A Few Things About Judo Jack

As a cartoon dog, I don’t claim to know very much about judo. But I do know it doesn’t involve grabbing someone by the tail and doing an airplane spin before letting them fly. However, that’s what we see in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon Judo Jack.

Cycle animation is involved in this scene. There are four drawings, each shot twice. Actually, there are two drawings of Mr. Jinks. They’re flipped over and painted on the other side.



And, now, the cycle. This is about the same speed it is in the actual cartoon.



This was the second Pixie and Dixie cartoon put into production. In the first few cartoons made for the Huckleberry Hound Show, the animation is jerky. Hanna and Barbera said over the years that they found that the Tom and Jerry pose reels at MGM, which were devoid of a lot of in-betweens, were pretty funny. That was the philosophy at their own studio to begin with (probably because of budget and time restraints). That means some of the first Yogi Bears and Pixie and Dixies will pop from pose to pose.

Here’s a good example from close to the beginning of this cartoon. The first drawing is on six frames, the next two are both on fours and the last drawing is on fives. There is dialogue but Pixie’s mouth doesn’t move for 19 frames.



The bulk of the animation in this cartoon is by Ken Muse, who animated the first Pixie and Dixie cartoon at Hanna-Barbera (Pistol Packin’ Pirate). He does a Tex Avery-like jaw drop and has a nice crumpled pose of Jinks, but my favourite drawings are by Mike Lah. You can see some of them in this post. On model? Lah doesn’t worry about that sort of thing. I presume Lah did his own effects animation, too, as there are several repeated swirl drawings.



In an earlier post, we mentioned Judo Jack Terry, who was a pro wrestler when this cartoon was made. One of his finishing holds was the sleeper. Judo Jack in this cartoon gives Jinks a sleeper, simply by lightly conking him on the noggin. Here’s Lah’s drawing when Jinks wakes up at Jack’s command. Lah liked open mouths that look like melted geometric shapes.



Judo Jack would never get made today. There are people who have adopted the case-closed attitude that all ethnic stereotypes are racist; a blanket opinion takes no effort. But let’s look deeper. Jack is the hero of the cartoon, something pretty daring considering the Allies had been at war with Japan less than 15 years before this cartoon was made.

During the war, stereotypes were hyper-exaggerated in cartoons (which exaggerate to begin with) to ridicule, belittle, and laugh at the enemy. That’s not the case here; they’re used as a nationalistic identifier, the same way Pixie and Dixie’s Cousin Tex is shown to be a Texan through stereotypes—cowboy hat, branding iron, vocal drawl and so on. The only character who ridicules Judo Jack is Mr. Jinks, and he is ultimately and rightly punished. There’s simply no other way to set up the nature of Jack’s character in a 6½-minute comedy—certainly not in 1958—than to rely on what are some pretty tired clichés that, I hope, have been tossed away for good.



Frank Tipper was responsible for the backgrounds on this cartoon, the earlier Pixie and Dixie pirate cartoon, the later Kit Kat Kit and the first cartoon produced for the Huck show, Pie-Pirates, starring Yogi Bear (at least he’s not credited on others). When he arrived at the studio and why he left is unclear. He very well could have been working freelance; he arrived at Le Ora Thompson's studio in 1957 after two years overseas with Halas and Batchelor and Anigraph Films. Tipper was an Englishman (Manx) who arrived in the U.S. in 1921. Devon Baxter has crafted a nice biography of Tipper at the Cartoon Research blog.

This isn’t among my favourite Pixie and Dixie cartoons—it’s kind of in the also-ran category—but there are enough good elements in it to make it enjoyable TV fare.