DT: Interesting thing about Swing You Sinners; nearly everybody working on it was animating for the first time because Fleischer had to replace a bunch of animators that quit. That is amazing!

JK: Well, Grim Natwick worked on it, and his animation of the ghouls and monsters is amazing. Ghosts, dinosaurs — everything! After Swing You Sinners, we'll run Mysterious Mose (1930). That has a lot of Grim Natwick in it, and what I think are the cutest animation drawings of Betty Boop ever done. Absolutely beautiful.

DT: Doesn't she still have dog ears in that film?

In Mysterious Mose, Betty Boop's second cartoon, she displays some of her early sex appeal.

JK: Yeah, but she's really great looking! If you look at the first Betty Boop cartoon, Dizzy Dishes (1930) she's hideous in that one, but that's Grim Natwick, too. Whenever she talks her mouth comes out like a foreskin. I still love that cartoon but Mose is such a contrast because Betty looks so cute. She doesn't look like a big fly or something. I'm going to show a Popeye cartoon but I'm not 100% sure which one.

Sometimes it's hard to get the studios to give you a print of something. I put down A Clean Shaven Man (1936) but pretty much any Popeye from 1933-1938 is going to be great. One thing that's special about the Popeye cartoons is that they gave everyone unique walks and runs. There's a real funny walk for Popeye, almost like little dances that he does. Olive's are crazy, those big spaghetti legs flying around. Fleischer did that better than anyone ever did, and they excelled at animating technical stuff, too.

I had more trouble getting the prints I want to show for Chuck Jones. I wanted to show The Dover Boys and Tom Thumb In Trouble. The thing about Chuck Jones is, everybody knows his cartoons. If you were showing the best of Jones you would probably show stuff like One Froggy Evening but I like his 1940s cartoons better than the ones that made Jerry Beck's The 50 Greatest Cartoons. One of the things I want to achieve with the second show is to display "The Age of Cartooniness." Not the "golden age," because not everybody making films was cartoony. Disney wasn't — he was the anti-cartoonist. He didn't like cartooniness.

Chuck Jones didn't either. I don't know how many people besides historians and diehard fans know that, but when the general public thinks of the "golden age of animation" they think of Chuck Jones. What I wanted to show is what Jones would have been if it had not been for Bob Clampett. Jones had two general tendencies; One was the tendency to do super-cute, Disneyesque syrupy-sweet cartoons, and the cutest, syrupy-sweetest cartoon ever made is Tom Thumb In Trouble. It's so sweet that it's rude! One of my very favorite Jones cartoons. My other favorite is The Dover Boys, the first stylized cartoon. It inspired John Hubley and all the UPA guys and caused a revolution in animation. And Jones almost got fired for it!

DT: Leon Schlesinger hated that cartoon.

Bob Clampett. © 1999 Bob Clampett Productions LLC. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in any form.

JK: I love the cartoon, I think it's amazing. It's stylized but it's funny, it has Warner Bros. jokes in it. It's not like Tom Thumb, which is unlike a Warners cartoon. Those two cartoons say "Chuck Jones" to me more than any other he's done. When he started making his real funny cartoons, that's because Schlesinger was telling him, "You'd better start making Clampett-style cartoons or you're out of here!" Jones wanted to be known as a "high artist" and maybe to him there were two ways to approach that. One was through cute — for some reason cuteness is associated with high art — or stylized stuff that looked like illustrations or magazine cartoons. That's what "The Dover Boys" looked like. Leon Schlesinger wanted no part of that. He just wanted pure entertainment.

Then we come to Bob Clampett, whom nobody had to tell to be entertaining. That was just in his blood, he was walking entertainment. He made cartoons in which not only was the animation good, every single part of his cartoons was good. The music was great, the timing phenomenal, the sound effects — every element of the film he was using, Clampett loved. Compare him to other directors like Tex Avery. Avery pretty much loved just one thing: getting a gag across. He experimented with design to a certain extent but his soundtracks weren't very good and he was strapped with Scott Bradley, whose idea of funny music was to play everything off-key. Avery didn't care about acting. Clampett cared about everything.