Gulliver Animation - King Bombo on the Carriage Step

It's difficult to identify my dad's actual pre-war (WWII) animation. However, two days after my dad passed away, Arnold Gillespie (who not only worked at Fleischer but went on to have a glorious career in special effects), paid me a wonderful telephone call to let me know that, back in the day, this particular piece of animation from Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels just "tickled" him. We can thank Bob Jaques for the clip. It seems like the moment I press the send email button to ask "Do you have...", the darn thing is already in my inbox.

Comic Book Interlude: Little Lionel

We can thank Mr. Bob Jaques for this one. Bob was searching for moonlighting-comic-book-drawing animators and came up with this from a Wacky Duck titled reprint pubbed in 1958 (I.W. Enterprises). My dad had already exited from a decade-long comic book era at that point, and Little Lionel dates back to the post-war 1940s. Still, I like the sort of pre-war old-fashioned flavor of it all: the telephone, the firemen panel, et al.

The Sad Sack

Harkening back to the old U.S. Army Signal Corps days, here's an old mildewed book I have that Sgt. George Baker, creator of The Sad Sack, personalized (above) to my dad. I don't know if Baker was technically in the animation unit, but then again, when it came to creatives -- no mattter what their particular facility -- every cartoonist (using that term in general) knew each other.

Rather than send you to Wiki's blurb on Sad Sack, let's just let the book do the talking.

Books in wartime, Egad!:

The Introduction: You might want to read the whole thing, but I'll paraphrase that Sad Sack first appeared in Yank magazine in 1942. "The Sack is Army's perfect personification of the Army's little man, the hopeless underdog who has no stripes, no glory, no friends in the orderly room, no escape from the dread terror of red tape and higher ranks. Since he is the Army's little man, none of his problems are of his own making. No matter what he does or leaves undone, trouble will come to him from outside forces. "

The deal, storywise, with Sad Sack, is that no matter how hard he tries, he always gets the crap end of the military pecking-order stick: the end gag is always the same...he's just a sad sack of... The book is flush with pages -- those scanned below are, to my own eyes, representative of what you would find.

Offline

Spectorphile will be offline for the next several days, as will my email. The Mrs. has ordered new carpeting to be installed 11/4, which means I have to disassemble my antiquated computer setup and stick the Irvchives into that strange place under the stairwell. I'll be up all night with this kind of stuff. See you shortly therafter.