Sunday 29 July 2012

Slick City Slicker Storyboard

There was once a place in the U.S. called ‘The Cartoon Network.’ It didn’t have tween-boy shows called “Dude, What Would Happen?” and “Build Destroy Build.” It had nothing but cartoons. Old ones, even. And its web site had great old pictures of people who worked at Hanna-Barbera, like Dick Bickenbach and Carlo Vinci. And it even had cartoons themselves and storyboards from a few of them.

Below is part of the storyboard from “Slick City Slicker,” the cartoon we reviewed yesterday. The size of the pictures is really small, but that’s what was on the site.

I suppose the board was drawn by Alex Lovy elaborating on sketches from Mike Maltese. Many of the character poses were maintained in the cartoon, but the opening pan is quite different. Background artist Bob Gentle used only one side of the street (the distance had islands near the harbour) with a huge house on Nob Hill on the right and the hotel on the left. Homes were in between and streetcar tracks were on the curving road. I suspect the detail in the drawing of the Raindrop Kid walking into the home is in the actual cartoon, if a decent version of it were to be seen.

The big mouth, close-eyed version of Quick Draw in the fourth set of panels is pretty funny. And the word “Kapok” when Raindrop smacks Baba with the racket is pure Maltese.











6 comments:

  1. Imagine finding stuff like this on the Cartoon Network site rather than tons of ads and games with paralyzing colors.
    Great find!

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  2. It's a very 'clean' board -- much closer to what ended up on screen than your average theatrical short storyboard of a decade or so earlier (at least based on the ones preserved). That may just be Lovy's style, but considering how tight the budgets were at H-B circa 1960, it would make sense to really nail down everything before you start committing it to drawing paper.

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  3. Did you take these from the Internet Archive?

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  4. It's sad -- what Cartoon Network has become. Their newer shows are dreadful. I used to watch Boomerang, but their schedule has been atrocious lately as well. I miss the days when Hanna-Barbera had their own channel (more or less) and would welcome a return. Perhaps another entity will surface and start airing classic animation. It happened with MeTV (what TV Land used to be) so maybe it can happen with another HB-styled channel.

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  5. Probably, Dudo. I've corralled some stuff from there. These have been sitting in my computer for awhile.

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  6. Considering the huge volume of things that I learned from cartoons and comic books during those formative single-digit years – especially in vocabulary, reading, spelling, folklore and legend, and general knowledge of the world (…how things work and, more so, how things SHOULDN’T work) – perhaps old Mister B. had a point!

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