Motion picture funnies

I was going to write in more detail about all those great cartoon videos I found yesterday, but I've noticed that whenever I've written about cartoons here in the past I always seem to sound strangely humourless, like I'm trying to come across as scholarly and not succeeding. I have no idea why, since the last thing I want in life is for people to think I know what I'm talking about.

On the other hand, I've got nothing better to write about tonight, and I'm still fascinated by the choice of cartoons to put on each tape. Not that I think 'choice' really came into it, it was obviously more a case of digging out the first public domain cartoons that came to hand from the pile, compiling them into a video, chopping off the copyright notices and title cards in some cases (I don't know if that makes them more or less legal, but a lot of these video collections do it), slapping a cheaply drawn cover on and selling it to people so excited by these new VCR things that they'll buy anything.

Although of course all the cartoons on these tapes are good ones, and some are really excellent. So I shouldn't be too scathing. The cover to the 'Betty Boop Noveltoon One' video [Noveltoons were the series that produced 'Tarts And Flowers', but not any of the other five much earlier cartoons on the tape] is in fact drawn by "Marc", an artist I admire greatly. If you're the kind of strange person who collects 80s/90s cheap cartoon videos, you might have encountered Marc without noticing it. I mainly know him as the artist responsible for the covers of 'Krypton Force' releases of the Japanese cartoons known in the USA as 'Force Five'.

These cartoons are five sci-fi series: Dangard Ace/Wakusei Robo Dangard A; Grandizer/UFO Robot Grandizer; Gaiking/Daiku Maryu; Spaceketeers/SF Saiyuki Starzinger; and Starvengers/Getta Robo G. They're all quite fun if you like that kind of thing, especially Gaiking and Starvengers, involving teams of heroes piloting giant robots to fight aliens [my brother will tell you that Spaceketeers is the technically superior and most entertaining one of the collection, so it's each to his own, obviously]. The American translations are mostly very good, although the voice acting is sometimes pretty bad, and the dialogue occasionally quite stupid.

In the UK, these never made it to television, but Krypton Force the video company got their hands on at least some episodes. Their policy for selling them was to give gullible children the impression they were buying Transformers videos (this was when anything with the Transformers logo, or something similar, on it was selling like hot robot cakes). So they retitled the series with names like 'Formators' and 'Sci-Bots', and had Marc draw the covers. I don't know how Marc got this job. Although he was proud enough of his work to sign every cover with his first name or pseudonym, he isn't a great artist. His drawings are collages of swipes from the episodes, drawn with minimal grasp of perspective and none of scale, and pictures of Transformers and other robots. Sometimes they would just cut pictures of Transformers out of books and stick them on the cover, sometimes Marc would professionally disguise them a bit, for instance by keeping the body unchanged but drawing the head of one of the characters from the video on top.

His cover for the Betty Boop collection is one of his most ambitious - it even has a background! I would date this from his later period, when he'd started to get almost experimental. Rather than drawing Betty Boop on the cover (perhaps they hadn't decided on the title when they commissioned him), he opted to draw the setting of Cakeland from the Little Audrey cartoon. It turns out kind of like Cakeland would have looked if Picasso had drawn it, but it does look quite pretty. In the foreground, we have renditions of Little Audrey, plus Porky Pig and the cat from 'Notes To You'. They're direct swipes of poses from the cartoons, of course, but he's gone to the trouble of drawing a slice of cake in Porky's hand, which is a nice touch. Audrey is twice Porky's height, which is a little strange.

On the back cover are three frames from the actual cartoons, again with no actual Betty Boop (the three Betty cartoons on the tape are black and white, and the other three are colour, so they probably wanted to give the impression that purchasers were getting a full-colour extravaganza for their money) and a list of the cartoon titles, with an impressive four out of six spelt correctly.