Two Chips and a Miss

This is a nice cartoon. It's from 1951, featuring Chip, Dale, and their friend Clarice. Apparently, it starts with Chip and Dale feigning going to bed when each wants to sneak out on the other to meet up with Clarice at a nightclub. There are some good Tex Avery-type arousal gags, and it ends with a real ho-yay moment. Clarice, Chip and Dale are all in good voice in this cartoon, and one can't help thinking of Ross Bagdasarian watching this cartoon in a theatre in the mid-1950's and hearing the wheels turning in his head.

Directed by Jack Hannah, who was responsible for Disney's best short cartoons of the 1950's, when Donald Duck pretty much supplanted Mickey Mouse as the studio's star character (Hannah would later work his same magic for the Walter Lantz studios). But Chip and Dale came a pretty close second.

Do You Believe In Cartoon Rabbits? YES!

Among the reparations ABC received for letting Al Michaels move over to NBC for their new Sunday Night Football franchise (where John Madden will also be in residence, making him one of the few men who's worked for all four major networks doing football - first CBS, then Fox, then ABC, now NBC):

NBC/Universal has given back The Walt Disney Company the rights to Oswald, The Lucky Rabbit.

WHAT? An eighty-year old cartoon character? Yes. Disney lost the rights to Oswald in the late 1920's when Universal installed Walter Lantz as the series' producer. Lantz continued to make Oswald films for years afterward, while Disney created another character - Mickey Mouse.

Now Disney's got Oswald back in its camp. What's Disney gonna do with Oswald? Stay tuned.

The End Of Walt Disney's Florida Studio...

Not since Max Fleischer was left out in the cold (warm?) in Miami and his studio pulled back to New York by Paramount Pictures has Florida experienced such a sad day in animation history as this past Monday, when Walt Disney Feature Animation closed its Orlando, Florida unit, part working facility, part tourist attraction. The studio started small in the early 90's with a couple of Roger Rabbit (remember him?) shorts, then about a reel or two of "The Lion King", then eventually complete features, up to and including the just-completed "Home On The Range". On Monday, the studio employees were given their pink slips and severance, some being shipped out to Burbank to continue their work, others wondering if they can get a job wearing a Mickey suit around Epcot. Anyway, Jim Hill Media has a great series of articles about the studio and its closure, including this one which includes a charming little anecdote about Frisbees being launched onto Sunset Boulevard from the fourth floor of the animation studio, when who should happen by but Mr. Eisner.... read it for yourself to find out what happens next!