Thursday, February 26, 2009

Irv Spector at DePatie-Freleng Enterprises: The Pink Panther: Gong With The Pink - (Partial) Storyboard


Released in 1971 as Gong With The Pink, you can see that this is a preliminary board with the working title Gong With The Wind. My big regret of course is that I don't nearly have all that much of it. However, the only thing that might be more rare than a Pink Panther itself (beast or gem) is perhaps a storyboard from the show, so why look a gift Panther in the mouth? Perhaps even more rare, it's a storyboard without dialogue -- so let me get out of the way and not ruin it with my own.





(The next two pages contain a facial sterotype gag which might be offensive to some blog viewers. If you feel you could be one of those people then please skip over them. I do not endorse or apologize for it -- I just present it.)









These last two board pages are not numbered. I'm appending them and will leave it to your imagination to fit them within.


8 comments:

Dave Mackey said...

Paul, you read my mind. Just so happens I was thinking about Irv's contributions to DePatie-Freleng cartoons this morning and noted his writing credit on that one, and was silently hoping you had something on that one. This was during one of those periods when DePatie-Freleng was making just enough Pink Panthers at a time to freshen the TV package. Dave and Friz and their directors had consistent Panther production through the end of 1969, but they actually stopped for a year in 1970, then cranked up the Pink machine again in 1971, then again in 1974, and for the last time in 1978 for the last TV show.

The other one I enjoyed that he had a hand in was the "Ant and the Aardvark" cartoon "Technology, Phooey". "Whoever said I was a computer? I'm really a pop-up toaster!" Very funny stuff!

Now, Paul, if you're in a request taking mood, I have one credit of your dad's I haven't seen in years - it was probably the last Paramount he worked on, called "The Robot Ringer" which was about a robot hired to work at an ad agency. Nickelodeon showed this cartoon in the 1990's quite a bit and it was funny and clever.

p spector said...

Dave, thanks for the information. I've nothing from "Technology, Phooey" that I know of. I do have early boards that I believe went on to be the cartoon titled "Pink da Vinci" (or else went on to nothing!) and will be posted soon enough.

I'm always in a request taking mood and am surprised I don't get more of them...requests, that is, not moods. With "Robot Ringer" I can firmly state that I have no boards, but it's quite possible I have a treatment for it, i.e., no drawings, just words. If that will suffice I'll keep and eye out and will post it sooner than later. My "collection" is like a mall: vast, shallow, and spread all over the place. Late period Parmount cartoons like "Ringer" are on my personal wantlist. I've never seen it, and it's not on the (Almost-Yet-Not-Quite-Complete) Complete Harverytoons DVD.

Anonymous said...

Nice. Outside of The Pink Panther did your dad ever do any other wordless storyboards or comics?

p spector said...

Animation-wise, nothing that I would have. Comic-wise, there are a couple of Coogy's on the blog that are pretty much wordless, or else just have a spoken tag at the end. I have a few more not yet posted.

Will Finn said...

Paul this is eerie. One of my kids is watching Pink Panther cartoons on DVD right this minute. And someone i work with just put the color poster of the top image up on his wall this week.

Thanks for this rare representation of the show's storyboards. I saw this specific entry not too long ago and it was produced (or anyway released) without the stereotype gag.

p spector said...

Will, that IS eerie.
I have sections of the the Pizza Panther bridge, which I'll post at some future point. At that time, if you get a knock on the door and it's Domino's...

Anyway, thanks for reminding me about the DVD. I guess I should surf over to Amazon.

Anonymous said...

I've got a copy of "Robot Ringer" taped off Nickelodeon -- it of course has the very limited animation of Paramount circa 1963, but is kind of an advertising-based precursor to Peter Sellers' "Being There", in that the robot's repeating of other people's words is taken to be some great, inventive new advertising slogans (as opposed to Sellers' lines about gardening being seen as great political strategies). Definitely not a story designed to entertain just the kids in the audience.

(Jerry Beck's been posting a few of the 1963 Noveltoons and Modern Madcaps on the Cartoon Brew site, and might be putting this one up soon, since it's the only Irv Spector-written short that's not part of the Harveytoons package.)

p spector said...

Thanks, J.
I saw that over at the Brew. I have a few accompaniment pieces from that era: some are treatment/summary, and some just billing statements. I might put something up if they correspond to what he posts in the future (and if what I have is even interesting). For instance, I have the treatment with the working title "I'll Raise You Ten", which became "Crumley Cogwheel", that someone commented upon over there. For "Robot Ringer", just a bill.