHOULD HAVE, only one of them does. Fireworks didn't have any of that garbage. Vector and bitmap editing in a single package, check!

Gah! But today, I lost five hours worth of work because glitches that have been in the last three versions of Fireworks are still there, working their magic. I'd be really pissed if I hadn't pirated this version. When it happened in the versions I actually bought, I was really pissed. So now, I'm forced to use Illustrator and Photoshop. I hate both of them, especially Photoshop. Bloated piece of crap.

Maybe I'll try Corel. Actually, yeah! What the hell has Corel been up to, these days? The last thing I remember from them is Corel Photo Paint 5 from, like, 1994.

Out of the Asshole: Max Fleischer and Inaccuracies in His Wikipedia Page

I'm reading Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution. It's a book by Fleischer's son, Richard, an accomplished director himself (Red Sonja!), about nothing more than his memories and what details he was able to dig up from his father's paperwork.

It's a somewhat dry and straightforward book, which is both a plus and a minus. I would have actually liked more texture and detail to the events, but even then, the book gets its point across.

What surprised me were the extreme differences between this book at Max Fleischer's Wikipedia page. The Wiki page claims to list this book as a reference, but I'm not sure what part they referenced. The dustcover?

Most interestingly is that the story of Fleischer gives me new appreciation for Walt Disney. Disney was an asshole. He was actually a bit legendary for it. The differences lie in your interpretation of that behavior. Some people saw this as a man demanding the best, and when you produced the best, you were rewarded. Others saw it as a temperamental child ordering about people of greater skill than himself.

I lean towards the former, less assholey interpretation of Disney, and Fleischer's failure at the hands of Paramount reinforces that. As everyone knows, Hollywood in the early days may as well have been run by the mob. You could fill a book, and people have, with examples of studios' atrocious behavior. They ran a huge racket, as it were. They controlled the movie production and they also controlled all of the theaters. You could only get your movie shown if you made it through them, and they would only give your theater movies if you signed a contract to only ever take movies from them. This was known as the studio system and the reason for the formation of United Artists.

Disney knew that he had to be an asshole to survive. He had to shoot that motherfucker before that motherfucker shot him, and in Hollywood, everyone was armed. I have a feeling that Disney's opinion on this was formed when Universal did exactly what paramount would do to Fleischer to Disney in 1928 with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Basically, Disney was happy with the success of Oswald and asked for an increase in pay and budget. Universal responded by demanding a 20% pay cut and reminded Walt that they owned him. This is world-class shit and it happened all of the time. Around the same time, Paramount was caught off-guard with the runaway success of Fleischer's Talkartoons series and were upset that the contract they had was giving Fleischer an "unfair" cut of the profits. Whereas Disney became hardened, poor Fleischer was too naive; he gave Paramount more money.

From the Oswald Rabbit Wikipedia page-

"In spring 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Mintz owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney's current employees to his new contract: Iwerks and Les Clark were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. Disney refused Mintz's demand, disassociating himself from Oswald after the series first season. While finishing the remaining Oswald cartoons, Disney, Iwerks and Clark created the cartoon hero who would become The Walt Disney Company's lasting symbol: Mickey Mouse, (a slightly altered Oswald the Rabbit to avoid litigation) the most famous of Walt Disney's characters."

Why did this happen? Because the studios were run by suits-and-ties. Men who have NO TALENT WHAT-SO-FUCKING-EVER, and I think that they know it. They HATE people with talent. They surround themselves with yes-men and assume "oh, actual creation is easy. We'll just hire some animators and everything will be fine. The heavy lifting that I DO, now that's difficult work!" Pieces of shit. This isn't just Hollywood, this is all business. This disconnect between people of actual talent and the talentless pieces of shit that run companies runs rampant in industry. Look at the American automotive companies. Rick Wagoner is a moron. Look at the tech industry. Look at what happened to Apple when everyone who actually knew how to do shit left the company in the late 80's. Look at how IBM nearly collapsed under its own red tape.

Look at John Lassater's story about being fired from Disney Corp. DISNEY!!! You'd think that Disney would be more aware of its own corporate history. Ohhhh, right. I forgot. People who run companies don't actually know things.

Disney got hurt very early on. Fleischer didn't get fucked over until decades after his career had started. The Wikipedia page is wrong. If Richard Fleischer's account is to be believed, Fleischer had nothing to do with the failure of his company. It was engineered disaster from Paramount. They sound like they were jealous, they were thieving, they were terrible, horrible, horrendous human beings. We should exhume all of their bodies and burn them in effigy. I'm glad that they were all alive to see the studio system get taken down by the courts.

It's funny. The defining difference between Disney and Fleischer might have been that Disney got screwed early-on, where Fleischer only met mechanical set-backs not associated with backstabbing and other such nasty business. If Fleischer had been screwed similarly early in his career and not Disney, we might be riding giant Betty Boops at Fleischerland.

Plot Contrivances in UP.

I heart Pixar in a big way. They are consistent in ways that no studio has ever been. Each film is memorable. Each film is a huge financial success.

Their recent opus, UP, was really good, and has been nominated for a few awards, but isn't my favorite. I actually think I'd prefer watching the arguably inferior Cars.

How could I say such a thing? Simply, UP has more plot holes and contrivances than any previous Pixar film.

• They travel from a city that resembles Chicago to... South America, in a single night.


• Charles Muntz, after killing a giant thing with a shaving kit, discovering car-sized turtles and dinosaur-like things. After having done more than many countries, loses his reputation for supposedly lying about a large bird? What? If it had been a fucking T-Rex, I could understand, but a bird?! I guess a t-Rex wouldn't have made a good, cute side-kick.


• That reality was bent for the house on balloons is fine, but the fact that Carl regularly circumvents physics when holding the house down, dragging it along easily, holding Dug, Russell, and the bird up with nary but the traction in his boots. It just got silly. Since the rules don't apply, the threat of physics winning, and of us falling, isn't a real threat and the scenes lack danger.


• Why does Carl become nervous after Russell talks about Kevin? He hates the bird and is not yet aware that Muntz is insane. Yet, there he goes, acting all suspicious and giving Muntz reason, however little, to believe that the two actually ARE there to capture the bird.

I was also disappointed by the blatant attempts at lightening the tone of the movie through ridiculous elements. The voice of Alpha is the least intrusive, but the dog pilots firing their guns with a squeeky toy was just retarded. I think it reveals Docter to not be the director that Brad Bird is, who maintained a better and much more seamless balance of comedy and drama in The Incredibles and even in Ratatouille.