| Pogo For President! |
[Apr. 9th, 2008|07:15 am] |
A few posts back, I went on one of my fan-enduced rants about how great the original King Kong is. The movie is a marvel of stop motion animation, even by modern standards. Sure, it's not as polished as the stuff we have today, but it was way ahead of its time.
With he election season upon, how could I nearly forget one of my favorite stop-motion animated features of all-time, Pogo For President?! (a.k.a. I Go Pogo) If I'm not mistaken, I believe it was an adaptation of an earlier body of work by Pogo comic artist Walt Kelly, who was long dead by then. However, I've never seen the actual comic story this is based on.
And not to show my age or anything, but this movie is so old that I actually remember video taping it off of Spectrum, a Chicago-based subscription TV service that worked by descrambling a broadcast UHF signal (Channel 66) during a time that Chicago didn't have cable services. Such a service is absurd by today's standards. Even then, it wasn't tremendously difficult to descramble analog pay channels.
In fact, the TV in my bedroom was notorious for defeating scrambled channels. Hey, it wasn't like I modded it! I just noticed one day that I was picking up Wrestlemania for no apparent reason. It wasn't until some time later that I mentioned it to my dad, who, of course, didn't mind watching a few free movies every now and then at the expense of HBO, Showtime, and whatever pay-per-view service we had. But I think I'm digressing.
The point is that this was the early 80s, and it was back in a day when shit like Gumby was what you had for stop-motion animation. I hate Gumby so much. In contrast, this was incredibly animated, and all you needed was one viewing to spoil you for life. It is impossible to watch Gumby after watching Pogo For President. Pogo truly set a standard that would later be matched (and then surpassed) by Wallace and Gromit.
The voice work was top notch, too, featuring most prominantly the voices of Vincent Price and Jonathan Winters, the latter voicing two roles. The features a number of great actors with whom I'm not fully aquainted, but one that stands out is Arnold Stang, who some of you children of the 80s will remember as the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee.
The movie had a very peculiar theory of color. Like the comic, it didn't use a lot of primary colors. For a film that takes place in a swamp, you very seldomly see the color green (aside from ol' Albert the alligator!). The trees were a very peculiar color, and the folliage was almost blue. Back in those days, I didn't realize that the animators were trying to copy the arresting style of the comic, so I tried in vain to adjust the tint on the TV, much the annoyance of my folks. You could tell that there was care put into this film so as not to dishonor the source property.
Sadly, this was the 80s, and despite all creative attempts to keep this pure and wholesome, there was some 80sness that crept into the picture. Namely the music. While the music, for the most part, stayed in context with the southern setting, it did occaisionally creep into 80s pop by playing a number of irritating songs that had nothing to do with the story. All of a sudden, there'd be a Pogo music video in the middle of the movie.
Also unfortunate is that there are no good videos online of Pogo For President, aside from this clip featuring Porky Pine voiced by Jonathan Winters. It doesn't really do the feature any justice, though.
If you've never encountered Pogo before, you're in for an initial shock. The dialogue is almost entirely done in local color, meaning that everyone talks with a drawl, and the ignorance of the characters is played for comedy. You actually have to stop and think sometimes to figure out what subject matter they're muddling before you get the joke.
For some time, I didn't even realize that Pogo was a comic series. That is until Bill Watterson, author of Calvin & Hobbes, mentioned Walt Kelly as one of his inspirations. It took me some time to track down an actual Pogo comic, and to this day, my own comic collection is sorely lacking. But, I do make an occaisional trip to the library, so I've been catching up on Pogo and his hilarious band of pals.
Incidentally, Pogo did return to the funny pages, although obviously with new artists behind the strip. Almost universally panned, I didn't mind it so much. The new stips are of the same stylistic quality that has been lacking in newspaper comics since the 70s, even if Walt Kelly himself isn't doing the strip.
In recent years, I've also learned that Pogo For President wasn't the only animated feature based on Pogo. There was another special, entitled The Pogo Special Birthday Special, animated traditionally by Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones. The cartoon predates its claymation counterpart, and, naturally, all the voices are completely different. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to find this. And thanks to Youtube, we now have the ability to see it...
What petition do we have to sign to get these two pieces of animation on DVD? Together, even! No sense in releasing them separately. I'd pay for it.
Editorial Note: Hey, wait a minute! I ran some system updates this morning, and Ijust noticed that the YouTube videos no longer have that annoying "Click to activate" thing anymore. Did Microsoft finally pay off whoever it was that was making them do that? At last! |
|
|
