It was the 1960s. We had a View-Master. Who didn’t?
There were slides depicting the Taj Mahal and other sites around the world. But there were cartoons, too. Only they weren’t really cartoons because they had a weird 3-D effect. Okay, it seems that’s what animated cartoons are today, but let’s not get into that here.
We’ve posted a couple of these pictures here before. A nice guy named Dom Giansante has collected a bunch of Hanna-Barbera View-Master slides, some from his own collection I gather, and we pass them on as a public service. The Yogi ones are really neat.
Seeing them now reminds me of the old George Pal Puppetoons. It might have been interesting to make a little Huck film in stop-motion, but it would have felt an awful lot different. No run cycles in front of a repeating background, for one thing. And then there’s that thing called “cost” that Bill Hanna used to go on about a lot. Ah, well. We have a few old View-Master frames—and our imaginations—to give us a bit of an idea of what it might have been like.
I've got the Yogi ones and, as you say, they're 'neat'. I'd have loved to have seen the TV show done this way - same as Wallace & Gromit.
ReplyDeleteYou might dig this Kid, a TV documentary that covered the very place that made these!
Deletehttps://vimeo.com/20696900
Do we know who created these pieces: could they have been someone from the HB studio? As complex as they are, they still keep with the immediacy/quickly-drawn-style nature of the cartoons: that takes a lot of skill. I saw a Fred Flintstone toy from the 80's and the whole character of Fred was off. When I think of Barney Rubble, I hear the nasally voice Mel Blanc created for him in the first handful of cartoons: I can hear that voice when I see him in one of the frames...
ReplyDeletehttps://vimeo.com/20696900
DeleteView-Master. This was a mania in the 60s and 70s.
ReplyDeleteMike Angelo = Michelangelo
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