Blog 8 for 3/23/2010 John Lyver, Scrappy
For Blog 8 I decided to see why Scrappy was not ultimately successful. I watched Scrappy’s Band Concert This cartoon though still in the times of black and white was very dry and not terribly humorous. There seemed to be no real main character of the cartoon and little to no plot line. Scrappy was not as successful as other cartoons of his day like those of the Disney cartoons.
I noticed that many of the motions in this cartoon were repeated over and over again, this is of course to lower the amount of frames the animators had to draw but they style of it being repetitious got to be very boring very quickly. The cartoon itself just seemed very repetitious and did not seem to be going anywhere. I can see why the theater owner quoted in chapter 8 was displeased with these cartoons. I also noticed the character Scrappy himself looked a lot like the other cartoon characters of the time especially Mickey Mouse, all you would need to do is add ears and a tail and a nose and Scrappy went from human to our adorable pal Mickey.
I wanted to look at another Scrappy cartoon to see if perhaps it was only that one episode that was not so good. So I watched another Scrappy cartoon called ‘Showing Off’. Scrappy in this cartoon is less serious then he was in the other cartoon. However, the cartoon still seemed to lack anything of particular interest or humor. This cartoon had some more cute moments then the first one, it was still rather boring though and the background was very plain and hardly moved which placed more focus on the characters. The characters were not that interesting either. Scrappy also tried to win the girl by smoking a cigar, which would have been more acceptable in cartoons in the 30s then it would be today.
In light of other cartoons Scrappy seems to be lost in the popularity of other cartoons and does not stack up to the popularity of its competitors.
I commented on Rebecca Townsend’s blog at http://rtownse4.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/blog-post-8-western-spaghetti/#comment-11
March 23, 2010 at 6:11 am
That’s one thing that the viewer immediately picks up on in a cartoon: how often the same animations are recycled. I find that I’ll lose my attention and interest in it much easier if I feel like I’ve seen the same clip recycled multiple times. If done too often, it really does start to feel sloppy and hastily done.