Dan Dare - Voyage to Venus animation

Russell Devlin posted this on YouTube almost a year ago, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, there are worse ways to spend it. According to Devlin, "This is the feature version of my earlier posted Dan Dare webseries for those of you who prefer it in that format. It is essentially the same, but with individual ep titles removed and editing to make the eps flow better together."

Ted Percival (d. 2011)

Ted Percival (far right, in uniform). At the top of the steps, smoking, is Reg Parlett

Ted Percival, whose career in animation stretched over five decades, recently died in hospital. He had been ill since shortly before Christmas. After suffering a bout of pneumonia which weakened him further, he died on the morning of 3 February.

William E. (Ted) Percival was one of the animators who worked on the 'Animaland' cartoons at Moor Hall for Gaumont-British Animation. His credits include The Lion (1948), The Ostrich (1948), The House-Cat (1949). One of his former colleagues described him as "a lovely man, always singing as he went along the corridors at Moor Hall."

When GB Animation closed its doors, Percival went to work with Pat Griffin, another Moor Hall refugee, at an animation production unit at the top of Castle Hill, Maidenhead, working on commercials. Percival later recalled "Whenever [Pat] wanted to see us, he would roll a cannon ball down the stairs - thumpety, thumpety, thump."

He subsequently worked with another former Moor Hall animator, Jack Stokes, who was directing episodes of a series of Beatles animated shows made for the United States by George Dunning's T.V.C. London animation company. Percival animated sequences based on various Beatles songs, including 'Twist & Shout', 'I'm Happy Just to Dance with You' and 'Tell Me Why'. When the TV series, broadcast on ABC in 1965-68, came to an end, George Dunning went on to direct the animated Beatles feature film Yellow Submarine (1968). Percival was one of 200 animators who put the whole movie together in only eleven months.

Percival's later animation credits include The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979), directed by Bill Melendez, the TV series Willo the Wisp (1981) for Nicholas Spargo's Cartoon Films Ltd., episodes of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (1983) and Muzzy in Gondoland (1986).

Percival, who lived in Pinkney's Green, Maidenhead, met Elizabeth (Bettina) Hansford, a key background artist, at Moor Hall. They were married in 1949.

(* My thanks to Bob Egby for passing on the news. The Beatles pic is from this site, which has some additional information on the animated TV show.)

Cartoon Censorship (1939)

Digging thorugh some old copies of the British weekly Everybody's, I found the above article on censorship in American animated cartoons. The article dates from 15 April 1939 when the Hays Code was being strongly enforced on Hollywood's output and as rigidly applied to cartoons as it was to live action movies.

Looking around to find a little more information, I discovered that the article wasn't original but based on an feature that had appeared a few months earlier in the American Look magazine (17 January 1939), a scan of which I found at the Cartoon Brew website.





As you can see, the original runs more examples than the version that appeared in Everybody's, although Everybody's was able to run some images with additional colour. The feature was put together with the aid of Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger, who was instrumental in bringing characters like Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny to the big screen. Some of the images are taken from cartoons--the hula-dancing mermaid is from the 1935 Merrie Melodies cartoon Mr. And Mrs. Is The Name, which was one of the first cartoons to use the tag-line "That's All Folks" which was to become a familiar phrase at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons.

Everybody's, like many general magazines in the UK, made plenty of use of cartoons, some of which I'll post over the next few days.