Art History Weekend

At some point my cable television provider added the Boomerang network to my package.  This seems to be a division of the Cartoon Network.  They specialize in mostly older cartoons (one slogan was something like "your favorite shows are coming back to you"), though for some properties they have modern versions as well.  For example, they have various hours devoted to vintage MGM Tom and Jerry cartoon shorts, but also an hour of newer Tom and Jerry cartoons with voice work from contemporary actors.  They have an hour of the original Scooby Doo cartoons of my youth, but also a 21st century series as well.  It's been long known around here that my all time favorite cartoons are the 1940's and early 1950's Warner Brothers shorts, especially with Bugs Bunny.  Above is a fragment of a large colored print from 2007-8 called A History of Art, a Babel inspired tower made up of dozens of things that influenced me to want to be an artist.  The room shown above is based on Grandma's Cottage in the mid 40's cartoon Little Red Riding Rabbit.  For me, the details of the background paintings was just as important as the animated characters and jokes- great surface textures of woodgrain and hand applied plaster over lath walls, etc.  More details about this can be seen in this 2007 blog post.

Anyway, starting yesterday, in honor of Easter weekend they are showing all Bugs Bunny.  As with their regular schedule, that includes both golden age shorts, and a contemporary Looney Tunes series, but it's the old ones that I have put on when there's nothing else interesting.  For example, today I saw a 1948 short called Mutiny on the Bunny, one of a series of cartoons with Yosemite Sam (here named "Shanghai Sam") as the captain and sole crew member of a large sailing vessel in a conflict with Bugs. Above is a background painting from this cartoon of Sam's ship, the Sad Sack, just before he kidnaps Bugs to be his new crew.  Sam is not my favorite antagonist for Bugs ( I prefer confrontations with Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and many one shot villains), so it's not one of my favorite cartoons. Not as funny as the Red Riding Rabbit cartoon.  But from the time I was young I always admired the artwork in these ship captain Sam cartoons.  The above background painting, credited to Paul Julian, may not be quite to the level of Vermeer or Caravaggio, but it certainly impressed my younger self.  The color, use of shadows and perspective, the details, every time I saw this it made me want to be able to draw/paint well enough to do something like that myself.  Later, as a full time art student, the names mentioned above and many others became my heroes, but I'm still affected by the art in old cartoons.  These new Looney Tunes episodes aren't all bad, it's clear there is a reverence for the originals and they are trying to make something entertaining, but they come up very short on the quality of the art.