Forty years on
Mark Steyn celebrates the work of William Hanna who died last week
My traditional Oscars review is suspended this year, and perhaps indefinitely, due to the general lameness of the big night. Neither the alleged blockbusters nor so-called 'independent' films were quite up to snuff, and, although I'm very fond of Steve Martin, his shtick seemed undersized for the Academy Awards, in the same way that David Letterman's did a couple of years back. The first requirement of an Oscars host is that they mean it — as, in their different ways, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal did.
So instead I would like to celebrate a seven-time Oscar winner whose path once crossed obliquely with Steve Martin's. In Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987),
Martin is an ad exec stranded by bad weather with garrulous oaf John Candy, who manages to derail all Martin's efforts to get home for Thanksgiving. At one point, having exhausted the eponymous trio of transportational modes, Martin and Candy find themselves on a crowded crosscountry bus, on which to Martin's distaste genial community singalongs keep breaking out. Invited to lead off the next number, Martin tries 'Three Coins In The Fountain'. It dies. Candy then begins the theme from the Flintstones. Within seconds, everyone is gaily joining in, and as the passengers give out their final `Yabba-dabba-doo times', Candy is heard bellowing Wilmaaaaaal!' as the bus disappears round a corner.
There's something so right about that moment, about the Flintstones' place in the scheme of things, a place so secure even two charmless miscast big-budget liveaction features haven't been able to dent. The man who wrote the song and co-created the show died last week: William Hanna. With Joseph Barbera, he also created Tom and Jerry, and Yogi Bear, and Top Cat, and Dick Dastardly and Muttley, and Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats — the last two of which are being transformed into live-action features even as I write. Ever since I got hooked on Huckleberry Hound as an impressionable young tyke, I've thought the Hanna-Barbera stable infinitely superior to the Disney bores. 'Huckleberry', for example, is a much better name for a hound than Mickey is for a mouse or Donald for a duck, don't you think? Mickey Mouse has been a star for 70 years, but he's as dull now as he was in the Twenties. Who is he? What makes him tick? Who knows? On Gay Day at Disneyworld, the ever so correct types who've succeeded Uncle Walt have Mickey and Donald walking arm in arm and Minnie and Daisy kissing. But why not? Mickey isn't gay, he isn't straight, he isn't anything. He's whoever's wearing the suit. Those Disney characters fail the basic test: you don't believe they have any life when they're not on camera. By contrast, Top Cat may be little more than a dated yellow hep cat wearing nothing but a waistcoat, but, next to the vapid Disney types, he's a model of rich, in-depth characterisation. Hanna's first animation job was in 1930 for Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising of the Harman-Ising Studio, creators of Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Harman-Ising brought him in to help out on Sinking in the Bath-Tub, the first adventure to star what they figured would be a long-running cartoon character, Bosko the Black Boy. Hanna couldn't save Bosko, but his work brought him to the attention of MGM, where he met Barbera. After some comicstrip adaptations, they made their first original cartoon, Puss Gets the Boot (1940) — about a cat and a mouse. They weren't yet called Tom and Jerry, but the dynamic of the relationship was already in place — the cat is warned that if he breaks anything else he'll be kicked out the house, whereupon the mouse starts winding the cat up by threatening to smash things and pin it on him. Tom and Jerry have been stars for six decades, but, aside from the odd underwater ballet with Esther Williams (Dangerous When Wet), nothing much has changed: Hanna and Barbera devised more sadistic demises for Tom than any fictional character has ever suffered before or since — he's been crushed, incinerated, steamrollered into the asphalt, blown to smithereens by sticks of dynamite tied to his tail, but no sooner has the dust settled than he comes back for more. Barbera was a fast economical sketch artist and a good joke man; Hanna had a wonderful sense of comic timing, far more sophisticated than Disney, and he understood better than anyone to date how to coordinate music, sound effects and visual gags.
When MGM shut down their animation department, the guys moved into TV. Faced with drastically shrunken budgets, they invented 'limited animation' — 300 drawings per minute instead of 1,000, and more reliance on stock footage. Critics dismissed it as 'illustrated radio'. Thus, Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo spent much of their long careers just strolling and talking in front of the same line of pine trees. And you know what? It didn't matter a bit. Some of Hanna-Barbera's early Tom and Jerry work is as sumptuous as anything from Disney — look at the bowling alley in The Bowling Alley Cat (1941) — but, like all truly creative spirits, they weren't fazed by constraints. There's still plenty to look at in The Flintstones — the woolly mammoth who serves as a vacuum cleaner, etc. — and, in its way, the visual economy is part of the series' signature. Though everyone points out The Flintstones are based on Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners, Fred and Wilma are much more suburban and consumerist, in their prehistoric way, than Gleason's dowdy bluecollar sitcom.
As for those who complain about HannaBarbera destroying the art of animation, they're missing the point. You could just as easily bemoan the way so many first-class animators have destroyed the art of storytelling: we've all seen a zillion fabulouslooking cartoons from Eastern Europe with absolutely nothing going on in them. But Hanna-Barbera understood that it all starts with a character, and 40 years on those characters are still with us — and, indeed, in the US even have their own cable network: Tom and Jerry, Barney and Betty Rubble, Officer Dibble, Penelope Pitstop, going on and on forever. Who else has a catalogue like that? Bill Hanna might have been writing of himself, when he observed, in another theme song,
He's the boss He's the VIP
He's a championship He's the most tip-top Top Cat!
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