Ancora “vecchiume”, ragazzi!
Proprio così, mentre state sfilando (alcuni di voi) alla Mostra d’Oltremare.
O magari in zona Vomero, dove lo scorso anno, fra le altre. è stata raccolta questa intervista a Gilbert Hernandez, a cura di Germana de Angelis e Luca Antonio Pepe.
Dopo oltre 365, chi non l’ha vista può fruirne qui (grazie agli autori!).
Chi ne ha voglia, fra un cambio di costume e una sfogliatella, può visionare l’eccezionale film ritrovato, una perla che sarebbe anche degna della rassegna organizzata da Andrea Ippoliti nelle sale di Castel Sant’Elmo.
E’ un cortometraggio con quello che noi italiani, nella versione riveduta e corretta da Massimo Liorni, conosciamo come Bang!, ma che in originale era Howdy Doody.
Se vi siete persi l’intera storia, Q U I ne trovate un sintetico (parziale) riassunto.
Liorni, peraltro, aveva anche realizzato dei fumetti con lo svitato Flub-A-Dub, il personaggio raffigurato nelle poche tavole incluse in questo post, tratte da un comic book USA, scritte da John Stanley.
Per Liornoi questo pupazzo animato si chiamava “Paperina”, nei tascabili della Editrice Adriana.
Howdy Doody and His Magic Hat (1953) from Cartoon Brew TV on Vimeo.
Di questo film animato sperimentale, girato su commissione e poi rifiutato (non piacque per nulla!), quindi rimasto inedito e miracolosamente ritrovato mesi fa, indi passato in rete, l’animatore e regista Gene Deitch parla all seguente link:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/brewtv/howdydoody.html
The catch to this opportunity was that all of us bright young hotshot UPA stars absolutely hated the Howdy Doody show, and felt that the puppet itself was gross—a ten on a kitsch scale of one to ten.
We determined to “improve” the Howdy Doody character to the level of our hallowed UPA design standard. After all, we were already the toast of New York animation, raking in the prizes and publicity. We simply couldn’t lower ourselves to something so crude, even if the client was paying us to do just that. So we just blithely went ahead with transforming Howdy Doody in our own image.
Unfortunately, this God-like endeavor went down in flames. Kagran paid for the film, but “Buffalo Bob” Smith, Howdy Doody’s Daddy, hated what we had wrought, and ordered the negative destroyed. Our little pride and joy experiment was never shown publicly, and was never properly listed on the International Motion Picture Database.
In plain language, it simply did not exist.
A 16mm print did exist. I had managed to liberate it when I left UPA. The heavens still punished me when this “one and only existing print” vanished without a trace in an international shipment. I spent the next fifty years—a full half-century—in a fervid but fruitless effort to track down another print. Not that this little film was any kind of a marvel, but simply because it was the very first film to bear the screen credit, “Directed by Gene Deitch” and thus personally important in my own history.
Further, it was a pretty good example of early 1950s animation thinking. The actual film was animated in a very low-budget paper cutout technique with a few camera effects.
