When Did That Happen?
As further evidence of Kanfer's disregard for chronology, on page 115, he states that "Daffy Duck was the studio's (Leon Schlesinger) answer to Woody Woodpecker." This simple sentence shows a regrettable lack of understanding. Daffy made his debut in Porky's Duck Hunt (1937), which Kanfer thinks (page 116) is Bugs Bunny's first cartoon. Woody didn't appear until 1940 in Knock-Knock. "Daffy was Leon's answer to Woody," sounds like some more of that "retroactive plagiarism" that Chuck Jones likes to talk about. Woody is more of an echo of the Crazy Rabbit that appeared in Ben Hardaway's Porky's Hare Hunt and Hare-um Scare-um. When Ben moved over to Lantz in 1940, he took the notion of a crazy character with the 'Ha-Ha-Ha-Haaaa-Ha!' laugh and made it a woodpecker instead of a rabbit. Mel Blanc supplied the laugh for both characters. To further damage his credibility, on page 117, Kanfer thinks that Bugs says "What's Up, Doc?" in Porky's Hare Hunt and that Avery directed it! He is also under the impression that the line "Of course you realize this means war!" became part of Bugs Bunny's vocabulary in later years, when in fact Ben Hardaway's Crazy Rabbit used the line in his first picture, Porky's Hare Hunt (1938)!

Let's see, what other Deviltry seems to affect Kanfer's book? Page 154: Art Babbitt's name was supposedly "expunged from the credits of Snow White and all the other films he had worked on, as well as any related printed materials..." Well, at last check, Art's name (spelled correctly, which Kanfer can't seem to do) is still on the credits of Snow White, and his name is still on all the studio lists that name all of the animators on Disney cartoons. So, Walt's "order" must have been ignored. On page 189, he seems to think that Hanna-Barbera's system of "planned animation" used a dialog system that "ignored" consonants! A mouth system with only vowel sounds would have the character speaking with its mouth open all the time. The Hanna-Barbera mouth drawings might have been redundant, but they did include both opened and closed positions! On page 143, Kanfer has Dave Fleischer directing Slay It With Flowers at Paramount. Dave Fleischer produced Slay It With Flowers in l944, at Columbia's Screen Gems cartoon studio, after the Fleischer Bros. studio was closed by Paramount. Bob Wickersham directed it for him. Kanfer also implies that Dave Fleischer continued to direct Popeye and Superman shorts during his involvement with Fox and Crow. Kanfer seems unaware of the history of Columbia's cartoon studio which was founded by Charles Mintz in 1929. It gets no mention at all until Frank Tashlin takes it over and that isn't until page 131.

Then there's the "revisionist" spelling of proper names such as "Seamus" instead of Shamus Culhane, Bob "McKimpson" instead of McKimson, and Eddie "Seltzer" instead of... Well, you get the idea.

The Looking Glass is Dirty
Kanfer summarizes his book this way: " To watch these funny pictures...is actually to peer into a distorted looking glass that catches the light and gives back pictures of ourselves." Yet, when cartoonists really do give us a distorted picture of ourselves, Kanfer is uncomfortable. The book's tone smacks more of The National Enquirer than The Saturday Review. Kanfer incessantly quotes from Walt Disney, The Dark Prince of Hollywood, as if it was all true, instead of a collection of everybody's favorite `Horrible Stories About Walt,' many of which are hearsay and unsubstantiated. He finds creeping capitalists and racists and makers of mediocrity behind every tree, but he reveals very little about the artists who created the films this book is supposedly about. He mainly quotes Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; almost nobody else gets to speak. Because of his close alliance with Chuck Jones, history gets a lot of Jones-friendly interpretation. To dismiss Hanna and Barbera's entire Tom and Jerry series as "mediocrity," seems to serve Jones very well. After all, the failure of Chuck's version of Tom and Jerry is justified, the characters he had to work with were never that good. He makes sure that Chuck gets full credit for Hell Bent For Election and The Dover Boys. John Hubley and Bobe Cannon are never mentioned. Chuck also gets the credit for the dubious achievement of creating the market for "re-drawn and painted cels" in the 1970's. This "market" was really developed jointly by Disney, Lantz, Hanna and Barbera, Friz Freleng, Shamus Culhane and Chuck Jones as a way of cashing in on the animation art boom that occurred in the 1980's.

Chuck doesn't like animation historians very much. In his new book he likens them to "hemstitchers." If great historians of the animated cartoon like Mike Barrier, Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, John Canemaker, Keith Scott, Milton Gray and Will Friedwald are hemstitchers, then they have sewn beautiful garments that flatter their subjects. Kanfer and his ilk mainly sew smothering patchwork blankets that cover their subject without revealing it.

Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story. by Stefan Kanfer. New York: Scribner, 1997.256 pages, illustrated. Trade paperback, $27.95; ISBN: 0-684-80079-9.

Mark Kausler is an animator who has been working in the industry for 25 years. He is currently working at Walt Disney Feature Animation on Fantasia 2000.