Oh! My achin' eyeballs! Now, there's yet another new book on the animated cartoon, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America From Betty Boop to Toy Story, by Stefan Kanfer and published by Scribner. I think I'll put it on the shelf next to the spate of other recent "dubious achievements" spawned by the animation boom; Enchanted Drawings, The Fifty Greatest Cartoons, Seven Minutes, Cartoon Monikers, Animating Culture and Walt Disney, The Dark Prince of Hollywood. All of these books share common problems: they are poorly researched, often paraphrased from seminal books on animation, they consistently misspell names, they mix-up film descriptions by often mis-matching titles and plots and the proper chronology of events is often disregarded. Worst of all, the books are often hatched from a premise that was not worth writing about in the first place, or paid for by big corporations as promotion devices.

The title Serious Business led me to believe the book might cover the business side of animation, history reflected through numbers, and include profit and loss statements, salary highs and lows for animators and other creative workers, and reports on profit participation by producers. I'd love to know if Leon Schlesinger or Fred Quimby got any kickbacks or percentages of their operating budgets, and how much! Instead we get a book that tries to squeeze the entire history of the animated cartoon into 235 pages, and yet falls far short of any real understanding of the medium. Being a friend of Chuck Jones, Kanfer makes sure that Chuck's favorite story about the inspiration behind Daffy Duck's voice (Leon Schlesinger's very pronounced lisp), gets printed not only on page 94, but also on the inside flap of the dust jacket. Of course Chuck has already told the story in loving detail in Chuck Amuck, and it makes an amusing anecdote, however, existing recordings of Leon's voice (Schlesinger Christmas Party Reels, l938-39, and You Ought to Be in Pictures, which Kanfer erroneously believes that Bob Clampett directed instead of Friz Freleng) indicate that if there is a lisp there, it is barely detectable. Keith Scott, linguist and voice performer whose excellent book on Jay Ward awaits publication, is my expert witness on this "lisping Leon" business. Keith has such a sensitive ear for human speech that he was able to figure out who did Screwy Squirrel's voice (Wally Maher) when no other animation scholar could crack the mystery. He too is unable to discern Leon's lisp from the existing sound recordings.

Sloppy Research
Kanfer, because of obviously sloppy research, repeats and perpetuates errors such as Leslie Cabarga's delusion about the lyrics that Louis Armstrong sings in Fleischer's I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You. If you listen to the soundtrack, Louis clearly states: "You bought my wife a bottle of Coca-Cola, so you could play on her Victrola ." Cabarga, in his book The Fleischer Story, quotes it as: "so you could play on her vagola." Obviously this story appeals to prurient interest, but it's phony. If Kanfer had checked the cartoon, he wouldn't have repeated Cabarga's error. Kanfer loves to point out sexy gags wherever he can find them, and seems scandalized by so-called "racism" in American entertainment. Here, he belabors the obvious. The history of popular American entertainment is loaded with sexy jokes, minstrelsy and jokes at the enemy's expense during World Wars. These vintage jokes may only be fit for the memory hole, and too outrageous for today's delicate sensibilities, nevertheless they were told. They are part of American history. To cast aspersions and vilify the animated cartoons and their makers for being part of the humor of their times is short-sighted. Many of the films he talks about, such as Der Fuerher's Face and You're a Sap, Mr. Jap , have been withdrawn from distribution for years, and studios often refuse access to these titles even to researchers. It seems to me that the end result of all this finger pointing about racism will be that these cartoons will be even more mercilessly censored and locked up like some vile pornography, when the caricatures in them were seldom intended to be mean to anyone; they were created to entertain an audience.

Kanfer not only errs in quoting sloppy authors, but he fails to understand chronology. On page 194, he quotes Freleng's disgust with network television, then accuses him of being "part of the problem." You see Friz is a dreaded Capitalist. He made pro-business films for the Sloane Foundation, apparently after Warner Bros. closed their animation department. If you look at the facts, By Word of Mouse was made in 1954, eight years before Warner's closed. Kanfer quotes Norman M. Klein (dubious achiever and author of Seven Minutes ) that the sinister message here is about the "changing role of cartoons, from film toward more obviously consumer-driven television." Actually, The Sloane Foundation would put up more than just the cartoon's negative cost if their message about the American business system could be included in the story. Friz did not choose to do this; the deal was between Warner Bros. and Sloane. The statement Warners seems to be making here is "if above-the-line profits can be made, make 'em!"