Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Ii Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

Animating the Science Fiction Imagination ii Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

J. P. Telotte

1 iv

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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

1. Introduction: Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination 1

2. Flights of Fantasy 23

3. Of Robots and Artificial Beings 43

4. Alien Visions 65

5. Inventions, Modern Marvels, and Mad Scientists 85

Postscript: New SF Images for a Postwar World 105

A Prewar and Early War Animated Science Fiction Filmography 127

Notes 133

A Science Fiction Animation Bibliography 139 Index 145 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As is usually the case, this book would not be possible without the contributions of a great many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Over several years, various members of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts sat patiently through papers that formed the basis for several chapters, asking the usual good questions and helping to sharpen my focus. My respected colleague in film studies, Murray Pomerance, provided early encouragement on the project and even offered a possible path to publication. Fellow faculty members and the students at Georgia Tech (GT) kindly—or dutifully—listened as I recounted, far too many times, why I thought a body of largely forgotten animation was important to our thinking about science fiction as a genre; since GT frames intellectual inquiry as a rather exciting activity, they were always supportive and even enthusiastic. Among the faculty, let me especially offer my thanks to Lisa Yaszek, Carol Senf, and Krystina Madej, and from among the typically bright students in my Animation and Science Fiction Film and Television courses, I would especially note Kyle Jenkins, Emily King, Andrew Lippens, and Fletcher Maffett. The Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Richard Utz, was as ever unfailingly encouraging, while Jacqueline Royster, Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at GT, provided crucial support by giving me the Distinguished Research Professor award, the funds from which allowed me to finish this project in a timely manner. Other colleagues outside of GT, especially those who know the field of animation much better than I do—Donald Crafton, Richard Neupert, Tommy Stathes, Jerry Beck—all kindly responded to out-of- the-blue inquiries, readily sharing their knowledge and advice. Special mention is also due to the editors at Science Fiction Studies, especially Carol McGuirk who, after proofing my article on the subject, reinforced my efforts by noting that the topic “really could (should) be a book.” Finally, I am especially grateful to the editorial group at Oxford University Press—Norman Hirschy for his viii

immediate encouragement and enthusiasm for the project, Lauralee Yeary for carefully shepherding me through the many details of the publication process, and the skilled reviewers who helped reshape my thinking and in the process shaped this volume in a great many helpful ways. Finally, the production team at OUP deserves mention, especially Alphonsa James who was most efficient. I very much enjoyed working on this project, and part of the pleasure was in my dealings with these many colleagues and publishing professionals.

[ viii ] Acknowledgments CHAPTER 1 Introduction

Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination

ong before the 24½ century when Warner Brothers’ Duck Dodgers

Lpatrolled the universe amid a relative explosion of live-action science fiction (SF) films and television programs, an established if little-observed tradition of SF animation was already flourishing. In fact, decades before Daffy Duck’s first appearance as Dodgers in 1953, and while SF was struggling to find even a scant place in live-action cinema—a place mostly defined by serials likeThe Phantom Empire (1935), Undersea Kingdom (1936), Buck Rogers (1939), and the various Flash Gordon films (1936, 1938, 1940)—many of the key animation studios of the 1910s to 1940s were regularly offering their own visions of standard genre concerns like space travel, robots, aliens, and futuristic technology. During this pre-war era, such noted figures of animation as Paul Terry, Otto Messmer, Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and Max and Dave Fleischer ranged across a variety of SF subjects and themes that both reflected and, through their exaggerated and largely comic presentations, critiqued science and technology’s growing presence in and influence on modern life. This book examines that body of material to consider how early animation’s modernist links afforded the emerging genre of SF, and what we might more broadly think of as the SF imagination, a fertile if generally satiric ground for development before World War II temporarily displaced many of those scientific and technological concerns from our movie screens. 2

This investigation began as a result of a rather simple observation: that even though our histories of SF have acknowledged and often discussed a great variety of texts that have helped shape the growth and our understanding of this important genre—texts in such areas as literature, feature films and serials, comic books and comic strips, and radio programs—some other generic efforts, particularly those in animation, have largely escaped cataloguing and discussion. This omission is especially surprising and even troubling since the pre–World War II era was so crucial to the formation of the SF genre and the development of what Brooks Landon terms “science fiction thinking” (4). During this period SF was just beginning to establish an identity, a corpus of important concerns, a solid fan base, and, after much discussion, even settle upon an acceptable title, as throughout the pre-war era SF went by a variety of names, such as scientifiction, scientific romance, scientific stories, pseudo-scientific stories, and science fantasy.1 However, it seems that most of our efforts to write the history of and better understand this formative period of SF have overlooked a fairly significant body of animated material that treated most of the same subjects as the literature, while speaking in appealing and even meaningful ways to a wide viewership. These neglected texts, I would argue, represent a significant contribution to the development of the SF imagination, which in turn helped shape our sense of the SF genre as it increasingly spread across a broadening media landscape. Throughout the course of its growth into one of the most popular of genres, SF has benefited greatly from this spreadable character, that is, from an ability shared by few other genres to function effectively in and across an array of media while addressing multiple audiences.2 Prior to World War II, its early development was especially marked not only by the growth of a highly speculative and serious literature, particularly in Europe, but also by an explosion of popular pulp literature; SF began to find a place in live- action cinema with both a handful of expensive and even epic-in-scope features such as Metropolis (Germany, 1927), The Mysterious Island (US, 1929), and Things to Come (UK, 1936), and with the more popularly oriented, less-ambitious but action-packed serials; it provided material for numerous radio dramatizations, most spectacularly with Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation of War of the Worlds, but also with broadcast versions of the exploits of various superheroes and spacemen drawn from the comic strips; and it inspired a variety of those comic strips and comic books, featuring characters such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Superman, all of whom would, in time, provide further inspiration for movie and later for television adaptation. All of these manifestations of the SF imagination helped

[ 2 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination fuel the genre’s early progress and set the stage for its well-chronicled postwar upsurge in popularity. And as this volume will chronicle, animation represents one more, if largely forgotten ingredient in this “spread,” one that shares some obvious relationships as a result of what John Cheng describes as the “period’s culture of popular science” (6). That kinship is rooted not just in a common fascination with science and technology, nor in their common exploitation of the science consciousness and its imagery that so marked what has generally come to be known as the Machine Age,3 but also in the modernist underpinnings of both forms. Of course, various commentators have previously linked both SF and animation to modernism, so perhaps the connection I want to build on is hardly surprising, although some of the bases for this linkage are worth spelling out. What Carl Freedman describes as SF’s fundamental emphases on “world-invention” and “subject-formation” (139), that is, its implicit challenge to revision both the world and the self, to, as Ezra Pound would offer, make both “new,” are certainly symptomatic of modernism’s broader questioning of all received forms, particularly as these two thrusts follow from the relatively recent notion that both the world and the self have a provisional, rather than a fixed and unchanging nature. And far more than simply inspiring exciting visions of what the future might hold for our world or ourselves, or, after the fashion of Jules Verne’s long-running and genre-inspiring series of novels, his Voyages Extraordinaires, depicting adventurous trips through every sort of space—through the air, under water, under the Earth’s surface, into space—the modernist spirit that surged through the newfangled literature of SF suggested a different sense of both time and space,4 and thus a potential for seeing the world and the self differently—that is, from another vantage and as something else. It is this potential that is at the core of Darko Suvin’s famous definition of the genre as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (7), or, as Rob Latham has amplified, as “a literary form that functioned to defamiliarize, critique, and/or satirize present-day reality” (2). That potential to “estrange” how and what we see is also an obvious part of the genre’s ties to animation, which has always offered its own strange visions, its own often satiric assaults on given reality, even, as we shall see, its own critiques of our far less pliable world. In his history of SF, though, Adam Roberts cautions against making too simple an equation between SF and the modernist spirit—a caution that has echoed as well in many discussions of animation. Roberts suggests that we need to distinguish between the representatives of what he terms “High Modernism” and the “Low Modernists” or “popular culture

Introduction [ 3 ] 4

artists” (157), two groups that did not share quite the same attitudes toward the hallmarks of the modern. The former, while embracing experiments with form and style (with what we might term the “technological” aspect of writing, for example), often reacted with some “hostility to the technological changes” in the culture that SF literature was both chronicling and championing, and that were part of the new culture of popular science. In contrast, the latter largely embraced that spirit, responding not quite with the sort of serious or “critical” agenda described by Freedman, but, “generally speaking, with excitement and exhilaration” (157) at the prospects for a new and even highly technologized world—or encounters with other such advanced worlds after the fashion promised in some SF. For Roberts and other commentators, the SF of the pulps especially, their brightly colored, graphic, and dynamic covers readily advertising the exciting nature of the stories within, were most obviously emblematic of this “Low Modernist” spirit and, like other popular culture elements, needed to be seen in almost a separate category from that of any “High” art. It seems a relatively easy and even useful move to recognize something of that same “Low” spirit, along with a most obvious graphic or visual kinship, in what is obviously another of those “popular culture” categories— the work of the rapidly proliferating animation companies, especially those of the American cinema. Led by the Fleischers, Terry, Disney, and Walter Lantz among others, these companies produced a great number of short films that seemed to celebrate movement; that, as the acclaimed Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein pronounced, marked “a departure… from once and forever prescribed norms of nomenclature, form and behav- iour” (10); that found their very purpose in a popular “excitement and exhilaration” typically embodied in their emblematic and highly energized characters—Mickey Mouse, KoKo the Clown, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Bimbo, Bosko, Scrappy, Willie Whopper, and many others. Moreover, they managed these considerable accomplishments through mechanical means and within an industry—the film industry—that had taken its own existence from a series of scientific and technological developments that recast the very nature of representation. They were, in short, machine products, part of a machine culture, and as such partly science fictional in nature— works that we might think of as genetically SF. Their own sort of visual estrangements or comic exaggerations are both born from and give insight into these technological roots. Esther Leslie has at some length traced out the workings of this modernist spirit in animation from the 1900s to approximately 1940, describing how it especially managed to absorb the “fragmentation and disintegration”

[ 4 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination that were commonly seen as modernist impulses “into its law of form, making clear how constructed not only it is but also the social world—ripe for transformation” (122). In fact, she argues that through their presentation of such an obviously “constructed” and “permutable world” (22), most cartoons of this era effectively united those “High” and “Low” modernisms (v) that Roberts identifies, not just because film itself was widely perceived as a modernist form—as it was—but because animation occupied a special cinematic category. Rather than an art based on the recording of reality, and thus one already anchored in the presentation of what is, animation from its earliest moments seemed in a thoroughly modernist way to move away from the real and the realism of a live-action cinema, to visualize what might be. It deployed its parodic potential in a typically modernist fashion to open up a “universe of transformation, overturning, and provisionality” (Leslie vi), perhaps best exemplified by the first great star of animation, Felix the Cat, with his ready ability to turn bits of scenery, word balloons, or his infinitely malleable tail into whatever prop a situation might call for. That constantly new and graphic universe, much in the fashion of the emerging literature of SF with its inherently utopian thrust, that is, its own emphasis on what might be, implicitly challenged traditional ways of seeing and thinking about our world, offering at least a visual variation on Suvin’s notion of a “literature of cognitive estrangement.”

Figure 1.1 Charlie Chaplin as cut-up animation in Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924).

Introduction [ 5 ] 6

It is probably because of this impulse that animation in both conventional and experimental forms was so readily embraced by the period’s avant-garde artists, many of them also mixing together depictions of technology with their own animated work. Among these figures and their efforts we might note Walter Ruttmann, as demonstrated in his abstract Opus films of 1921, 1923, 1924, and 1925; Hans Richter with hisRhythmus 21 (1921); Viking Eggeling and his Constructivist work Symphonie Diagonale (1924); and Fernand Léger with his surrealist Ballet Mécanique (1924) (Figure 1.1). These first abstract animated (or hybrid, mixing animation and live action, after the fashion of the Fleischers and early Walt Disney) films were all efforts to connect a new sort of high art to the cinema, even, argu- ably, a kind of SF, resulting in what Cecile Starr has variously described as “fine art animation” and as “pure cinema” (67), while also reflexively high- lighting that cinema’s own highly mechanical/technological nature. But even popular cartoons, it seems, readily betrayed more than just traces of this modernist character. Well before John R. Bray began producing cartoon versions of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in 1920, this comic figure had been widely embraced as a kindred spirit to the surrealist movement and Herriman’s comic strip lauded by the art critic Gilbert Seldes as “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today” (231). Early entries in the Fleischers’ “Out of the Inkwell” series would tap into this same modernist spirit, particularly in a work like KoKo Gets Egg-Cited (1923), wherein the animated clown turns the tables on his animator, himself “drawing” Max Fleischer and his seemingly “real” world, and in the process turning our view of the world inside out, rendering it not as producer but as something produced. And Eisenstein visited Disney’s studio and praised his early work in particular for its “plasmaticness,” that is, for its embrace “of all-possible diversity of form,” while reject- ing the “mercilessly standardized and mechanically measured” (21) images of conventional art, including much of what constituted the cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. As the animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi offers, in this period animation seemed, for many, to be signaling that there was a “decisive” linkage between “the history of film” and “the history of art culture” (12), to be quite literally “drawing” the two together as part of an emerging modernist culture that saw the world and the self as flexible, constructed, and open to change. However, other commentators have demurred with Leslie’s ready linkage of animation and modernism, or at least with what Roberts terms “High Modernism.” Given the great number of cartoons aimed largely at a popular culture, and thus presumably an unsophisticated audience, Paul Wells suggests that, at least in America, we should more accurately

[ 6 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination consider all animation of the pre-war years as occupying a highly compromised category, that of a “conservative modernism,” a version that, while at times suggesting the “contingency of Modern art,” usually did so while actually embracing “the familiar” and the comfortable in the culture (Animation and America 27), thereby insulating its audience from any modernist thrust or the discomforts of change. If in its “plasmaticness” or “permutable” visions the form often “called attention to itself and its departure from the normal conventions of graphic representation,” he offers, it did so only on a stylistic level and “to properly facilitate a view of contemporary life rather than a resistant perspective upon it,” such as modernism often seemed to promise (Animation and America 27). The result is a body of animation throughout the period under consideration “in which assimilation and de-familiarisation are simultaneous effects,” that is, films wherein the “excitement” of the new is always yoked to and ultimately qualified by, even wrapped within the comforts of an older, “familiar” world and worldview (Animation and America 27). This perspective, drawn from Frederick Karl’s effort to delineate various levels of modernism—“radical,” “moderate,” and “conservative” versions (14)—is in keeping with the Marxist suspicion of all popular culture, or what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno influ- entially labeled “the culture industry” (94). As a foremost product of that industry, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, all of film—and they specifically include the animated cartoon—effectively “debars the spectator from thinking,” while “repressing the powers of imagination” (100). Thus that “conservative modernist” designation that Wells offers suggests a level on which animation is hardly modernist at all, since it remains “predicated upon the idioms of popular entertainment” (Animation and America 27) and an affirmation of the status quo. I want to argue here that neither perspective is adequate, that neither a true or “High” modernism nor this conservative interpretation properly accounts for the animation produced by the American cartoon industry in this period, especially when it comes to addressing an animated SF. In offering her own parsing of modernism and its role in the cinema, Miriam Hansen offers a more useful notion, as she suggests that we might better think of film’s modernist thrust as representing a kind of “vernacular modernism,” a manner of discourse that operates on the “quotidian” or “everyday” level, but that also mobilizes the cinematic art’s “new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception, a new relationship with ‘things,’ different forms of mimetic experience and expression” (60). While Hansen is primarily talking about how narrative cinema of the 1910s through the early 1940s typically worked, her comments also ring true for animation, especially when she describes how film “opened

Introduction [ 7 ] 8

Figure 1.2 Interplanetary Revolution’s vision of spaceships on Mars (1924).

up hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience,” affording audiences a “new visuality” that could, in a clearly modernist— and just as clearly science fictional—sense, suggest “a different organization of the daily world” (72). Hansen’s “vernacular” take on the modernist spirit seems a particularly useful one for considering the work of animation, since it suggests a sort of double vision that can help account for both the artistic embrace of animation and the popular enjoyment of the form, as well as animation’s special role in the development of a cinematic SF during the pre- war era—SF that represented a new and challenging sort of narrative but that, in this period, was more often than not generally conservative in its implications. Certainly, that sense of film’s—and animation’s—“new visuality” suggests that some dimension of modernism’s subversive impact was both implicit and even inevitable, as it accustomed us to see differently, effectively translating the unfamiliar into the “vernacular.” Thus, that impact was not confined to such pointedly radical texts as the Soviet revolutionary SF cartoon Interplanetary Revolution (1924) (Figure 1.2), in which the heroic Comrade Cominternov rockets to Mars to help purge the planet of its peculiar anthropomorphs—its grotesquely depicted, animal-like Capitalists. Yet at the same time Hansen’s view allows us to acknowledge Wells’s observation, that often this impact was tamed or

[ 8 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 1.3 A proto-animation scene in Georges Méliès’s Deux cents milles sous les mers (1907). naturalized, or, more accurately, diluted in the relatively harmless humor of the animated world. Let me emphasize, though, that I do not mean to frame these texts within a conventional ideological explanation. For that sort of vantage itself tends to tame how we see these films, by dissolving or passing off the tension that especially marks the period’s SF animation—a tension that results in some texts that are largely a string of gags based on the emerging motifs of SF, and in others that deploy those motifs in quite challenging, at times even unsettling ways. By working from the sort of double vision that Hansen’s take on modernism implies, though, we might in various ways denaturalize these texts, allow them to be seen in their dynamic nature, or as Norman Klein more evocatively—and usefully—suggests, as “a package always about to explode, always at war with its nature” (106). From this vantage we can also better glimpse how their internal dynamic links to their SF nature, how certain key SF subjects or motifs are indeed often tamed—usually by satire—for general consumption, but also how at other times that explosive potential lingers, allowing for an animated SF to offer its own take on the sort of “world-invention” and “subject-formation” that Freedman describes—or simply, as in the Fleischers’ cartoon Up to Mars (1930), to actually explode any conventional view. In the process, we might

Introduction [ 9 ] 10

also start to see how such popular culture texts helped, throughout the pre-war period, to sediment the often challenging imagination of SF into American and eventually world culture, making its sometime problematic visions seem all the more acceptable, even inevitable for a modern technological society. Before describing this body of animated SF, though, we might first consider at least briefly why these films have been largely overlooked by both SF and film genre scholars. As we have already noted, commentators on both animation and SF have generally jumped over this period, observing that there are what we might term proto-animation efforts to be found in the work of pioneer SF/fantasy filmmaker Georges Méliès (Figure 1.3) or noting the crude cut-up example of a foreign cartoon like the previously cited Interplanetary Revolution (1924), but then usually shifting attention to the World War II period and the Fleischers’ Superman cartoons of 1941– 43 with their obvious array of SF conventions, of robots, mad scientists, and fantastic inventions.5 These historians have commonly assumed, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., does, that, until the post–World War II period, “the art form was not particularly attracted to SF’s generic strengths” (30). As a result, nearly forty years’ work in this convergent area has received scant or no attention, much less critical commentary and assessment. The reasons for this oversight are both understandable and yet in some ways surprising. They also require that we first contextualize this work, framing early US animation production, which generally dominated the international market, within its industrial situation in order to better understand how its animated cartoons, which also dominated the market, have been perceived. Throughout the pre–World War II period and in the American film industry on which this study largely focuses, most of the major feature film studios, as well as some of the smaller ones, regularly distributed cartoons to accompany their productions, either through the work of in-house animation units or, more commonly, through contracts with small, dedicated animation companies. Thus, Paramount distributed the Fleischer Studios’ cartoons, which featured KoKo the Clown, Betty Boop, Bimbo, and Popeye, among others; Universal handled Disney and later Walter Lantz films, especially those starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, originated by Disney but transferred to Lantz; MGM sponsored Iwerks’s Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper cartoons before creating an animation unit of its own; Fox (later 20th Century-Fox) sponsored Paul Terry’s Terrytoons, featuring Farmer Al Falfa and later Mighty Mouse; for a time Universal, United Artists, and RKO, in order, distributed Disney’s works, providing temporary homes for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other Disney characters; Columbia handled Charles Mintz’s productions,

[ 10 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination especially those featuring his Scrappy character; and Warner Bros. contracted first with Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising and later with Leon Schlesinger before integrating Schlesinger’s unit into the larger studio as the famed “Termite Terrace,” wherein creations like Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Marvin the Martian would eventually roam. Thanks to their facilities, organization, and/or theater chains, these major studios managed to dominate American film production, distribution, and exhibition throughout this period and beyond, and thus played a leading role in shaping public attitudes and fashion, both in the United States and abroad. I would suggest that we see these studios’ creation of a body of SF cartoons as a part of that shaping, reflecting an effort throughout this period, as Eric Smoodin describes the larger animation industry, at influencing and “regulating audience desire and behavior” (9), especially in the face of an increasingly science and technology-inflected culture. But if they were indeed a part of this shaping of a modern, technological culture, and according to Smoodin involved in a wide variety of “discourses about power, behavior, and social control” (1), why have our SF cartoons been largely overlooked? One perhaps already obvious explanation lies in the nature of that industrial circumstance. At least until the war years, few of those major film studios bothered to produce these cartoons themselves. Seeing them as no more than supporting material and with a marginal appeal—as well as a marginal addition to the bottom line of profits—they generally farmed out cartoon production to the small, specialized animation companies noted above, such as the Fleischer, Mintz, Iwerks, Van Beuren, and Disney studios, among others, all of which survived on slim profits as they orbited the greater film industry. If the large studios, whose names typically preceded the titles of these cartoons, did not see this work as very important, then we might well understand why many SF and genre critics and historians would have a similar view and would tend to neglect these early contributions to the genre. Another of those understandable answers follows from the nature of the product. In this pre-war period the animation industry was largely specialized around what is known as the seven-minute cartoon. This short form was commonly seen as a relatively minor adjunct or “added attraction” to the feature film presentation, that is, a brief bit of filler in the larger bill of offerings that almost all US theaters provided to patrons from the 1910s into the 1960s. And just like the other one- and two-reel attractions that helped to fill out the typical theatrical bill, the cartoon has seldom been seen as meriting—or rewarding—the same level of attention that historians and critics have accorded the feature film, even if the cartoon has, in more recent years, managed to escape the sort of historical and critical

Introduction [ 11 ] 12

neglect that still marks most of its cohorts on the bill: travelogues like the FitzPatrick Traveltalks, live-action comic shorts such as the Joe McDoakes or Robert Benchley films, crime tales like MGM’s long-running Crime Does Not Pay series, dramatized historical oddities such as John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade, and so on. But while they have, for various reasons, proved less ephemeral than these other short subjects, pre-war cartoons, with few exceptions, have still commonly been perceived in much the way that the animation historian Stefan Kanfer describes them, as “bright, brittle entertainments without much substance or importance” (15), and thus lacking, much as Paul Wells suggests, the ability to “embrace and facilitate serious issues and agendas” (Animation and America 5), such as those often and openly taken up by many of SF’s literary texts, even by much of the at times maligned pulp fiction. Moreover, the audience for such “brittle” efforts has generally been perceived as being of a very different character than that for the new literature of SF. In this same period, SF established a ready and enthusiastic audience with the readers of pulp magazines like Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories, and Wonder Stories—an audience that often overlapped with the new popular science periodicals of the time, such as Modern Electrics, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science Monthly (some of which were produced by the same publishers who did the pulp fiction magazines). Certainly, there is some disagreement about the nature of that SF readership—and the genre’s fandom—in this early period, as Edward James has at some length sketched out. On the one hand he notes the often “simplistic characterizations of SF readers” that some commentators have offered, including the notion that this audience was typically male and “stuck in an adoles- cent state of mind,” but on the other he describes how some historians have also characterized that audience as being rather “exceptional” and far more interested in “ideas” than many readers of more traditional literature (98–99). A survey of the early SF pulps, at least of their various “Reader’s Corner” (later “Brass Tacks,” Astounding Stories) or “The Reader Speaks” (Wonder Stories) columns, quickly reveals that there was indeed a very serious readership, including a strong female component, that was quite aware of the “idea” orientation of this literature. But more generally, and more to the point for this discussion, there was, as Cheng has chronicled, a pal- pable sense in this audience that the SF imagination was actually forecasting scientific and technological reality, as if the genre were inviting all of its readers to play a role in what he terms a “participatory science” (84), providing them not simply entertainment or escape, but something much more important—a feeling that they might “read science fiction to situate both its facts and its fictions within the circumstances of their lives”

[ 12 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination (83). By reading this new sort of fiction, many apparently felt, as those letter columns further suggest, that they could better understand the new technological culture in which they were immersed and, armed with that understanding, help to change attitudes, cultural circumstance, and even perceived reality, very much in the modernist spirit (Figure 1.4). In seeming contrast, the typical seven-minute cartoon of the era played to no such specialized audience, perhaps not even to one that was especially fascinated by the latest developments in science and technology. And with the exception of a character like Betty Boop, there seems little in these films of a direct address to female viewers. But here too,

Figure 1.4 The “new visuality” of the SF pulps: a cover forAmazing Stories.

Introduction [ 13 ] 14

the precise nature of that audience has remained open to debate. Thus the preeminent historian of the Hollywood cartoon, Michael Barrier, suggests that a double view of this audience was also current and appropriate. While many within the film industry operated as if the cartoon was just a portion of the bill that was designed to attract children, thereby helping to lure the entire family to the theater, many animators claim to have aimed their work at more of an adult audience. Certainly, the titles of many cartoons, with their plays on words and obvious allusions to adult-oriented feature films, suggest as much. And in support of this view, Barrier points to the paid adult admissions for such landmark films as Three Little Pigs (1933) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and to the adult war workers and those in uniform “who responded enthusi- astically to the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons a few years later” (x). And to this point we might add, as evidence, the government’s commis- sioning and use of such cartoons as effective training and propaganda tools throughout World War II. Offering a more specific characterization of that viewership, Wells describes the cartoon audience as most often adult and broadly “populist” in attitude (Animation and America 23). That populist characterization fits with John Izod’s account of pre-war audiences, wherein he describes how feature films of this period were typically “targeted at a mass audience” with “their scenes and characters” directed at “the broadest possible group of people” (94). As a part of that larger theatrical bill we have described, the cartoon would have been designed to function within this context, that is, with its creators assuming a similar “mass audience” and addressing that audience accordingly, treating subjects and events of topical interest, while framing them in a broadly and highly accessible comic context. But given the large studios’ naïve estimation of the audience, as well as the speed with which the cartoon “product” needed to be produced, those at parent companies such as Warner Bros., MGM, Fox, and Paramount could be expected to have little interest in doing the sort of work that, we might assume, would have most appealed to a real SF fandom. Even if we think of that fandom as only having what some describe as a naïve faith in the power of science and technology, it most likely would have found elements of accuracy or plausibility—that is, getting the science “right,” a point often stressed by editors of the pulp magazines—to be of some interest or importance.6 However, what would have been more important for the studios was getting the cartoons out on time, as per the contracts between the animation groups and their distributors or parent companies. Taking the pains to get the science right would invariably have taken a back seat to schedules, not to mention budgets. In light of this problematic audience/production

[ 14 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination context too, we might expect that the resulting texts would little inspire genre historians, particularly those who, in the past, have often had to fight to have even an avowedly serious SF literature perceived not as just juvenile entertainment but as thoughtful work and a revealing window onto cultural attitudes toward science, technology, and change. Finally, we have to allow that the SF cartoon may have so often been overlooked or excluded from serious consideration simply because it functions in a largely comic vein. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., points us in this direction when he speculates that animation was not “attracted to SF’s generic strengths,” and that what he terms the “high humor of Golden Age cartoons” generally served “to mock realism in narrative, in image, and in ontology” (30). That element of mockery, parody, or satire for some quickly disqualifies the cartoon mode from even being considered as SF, much as it has other comic texts, since it seemingly sets the audience at a distance not only from the real world, but also from the problems and even the potential solutions to those problems—solutions often suggested and explored by the SF text—that beset this world. In effect, many might see the cartoon as trivializing its subjects, the very concerns that are so central to the project of the SF genre, thereby resulting in what Michael North nicely describes as a “critical disesteem for the merely amusing” (85). A related and perhaps even more subversive possibility might be seen in the way that comic animation taps into the very spirit of modernity, even hinting that modernism itself might at some level be at odds with the SF imagination. As North has argued, modernist comedy often suggests “there is something inherently funny” in the whole world of machines and technology, and that the mechanization and repetition that we find paro- died in the characters and actions of figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, in the visual rhythms of Léger’s avant-gardist Ballet Mécanique, or in the absurd inventions produced by the Fleischers’ Professor Grampy character should inspire laughter rather than the sort of appreciation and even inspiration that many SF editors, writers, and fans would hope to locate in the world of science and technology. Comic animation, in short, might reveal a kind of unwitting cleavage between the SF imagination and the modernist spirit by amplifying a machinic absurdity that surges through the genre, at least in its early, formative decades—and that we often glimpse dramatically staged on the pulp magazine covers. The result, in any case, is that SF historians and commentators have usually brack- eted animation off, setting it in a separate, sometimes parallel category and treating it under the subordinate heading of comedy—as has frequently happened with other comic SF texts, such as the television series Red

Introduction [ 15 ] 16

Dwarf or Douglas Adams’s novel/radio program/television series/film A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—all the better to sustain the seriousness of SF’s generic components and social thrust. And yet it remains more than a bit surprising that, at a time when other graphic arts that challenge a limited sense of the genre—comic strips, comic books, pulp covers, fantasy art, even video games—have been accepted into the canon and explored for their links and contributions to the development of SF and a SF fandom, early animation remains largely neglected. As we began by noting, almost every one of the key animation studios explored this generic territory—some far more often than others— while some also demonstrated an especially keen fascination with science and technological issues. Iwerks and Disney, for example, throughout their careers often seemed as concerned with technological developments as with those of narrative, and that concern frequently filtered into their animated efforts, as Disney’s postwar “Man in Space” series most notably attests. The Fleischer Studios could draw on a well-established reputation for their work in science and technology areas, thanks to Max Fleischer’s former position as an editor for Popular Science Monthly and the studio’s early creation of such curious hybrid films asThe Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923) and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (1923). Of course, others may have just been following the common imitative practice of the industry, producing cartoons on proven, familiar, or just timely subjects—including those with an obviously SF character. This pattern is easily glimpsed in Iwerks’sTechno- Cracked and Charles Mintz’s Technoracket, both of which, released within several months of each other in 1933 and at a time when the Technocracy movement was being much discussed, begin with their cartoon stars reading articles on the promise of Technocracy and then building robots in an eager effort to make that promise a reality. But whatever the prompt, the final result is that there does exist a considerable body of SF animation from the pre-war era (as this book’s filmography illustrates), that it represents the work of essentially every major animation studio, and that it is a canon that in recent years, thanks to the Internet, has become generally accessible to researchers as well as SF fans. More important than the various reasons for this neglect is that in these short films we can discover replicated so many of the key SF “memes,” or what Matthew Fuller defines as the “base units of cultural information and change” (111), that were part and parcel of the cultural climate, familiar subjects and topics of discussion in the Machine Age, as well as the source for many of those alluring images featured on the pulps’ vivid covers. Here, for example, we find an interest in the possibilities of rocketry and space travel, brought to the public eye by the well-publicized rocket research of

[ 16 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 1.5 Animation’s timely subjects: Scrappy learns about Technocracy in Technoracket (1933). Columbia Pictures.

Robert H. Goddard; speculations on the nature of other worlds and especially alien beings, prompted by recent developments in astronomy and the emergence of what Cheng refers to as “biology’s new science” with its emphasis on evolution and the diversity of life (153), perhaps throughout the universe; a fascination with robots (along with the Technocratic movement that, as the Iwerks and Mintz cartoons attest, often championed their development) (Figure 1.5); and visualizations of all manner of inventions, typically produced by eccentric, comic, or even “mad” scientists, but also constantly put on display at the numerous World’s Fairs of the era and thus widely reported on in the popular press. Already driving the literature of SF, these concerns were also beginning to make their way into live-action SF films of the era, especially the serials, and would later, most dramatically in the postwar period, become the familiar components of a flourishing and immensely popular SF cinema and television. While Edward James, drawing on the foundational fiction of such figures as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H. G. Wells, has suggested that we might categorize SF literature in terms of particular kinds of stories—the extraordinary voyage, the tale of the future, the tale of science (13)—I want to focus attention here on these recurrent memes or cultural signposts of a developing SF, not to suggest that SF is a simple, stable, convention-bound

Introduction [ 17 ] 18

genre, but to capitalize on that highly visible—and evolving—dimension of the genre, one where the intersection with animation is most readily observable. With a typical length of approximately seven minutes, cartoons of this period simply had little time to develop a complex narrative thrust of the sort that James describes, even though they would at times parody some of the better-known SF texts. And as we have already noted, many of these films were generally structured around a series of gags, themselves more often visual than verbal in nature, so their generative impulse, as well as their primary strength, was often directly tied to a specific meme, such as constructing a robot, building and flying a rocket, or encountering strange new machines or creatures. Moreover, as Gwyneth Jones observes, SF has consistently been dominated by and thus identified through a series of such “icons,” which she describes as convenient signposts by which the SF author or creator manages to “announce the genre … warn the reader that this is a different world, and at the same time constitute that difference” (163). She further suggests that it is possible to identify “a core repertoire of these salient images” (164), such as the rockets, robots, aliens and alien worlds, and strange inventions noted above.7 These memes, representing as they do both central attractions of the cartoon and the process of signaling and decoding the special world of SF, thus seem an especially useful tool for placing the cartoon within a SF context, discussing its operation, and considering some of its contributions to the developing SF imagination. Of course, animation has typically tended to frame these memes in a different context than does much of the genre’s literature. As we have noted, since they were largely comic in thrust, theatrical cartoons most often portrayed science and technology in a way that may have seemed unsuited to addressing serious issues or that situated it outside the pale of conventional SF. Yet Paul Wells, even as he speaks about the larger thrust of animation, further hints at the sort of kinship to SF we have been emphasizing. He observes that, while comic films might not “seek to be didactic or have purpose or intent in making statements, the very language of comedy … is an intrinsically alternative one, speaking to a revision- ist engagement with the ‘taken-for-granted’ ” (Animation and America 5) in a way that, I would suggest, parallels SF’s efforts to fashion what Darko Suvin terms “an imaginative framework alternative” to our own “empirical environment” (7). So while the enthusiasm surrounding pre-war SF, and especially what John Cheng describes as the pulp stories’ exciting and “optimistic claims to progress and purpose” (85), may have been somewhat diluted in the comic atmosphere pervading our cartoons, those films, and especially those deploying the sort of SF icons noted here, did produce

[ 18 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination another sort of overturning and provisional vision, perhaps more akin to the range of SF literature that took a pointedly satiric aim in its treatment of key social issues. It is just another version of what I have termed their double vision, as these cartoons most commonly employed their exaggerated, comic visions both as core appeals—again, much like the covers of the pulps—and as tools for satirizing and critiquing an increasingly technologized world, as well as for reinforcing the comforts of the traditional, as if they were simply the strange, oneiric, yet ultimately passing visions of science and technology. In so doing these films managed to let their audiences savor some of the excitement attached to the new world that SF was forecasting, while also maintaining a distance or detachment from that world, thereby blunting some of its thrust, and especially some of its more disturbing implications, with laughter. However, the fact that the animation industry, through the popular vehicle of the seven-minute cartoon, took up this challenge of the new should be neither surprising nor dismissed. Like the live-action silent comedies that were so popular during the 1910s and 1920s, the cartoon’s gag emphasis made great capital from that modernist spirit of “overturning” the status quo, even as it frequently centered those gags around different forms of “transformation,” typified in non-SF works by the various sorts of alterations Felix the Cat might make in his environment or self, by the different shapes KoKo the Clown might adopt as he emerged from Max Fleischer’s inkwell at the start of every cartoon, or the many “plasmatic” adaptations Mickey Mouse might make as he turned animals into musical instruments in a film like Steamboat Willie (1928) or used farm imple- ments, as well as other animals, for airplane parts in Plane Crazy (1928). Combining this spirit with the challenging world of science and technology was hardly a reach, given the way that these developments were already posing their own quite tangible challenges to the status quo. But that combination was also only natural, given that film, as a technological art form, already had a kind of science fictional character—and animation, as was earlier suggested, probably more so than live-action film. Not only was the cartoon produced in a manner that resembled the assembly line, but animation also pioneered the use of three-strip Technicolor film, developed 3-D images through various sorts of multiplane cameras, and liberated its artists to imagine any sorts of worlds and beings without the requirement of sets, props, and real actors. As a result, animation allowed for the production of specific kinds of imagery, situations, and movements that were not even to be found in live-action cinema of the time, thereby mobilizing another version of that utopian spirit—a spirit of visualizing difference and change—that many see as fundamental to

Introduction [ 19 ] 20

all SF. But what Brooks Landon describes as this characteristic “agenda of change” (7) in SF has always been fundamental to animation, a form that takes its very being from the transformation of static drawings into the illusion of motion and life, and from simply imagining, as SF at its very best does, other ways of being. Apart from this demonstrable sort of kinship, the very nature of genre thinking argues against dismissing this body of animation from the discussion of SF and its historical emergence. The practice of genre study, as John Rieder has observed, involves a variety of tasks, such as “specifying” the genre’s “usage and extent, locating its principal sites of production and reception, selecting its canon of masterpieces, and so on,” with all of these activities functioning not simply as snapshots in time but as part of an ongoing historical process (191). The cartoon represents one such “usage” of SF’s memes and driving spirit; it is the product of a film industry that has, throughout its history, tried to accommodate the rising tide of science and technology in a variety of ways, including live-action features and serials; and while it would generate few “masterpieces” during the pre-war era, the cartoon would add a significant and appealing body of texts to the canon, eventually even its own iconic characters, such as Marvin the Martian. In surveying these various and largely neglected cartoons from the pre-war period, then, we are simply adding to the historical portrait of SF’s development by doing much as Rieder describes: “observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances” (196). Animated SF—largely American in this admittedly limited study, but with a worldwide impact—comprises a significant part of this “web of resemblances.” We should take note of these films, then, not because their modernist spirit was different from that which could be found elsewhere or because the cartoons themselves were few or out of the ordinary. In fact, their very ordinariness, the common nature of these SF stories and their num- bers, combined with their striking images, are themselves telling. For as we shall see, these animated tales of space flight, the building of robots, encounters with strange alien figures, and astounding inventions—as well as SF burlesques, such as Paul Terry’s 20,000 Feats under the Sea (1917), a lampoon of Jules Verne; film satires like British animator Joe Noble’s Whatrotolis (1929) (Figure 1.6), which offers a comic take on Fritz Lang’s epic Metropolis (1927); apocalyptic visions such as Fleischer’s KoKo’s Earth Control (1928); and mad scientist stories, including Disney’s The Mad Doctor (1933) and Columbia’s The Great Experiment (1934)—readily demonstrate how the SF imagination was not only developing but, despite

[ 20 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 1.6 The British cartoon Whatrotolis (1929) spoofs the German SF classic Metropolis (1927). its strangeness, subversive implications, and sometimes mixed vision, also rather quickly becoming sedimented into the popular consciousness and popular culture. While these cartoon texts may not be as significant or influential as the large body of pulp literature or as the more ambitious efforts of some of the period’s prominent authors—and we might note high-profile figures like Yevgeny Zamyatin, Olaf Stapledon, and Aldous Huxley, among others—they can help us see how the genre gradually grew out of or was inflected by a variety of different “repetitions, echoes, imitations” (live-action features, serials, comic shorts, cartoons, radio broad- casts), how it aided in the popular imagining of science and technology, and how it contributed to a sense of inevitability in the emergence of what Adam Roberts refers to as this “wholly new mode” (173) that is SF, a story type that throughout the pre-war period, as he says, was quickly becoming “part of the mental furniture of most Americans—and most Europeans as well” (193). While our histories of both the early SF print genre and early film have almost completely overlooked these animated efforts, then, this book argues that they represent a significant milestone, particularly for the genre’s media development. Specifically, their dominantly “vernacular modernist” approach, their exploitation of animation’s always provisional

Introduction [ 21 ] 22

world, and their ability to translate the challenging into the comic contributed to the naturalization and acceptance of SF’s inherently provocative vision. In the process, they helped pave the way for the postwar flourishing of media SF, as it entered our domestic spaces with Captain Video and a host of other televised space operas of the 1950s, became ubiquitous on the movie screens with numerous alien invasion narratives, and returned in an even more ambitious animated vein with such winning characters as Duck Dodgers, Marvin the Martian, the Jetsons, Astro Boy, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and other cartoon figures of the postwar/Cold War period. But even before this second coming, before the genre found this wider level of media maturity and acceptance, these pre–World War II cartoons managed to visualize and bring to life ideas that were being suggestively sketched on the covers of our pulp magazines, as well as in the new science literature represented by such periodicals as Popular Science and Science & Invention. They expressed our simultaneous eagerness for and yet misgivings about those ideas, but by allowing us to laugh at the various transformations and alterations depicted, they also helped alleviate some of those misgivings, thereby better preparing us to accept that science-fictional vision. In sum, they effectively addressed an audience of both adults and children who were increasingly aware that they inhabited a rapidly changing and contin- gent world, an inevitably modernist one whose changes were being both defined and propelled by scientific and technological developments—that is, by the very stuff of SF.

[ 22 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination CHAPTER 2 Flights of Fantasy

erhaps the oldest major form of SF, as Edward James has suggested,

Pis that of the “extraordinary voyage” (13). As the title of Jules Verne’s series of remarkably varied stories Voyages Extraordinaires might suggest, it is a narrative type that is highly flexible, has taken many shapes, and is firmly embedded in the genre’s modern literary history. The extraordinary voyage’s possibilities for imagining space ships of various sorts and depicting the activity of space flight and exploration, though, would prove especially attractive to animation, providing material for some of the first SF cartoons of the pre–World War II era and, afterward, offering opportunities for capitalizing on the Cold War space race with its varied aims and equally varied rocket types. In the earlier cartoons the Low Modernist “excitement” that Adam Roberts links to science and technological development in the period seems especially emphatic, in no small part because it closely parallels the enthusiasm that was attached to animation itself— an enthusiasm seen in both its practitioners who were able to give free flight to their imaginations, and to audiences who were also being offered extraordinary voyages to unusual new worlds through this vehicle that Alan Cholodenko, in a fittingly science-evoking turn, has termed “the animatic apparatus” (21). In fact, as the introduction hinted, we might see the cinematic mechanism for giving life to inanimate images, giving new life to the already animate, and bringing new worlds into view as akin to the SF imagination, even as a kind of metaphoric “space ship.” In this period practically every major studio would capitalize on the possibilities inherent in this vehicle, depicting a variety of different journeys and conjuring up a wide array of conveyances. Yet those cartoons, operating 24

largely in the vernacular modernist fashion described in the previous chapter, would often qualify that enthusiasm, usually by framing these flights as fantasies and sometimes even follies from which their animated characters would return not so much with a sense of accomplishment or triumph, but more often with a sigh of relief. As Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan argue, in the pre-war era futuristic transportation, along with the exploration of the unknown that it might make possible, often became “a kind of general metaphor for the future,” while serving as “an expression,” at least in America, of a widespread “faith in progress and technology … implying that it would be just a short ride, or flight, to utopia” (88). The rapid development of aircraft and airships before and during World War I would raise expectations—and ultimately the sights—of those intrigued by the possibilities of aerial exploration and of a world connected, potentially even made better, through the air. This point is made emphatically in the H. G. Wells–scripted live-action feature Things to Come (1936) with its depiction of a society of airmen, Wings Over the World, who in the near future use air power to restore order and project a positive prospect for a war-ravaged world. However, a number of Walter R. Booth’s early SF films, works with titles like The Airship Destroyer (1909), The Aerial Submarine (1910), and Aerial Anarchists (1911)—all of them combining live action with model work and some animation—would emphatically qualify this utopian “faith,” suggesting that it was, almost from the start, also shadowed by a threat, a sense of the dystopian possibility latent in these technological developments. Throughout the post–World War I era, though, it was the positive potential of flight—on Earth and beyond—that was frequently heralded by a string of cultural developments. Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 not only caught the imagination of the world, suggesting a sense of connection, but it was quickly saluted in a number of cartoons, such as Felix the Cat’s The Non-Stop Fright (1927), KoKo the Clown’s KoKo Hops Off (1927), and Mickey Mouse’s Plane Crazy (1928) (Figure 2.1), while further energizing those dreams of flight and aerial adventure, particularly empowering the notion of the intrepid individual adventurer. Robert H. Goddard’s writings, especially his landmark volume of 1919, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, along with his widely publicized rocket experiments that followed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, opened a new perspective on aerial adventure by turning attention to our neigh- bors in space, most commonly the moon and Mars. In 1930 a group, many a part of the growing SF community, founded the American Interplanetary Society (later retitled the American Rocket Society) with the aim, as John Cheng sums up, of “proposing scientific research and subsuming it to a

[ 24 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 2.1 Mickey Mouse constructs a plane from scrap and animals in Plane Crazy (1929). Walt Disney Pictures. larger goal of building ships to travel through outer space to the moon and farther” (255). That goal’s achievement would be visually dramatized in a central display in the Transportation Building at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. There, the famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s animated model of a “Rocketport of the Future” vividly linked the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow” with the futuristic possibilities of air transportation, including rocket flights to other continents and out into space. Such developments suggest the extent to which space travel and exploration were becoming a new and exciting component of the popular imagination, even a part of, as the Fair underscored, its utopian imaginings. It is also a cultural meme that pulp SF was rapidly exploring and exploiting, as well as one to which SF animation would, precisely because of this popularity, repeatedly be drawn throughout the pre-war years. In fact, responding to such recent scientific and cultural developments much as the pulps did, the various animation studios all offered a wide range of adventuresome SF trips during the pre-war years: around-the- world journeys, such as those in the Mutt and JeffGlobe Trotters (1926), Farmer Al Falfa’s Sky Skippers (1930), Cubby’s Stratosphere Flight (1934), and Buddy’s Lost World (1935); undersea explorations like Mutt and Jeff in the Submarine (1916) and Paul Terry’s burlesque of Jules Verne in 20,000

Flights of Fantasy [ 25 ] 26

Feats under the Sea (1917); and even time travel, as depicted by Ko-Ko in 1999 (1924), Felix Trifles with Time (1925), The Great Experiment (1934), and Krazy’s Race of Time (1937), among others. But based on the number of surviving cartoons, it seems that those depicting trips into outer space with an emphasis on the moon, Mars, or the stars, were the most popular entries in this mode, with the conveyances for such flights ranging widely—and, in typical cartoon fashion, wildly. They include rocket ships, fireworks, balloons, propeller-equipped houses, bow and arrow, and even swift kicks. While scientific principles and plausibility were sometimes acknowledged, they ultimately were subservient to the flexible, even subversive logic that audiences usually associated with cartoons, with these films generally linking such adventures to a kind of “spaciness”—or, to borrow from Warner Bros., a Looney Tune-ness— in their characters, in technology, and in the culture they represented. Given the problems of film preservation and the general sense that short subjects, and especially cartoons, were essentially ephemeral material, many of them no longer existing, we cannot with any certainty say which animated films were the first to explore this meme. In his overview on the links between SF and animation, Paul Wells, as we earlier noted, points to the works of Georges Méliès, particularly his A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), along with the remarkably similar efforts produced by the Spaniard Segundo de Chomon, including Excursion to the Moon (1908), a near scene-by- scene rendering of Méliès’s film, andA Trip to Jupiter (1909), as milestones in this area. While none of these is a truly animated film, all look toward animation’s different approach to visualizing the modern world. Other near relatives of this sort, but often overlooked, are the animation pioneer Emile Cohl’s hybrid effortClair de lune espagnol (1909), a fantasy wherein aliens capture the lovesick matador Pedro and deposit him on the moon (the various visions of which are animated), and Thomas Edison’s more conventional A Trip to Mars (1910), in which a scientist discovers a “reverse gravity” formula, allowing him to float to Mars—a voyage that combines some animation with double exposures to produce its otherworldly effects. However, all of these works are essentially variations on the “trick film” form, for the most part live-action efforts marked by magical appearances and disappearances achieved by editing, and at times (as in Excursion to the Moon, Clair de lune espagnol, and A Trip to Mars) spiced with brief animated scenes, models, and pixilated images. But besides such trick efforts, a number of fully animated cartoons about space flight and exploration did appear in the very early days of the cinema—works like the Emile Cohl effort Monsieur de Crac (1910), a short piece depicting the fantastic travels of Baron Munchausen, and the

[ 26 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Happy Hooligan cartoon A Trip to the Moon (1917). These demonstrate this meme’s early attraction for animators, in part because of the potential it offers for visualizing the new and different, but also because of the way such material usefully intersected with early animation’s fundamental, even seemingly inevitable fascination with the nature of space—or, more precisely, with the challenge every animator faces: how to fill the open or empty space of the medium—the sheet of paper, cel, or movie screen on which he or she works. In these first efforts, and to some extent throughout the pre–World War II era, we find SF cartoons using this material repeatedly to explore the tension between the 2-D space to which animation was, as a form, limited and the 3-D realm to which it always alludes and which its fantasies about space exploration, as we shall note, so often seem to reflect or metaphorize. We can see that fascination especially in the way that a number of early cartoons exploit this spatial self-consciousness, along with the simple attractions of motion, to work in concert with their usually slight narratives about space travel, space exploration, and space ships. In fact, they typically use the possibilities of space travel to enhance the impression of their animatic properties, as the early Happy Hooligan effortA Trip to the Moon nicely demonstrates (Figure 2.2). To suggest that a character actually flies to

Figure 2.2 Happy Hooligan travels by rocket in A Trip to the Moon (1917).

Flights of Fantasy [ 27 ] 28

the moon, as in the case of the mischievous but kind-hearted hobo Happy Hooligan, we have to see him move, sit on a rocket, physically react to its motions, fly a trajectory to the moon where he is paraded about among the moon population, and then dance with and even chase after a fetching moon maiden. His various movements, sight lines, and physical reactions serve to suture together wildly different spaces, other realms that, as in all film, seem to exist off-screen, and thus to suggest something more than the static, 2-D world in which the narrative begins, as we first encounter Happy resting, along with another sleeping hobo, on a park bench. Happy’s space exploration ends, however, rather unhappily, as a fight with a moon man dissolves into a policeman clubbing him as he awakes on that same park bench where his story began. The dissolve reveals that this vision of traveling to and exploring other worlds, even catching a moon maiden, was, after all, just a daydream, an imagined event in an imagined space, a kind of utopian realization for a character who is defined by his exclusion from society and all such possibilities. But it is a pleasant version of the dream he shares with his medium, with animation itself, which always seems to be strain- ing against its own nature, trying to escape its own limited, flat “world” and bounded space to discover other realms, other possibilities: the still image always pointing toward the possibility for motion, or as Cholodenko formulates it, for blurring or suspending “the distinction between representation and simulation” (21), and the single space always suggesting other, contiguous spaces just out of the frame or hidden by virtue of the very flatness of its images. A Trip to the Moon is simply an early indicator of both the reflexive (and thus implicitly modernist) possibilities of this meme and the thematic direction in which it would generally develop—as a frame not so much for stories of transcendence or achievement (as in Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, which culminates in a parade and celebration of its astronauts’ accomplishment), but for tales of accommodation or even frustration, as space adventuring encounters the limitations faced by all humans, all anthropomorphs, and even all film. It is an intriguing coincidence that this dream-trip would appear in the same year as the novelization of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s landmark SF novel A Princess of Mars, a story that also employed a variation on the dream mechanism.1 As Brian Stableford has observed, while Burroughs is considered one of the pioneers of SF adventure stories, he gave little attention to establishing a “plausible mechanism” or “facilitating device” for transport- ing his central character John Carter from Earth to Mars (“Science Fiction” 29). Rather than embarking on an interplanetary rocket, Carter simply falls asleep in a strange cavern and essentially dreams himself there, as if projected into a new and exotic world, that of Barsoom, that was magically

[ 28 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination contiguous to his waking world of the American Southwest. This ability to dream another space is, as the Happy Hooligan short suggested, close to the very essence of both animation and SF, so it should hardly be surprising that a number of cartoons would resort to this reflexive mechanism for their science fictional narratives. Winsor McCay, who is best known for bringing a dinosaur to life in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and who billed himself as the “inventor” of the animated cartoon, turned to this same dream-narrative mode for one of his best films,The Flying House (1921). It is a story about a normal house that, when fitted with engines and wings, allows its inhabitants a way of escap- ing from their dunning landlord, as they fly around the Earth, amidst the stars, and land on the moon, all while searching—vainly—for someplace free from everyday economic pressures. However, the space adventure McCay has so carefully crafted, one that ends on another SF note, with his house’s occupants being shot down by an “experimental rocket cannon,” proves to be just another illusion. Their adventure has simply resulted from some indigestion, caused, as is the case in several other McCay efforts (and as inspired by his earlier comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend), by a bad meal of Welsh Rarebit. As the couple awakes in bed at the film’s conclusion, clearly astonished at the many outlandish images and impossible situations they have together dreamed, the cartoon again links itself to the audience who should also have been amazed by the remarkable vision that this film, like practically all cartoons, has allowedthem to dream through most of its eleven-minute duration. But beyond any self-conscious elements, both the Happy Hooligan film and McCay’s Flying House are noteworthy for the way in which they manage to fill their spaces with a variety of SF memes—the space ship, celestial bodies, aliens, even that “experimental rocket cannon”—to tell both trivial and more serious tales, to limn both a pleasant daydream and a nightmare, to be both conservative and at least implicitly subversive in their implications. Happy Hooligan, in keeping with his carefree character, literally sees stars when a scientist approaches him with the prospect of traveling to the moon, and in an effective ironic touch, he later sees those same stars, but this time physically rather than imaginatively inspired, when he is roughly awakened from his park-bench dream by a policeman’s billy club. But with a simple shrug of the shoulders, he goes off whistling, as “happy” as ever, even with his pleasant dream of capturing a beautiful moon maiden suddenly burst by the authorities. Meanwhile, McCay’s tale about predatory landlords (the “money sharks” that one character rails against) and domestic insecu- rity suggests other and more serious possibilities for such dreams (Figure 2.3). Of course, McCay had already demonstrated his social conscience

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Figure 2.3 A couple soars to the moon in Winsor McCay’s The Flying House (1921).

and his ability to use the cartoon as a vehicle for cultural commentary with his earlier animated protest against German technological atrocities, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). But that social thrust, as we shall see, would not find great purchase in other SF cartoons, live-action SF cinema, or, for that matter, even in much of the pulp literature of the 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, even as he notes a relatively serious tone that some SF authors were beginning to take in their material in this same period, Edward James describes how still, for most SF of the era and, he claims, particularly in America, “the dreaming pole was in the ascendant” (46), the Burroughs influence looming large. However, James could just as easily have been describing the sort of narrative approach frequently used by the animation studios, which offered many other variations on the science fictional dreams of both A Trip to the Moon and The Flying House, most of them in keeping with a more conservative attitude, commonly using those memes to challenge our vision of the world, to explore animation’s different possibilities for visualization, if less often to comment on the implications of that vision or on the medium of animation. To better gauge how widespread these dream-vision space narratives were and their distribution across different studios, we might briefly survey a number of efforts by such figures as Ub Iwerks, Walter Lantz, the team

[ 30 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination of Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, and Charles Mintz. In Iwerks’s Stratos Fear (1933), for example, his signature character Willie Whopper goes to the dentist to have a tooth extracted, but after receiving gas, he seems to inflate like a balloon and floats past the moon to Mars where he encounters a nightmarish world of transformations before finally awakening—from his gas-induced dream—back in the dentist’s chair, where he realizes that he has simply hallucinated the entire journey. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit has a similarly imaginary experience in Sky Larks (1934) when he and a friend fall asleep while watching a newsreel about a high-altitude balloon ascent (represented, in another reflexive turn, by a live-action newsreel of one of Auguste Piccard’s record-breaking ascents of the early 1930s). Oswald then dreams of launching his own “stratosphere flight” in a stove attached to a balloon, one in which he and his dog companion ascend through the Milky Way (composed of bottles of milk) and finally crash on Mars. Eventually these two accidental astronauts are roughly awakened from their dreams of space flight by a burly theater usher. In Little Buck Cheeser (1937), MGM’s Cheeser the mouse, inspired by reading a Buck Rogers comic strip, imagines building a firecracker and rocket-propelled ship not to explore space, but to fly himself and his mouse friends to the moon, also by way of a bottle-composed Milky Way, so they can mine its cheese-y composition. But that hope is dashed when his rocket goes out of control, crashes, and he awakes, with some relief, to find himself safely back in his bed at home (Figure 2.4). And Columbia’s Scrappy in Scrappy’s Trip to Mars (1938) dreams of sneaking away from his mother and flying a homemade rocketship to Mars, where he and his dog are welcomed by the Martian queen and her minions, only to become homesick and decide to fly back home before his mother— and he—awakens. These narratives, with their simple dream-propelled space explorations, all suggest—quite literally—a widespread fantasy of space travel that tracked along with both the serious literature on rocketry and astronomy of the time, as well as with what Cheng describes as “a broader cultural fascination with aerial adventure” (253) that was being similarly played out in the pulps—and, as the Piccard footage attests, even in the newsreels. But with these films’ characteristic logic also that of the dream, they often tended to present space flight itself as a rather outlandish vision, at times a nightmarish adventure, and one from which the various cartoon travelers would, perhaps like sober Americans of the time, eventually awaken, safe in their homes. We might situate these dream narratives between two other approaches to the intersection of animated space and space exploration to be found in the era’s cartoons. One type simply dissolves that narrative frame, so

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Figure 2.4 Inspired by the comics, Cheeser dreams of building a moon rocket in Little Buck Cheeser (1937). MGM.

that the entire film seems to operate according to a dream logic that makes maximum use of animation’s properties of exaggeration and transformation. It does so by exploiting the cartoon’s fundamental plasticity, capitalizing on its entertaining capacity for taking viewers away from the real or the expected, and centering its action in a world governed by the sort of “gravity-defying tricks” and visual surprises that, Esther Leslie suggests, “were the essence of cartooning” (32) in its early days. In contrast, another approach follows what Leslie terms a “realist injunction” (32) of the sort that would eventually become associated with Disney-style animation of the later 1930s—a style in which “gravity” and other laws actually play a kind of normalizing role, as characters squash, stretch, rebound from, and anticipate movements,2 and as events are more naturalistically motivated and depicted. However, in terms of subject treatment the result is more often what we might term a qualified realism, that is, an approach not so much concerned with the scientific plausibility that intrigued many SF fans of the period—issues involving speed, rocket power, atmosphere, and gravity, all frequently discussed in the pages of the pulps and sometimes with narrative-stopping effect—but with a kind of general plausibility or causal linkage for narrative events. This sort of realism is marked especially by an

[ 32 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination effort to offer images that roughly corresponded to currentcultural conceptions of space, space travel, and space vehicles. The first of these approaches is also the earlier and more common one, and perhaps only logically so, since originally many of animation’s pioneers saw the form less as a representational art—like the live-action film— than as a kind of ideographic playground wherein line and space might be explored as if they indeed represented a quite different sort of space, a different world ruled by different laws. Probably the most important contrib- utor to this sort of film was the Fleischer Studios—the producers of KoKo the Clown, Bimbo, and Betty Boop cartoons, among others. As an example, we might consider A Trip to Mars (1924), a hybrid of live action and animation like most KoKo films, in which the story’s very focus is on how real and imagined spaces might be playfully combined. In it, Max Fleischer first dips his pen into his inkwell, draws KoKo, and then explains to his apprehensive creation, “I’m a nut on astronomy—you’re going to be shot to the moon.” But a protesting KoKo reacts by planting a handy can of TNT beneath Max’s chair, so while the clown is thrust into space astride the cartoonist’s very real sky rocket, his creator too is blown upward by an animated explosion, with both of them, after some frightening adventures on Mars, eventually landing on Saturn’s rings and, seeking an escape from the nuttiness they have encountered, jumping into an inkwell found there—the same sort of inkwell from which KoKo had emerged at the beginning of the cartoon. If their mutually explosive flights into outer space are wildly improbable, comically emblematic of the very spaciness of their cartoon—and perhaps of the trepidations that some attached to all such space endeavors—their escape, back into the safety of the inkwell, into the fountain of animation, is no less so, although it does have the effect of underscoring the entire film’s status as essentially a modernist gag about how one sort of space might produce the other and how equally nightmarish—or nutty—both outer space and animated space might actually be. This same sort of dream logic marks a number of other SF cartoons about space and space travel, including the later Fleischer cartoon Up to Mars (1930), Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’s Mars (1930), and especially such Felix the Cat efforts asFelix Flirts with Fate (1926) and Astonomeows (1928). Much as in A Trip to Mars, Fleischer’s Bimbo, the central character in Up to Mars, finds himself accidentally astride a sky rocket, which, in another self-conscious move, this one directed at Disney and his popular Mickey Mouse character, has been lit by a mischievous mouse, sending Bimbo rocketing into outer space. Colliding with both the moon and Saturn, both of which are personified here and grumble about Bimbo’s carelessness, his rocket eventually crashes on Mars, leaving him stranded

Flights of Fantasy [ 33 ] 34

in a strange world. In the same year Walter Lantz would produce his own Martian adventure with Oswald literally being kicked into outer space by his romantic rival Putrid Pete. After hitching a ride on a witch’s broom, Oswald lands on Mars and later hops aboard a passing comet that brings him back to Earth and his girlfriend. A similar romantic issue propels Felix the Cat into space in Felix Flirts with Space when, after seeing all those around him successfully mated, he looks to the stars for solace. Peering through an astronomer’s telescope, the lonely feline spots a beautiful female cat on Mars and directs his own sky rocket toward the red planet so that he can woo her. In Astronomeows Felix’s journey is a bit more gravity- and logic-defying, as he shoots an arrow with a line attached to Saturn and then simply pulls himself onto its rings. Once there, though, he is rudely met by one of the planet’s inhabitants who kicks him all the way to Mars. With such interplanetary flights being repeatedly presented as comically accidental, easily and quickly accomplished, or exaggerated beyond belief, these cartoons consistently frame space travel not as the product of dreams—or even a McCay-like indigestion—but rather as natural material for exaggeration and gags, as “outer” space seems to blossom from or dissolve into the crafted spaciness of the cartoon, as if it were no more substantial—or scientifically predictable—than the highly provisional and unpredictable spaces of the animated world. Yet at least some cartoons give evidence of the more “realist injunction” that Leslie identifies. Even in some of the dream narratives noted above, we can find an obvious tension between their dreamy context and the various SF elements that the cartoons depict—the different icons or events that most specifically identify them with the genre. For example, Little Buck Cheeser, Krazy’s Race of Time, and Scrappy’s Trip to Mars all carefully sketch cigarlike rockets of the sort that were then commonly being depicted in live-action SF films of the period—works like Just Imagine (1930) and the Buck Rogers (1939) and Flash Gordon serials (1936, 1938, 1940)—in comic strips and on the covers of the pulp magazines. And Little Buck Cheeser, while doing obvious homage to the Buck Rogers comic strip that had debuted in 1929 and that had already established a certain look for space adventuring,3 also gave lengthy narrative attention to the complex and labor-intensive process of actually constructing Cheeser’s moon rocket—a point similarly emphasized in the more conventional narrative, Tom and Jerry’s The Phantom Rocket (1933), wherein different scenes depict human welders, riveters, and fuelers all at work on a space ship. Donald Crafton suggests that incorporating such realistic elements into these cartoons might simply reflect a pragmatic decision by the various animation studios, “which were retooling the simplified space of the 1920s Tooniverse

[ 34 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination to better accommodate the increasingly complex characterizations” that had become the central focus of their sound films (Shadow 150). However, the images in these and other cartoons speak just as much to shifting attitudes outside of the cartoons and their studios, particularly to an increasing sense of the culture’s embeddedness in a world of steadily advancing technology, just as the pulps, the various science/hobby magazines (works like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics), and radio programs of the period were also constantly chronicling. In this context we might also take note of the somewhat earlier Soviet- era cartoon described in the introduction, Interplanetary Revolution of 1924. While few—if any—in the west would have seen this film, it does attest to a rather different sort of cultural influence, while in a heavy- handed and obviously more radical way echoing McCay’s element of social commentary in The Flying House.4 A propaganda cartoon that echoes the plot of the popular feature film Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924), it depicts the aptly named Comrade Cominternov as he travels to Mars to liberate that planet from predatory capitalists. Interplanetary Revolution is largely a cut- up or collage film, using exaggerated, strangely juxtaposed, and sometimes pixilated images, especially in its presentation of the capitalist enemy, who are depicted as grotesque pigs, dogs, and other beasts. And yet it combines those highly stylized and exaggerated images with fairly realistic representations of a space plane, a vertical launch tower, and the machine-and- gauge laden interior of Cominternov’s spaceship, as if its very style were designed to make the key point here, visually contrasting the grotesque, appetite-driven world of capitalism, even on Mars, with the scientific, logical, and real world of the new Soviet Russia. The result is a film that seems strangely pulled between realist and dreamlike visions, as it incorporates many of the cinematic pyrotechnics espoused by the leading Soviet film- makers (and theorists) of the period—figures such as Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov—into an overblown propagandistic vision, suggesting how the realities of science and technology, properly guided by a socialist mind-set, might be martialed to fight against what its creators view as the nightmare of capitalism that threatens to spread throughout the solar system. We can see a similar—albeit pointedly nonpolitical—turn in a later and far more elaborate work by the Fleischer Studios, Dancing on the Moon (1935) (Figure 2.5). This film too, one of the studio’s Color Classic musical productions, seems to challenge the “characterization” explanation forwarded by Crafton, while emphasizing a realist thrust and a rising interest in technological issues, both within the Fleischer Studios and in the culture at large.

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Figure 2.5 The Fleischer Studios’ “stereoptical” rocket to the moon: Dancing on the Moon (1935).

As we have seen, Max Fleischer reflexively jokes in A Trip to Mars that he was always something of “a nut” on scientific matters—a comment that recalls his background in actual science writing and reporting when he served as an editor for Popular Science. Later, while working for the J. R. Bray Studio in the immediate post–World War I period, Max also partly supervised and animated a number of factual, space-oriented shorts, including Hello Mars (1920), All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon (1920), and If We Lived on the Moon (1920), all of them productions that were intended for the new educational film market. And after founding the Fleischer Studios with his brother Dave and producing the successful “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons starring KoKo the Clown, Max undertook two ambitious and near-feature-length hybrid projects that further reflected these scientific interests. One, a fifty-minute film, The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923), done in conjunction with the astronomer and SF writer Garrett P. Serviss, sought to explain Einstein’s theory in layman’s terms; the other, Evolution (1923), a forty-minute effort made with the help of Edward J. Foyles of the American Museum of Natural History, told the story of human evolution according to Darwin. While both works relied mainly on live-action footage and title cards, they also drew to some extent upon the visual power and clarity of the animated image to carry their scientific messages—messages

[ 36 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination that reflected what Fleischer himself described as his “keen and instinctive sense” for science and technology (qtd. in R. Fleischer 13).5 In light of this background, we might only expect that his studio would eventually produce what is probably the period’s most substantial cartoon depiction of space travel. One of Fleischer’s most ambitious and expensive seven-minute cartoons, Dancing on the Moon employed both the two- color Cinecolor film process and an early version of the studio’s special “Stereoptical Apparatus”—Fleischer’s own multiplane camera device for combining scale models and props with multiple layers of animation cels in order to produce a highly realistic 3-D imagery. This combination of color and depth, along with a nicely detailed rocket model, resulted in an elaborate depiction of how the “Honeymoon Express to the Moon” rocket operates, as it regularly whisks newlyweds to that seemingly ideal destination for dancing and romancing. In combination with these technical enhancements, the film’s sculpted versions of the Earth, moon, and several other planets, which probably reflected some of Fleischer’s earlier work on the Bray educational films about space, produced an effective 3-D vision of space flight, and one that receives more screen time than any other such animated depiction of the era. As a result, with this effort we see one of the few instances of the SF cartoon trying to meld its 2-D representational space with real space to produce a more authentic context for the cartoon’s otherwise slight story of a male and female cat who have been accidentally separated while heading off on their honeymoon. It is, in short, a story in which space itself becomes the central issue. And yet, most of Dancing on the Moon’s realistically styled narrative is given to the familiar sorts of gags and musical activities found in the more conventional cartoons of the period. Its main focus is not on what marvelous sights abound in space, but on what the various animal honeymooners do during their moon sojourn, as we see giraffes necking—and necking, their necks intertwined, caught together—seals suggestively slapping flip- pers, cows ringing each other’s cowbells, various animal couples dancing around and through the moon’s craters. The result is a strange and conflicted vision, even when the different animal couples happily dance across this alien—and 3-D—surface. For their movements contrast with the single male cat who wistfully watches, unappreciative of this stunning moon- scape, as he longs to be back home with his wife who has missed the rocket. And when he does return to Earth and, in another “stereoptical” scene, dis- embarks from the 3-D rocket, the narrative quickly reverts to “flat” space for a very traditional, even rather sexist cartoon gag, as his “loving” wife, in what is apparently meant to be a “natural” reaction, beats him for leaving her behind. Narrative and style, romantic and realistic experiences, simply

Flights of Fantasy [ 37 ] 38

collide rather than make effective use of the film’s technical enhancements. So while the film’s depiction of the ship’s launch, including the use of an angled launch ramp,6 of travel through a 3-D solar system, of the moon’s textured surface, and the ship’s return all frame the otherwise familiar cartoon animal antics in a more realistic context, that framing offers little pay- off. Here as in many of the Fleischers’ other offerings, as Michael Frierson offers, the cartoon simply relies “more heavily on tricks and effectsas effects for their entertainment” (87). Thus, even asDancing on the Moon generates an interesting tension or dynamic between these “effects” and its conventional—and typically 2-D— gags, it barely approaches the more productive tension between the real and the fantastic that often marked the era’s pulp literature and that would briefly resurface when the Fleischer Studios, just prior to its dissolution and takeover by Paramount, deployed many of these same ambitious effects in its Superman cartoons of the early 1940s, although these would be not in the service of rocketry or the exploration of other worlds, but rather as complements to a new, superhero- driven vision of this world. Of course, the various animation studios were hardly worried about being criticized for such failings. Unlike the readers of the pulps, their audiences were probably little concerned with the general lack of scientific consideration or with the lack of a realistic consistency in their narratives. Certainly topicality was important—as we recall with Sky Larks’s use of the Auguste Piccard newsreel, the newspaper headlines about “Technocracy” in Columbia’s Technoracket (1933), or, somewhat later, the Superman cartoons’ embeddedness in current events, such as the threat of Nazi and Japanese spies. However, an adherence to scientific fact was clearly much less important, with even the most implausible modes of space travel, such as fireworks, a bow and arrow, or a kick in the pants, readily serving as acceptable instigations for these narratives of space travel, many of them presented either as dreams or as ruled by a dreamlike logic. For audiences who naturally saw the cartoon as of a different order of reality from the live-action film, as an expressively rather than mimetically driven form, that comic logic was enough. And yet it points to a widely developing SF imagination, one actively dreaming about such possibilities, even in the relative absence of actual efforts to send humans into space—much less the real dogs and monkeys that would recall these anthropomorphic space travelers while serving as our stand-ins for the first space flights of the late 1950s. Here, in keeping with that vernacular modernist approach, the dream of space and space flight was just barely grounded in substance, with little effort made to link these stories about using the latest technology to explore other worlds and other possibilities

[ 38 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination for life to our own world and the sort of utopian possibilities that it might hold in store. Still, there is a level on which even such comically exaggerated narratives do take on a more critical modernist character, one directed not so much at social circumstances, as in The Flying House or Interplanetary Revolution, but in the direction of the movies themselves. We began this chapter by noting hints of this modernist linkage between subject and medium in several films, including an early effort like Happy Hooligan’sA Trip to the Moon and the later Oswald the Rabbit cartoon Sky Larks. Donald Crafton has identified one frequent form that this influence takes, what he terms “self- figuration,” or “the tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into his films” (Before Mickey 11), as when McCay, Walt Disney, Walter Lantz, or Max Fleischer shows himself drawing his characters, or when Fleischer “figures” himself into the narrative itself, as inA Trip to Mars. Another version of that modernist self-consciousness shows up in Sky Larks, as it pits Oswald’s cartoon dreams of space flight against the newsreel depiction of Piccard’s successful balloon ascents, as seen in the theater. That conjunction reminds us of the inspirational power of scientific activity, even as the narrative mocks the wild daydreams that might result and crowd out that very real activity, including the sort of dreams put forward by movies such as Sky Larks. As another instance of this implicitly critical and self-conscious approach—as well as a final gloss on all of these early films about space, rockets, and space exploration—we might also consider the Van Beuren Tom and Jerry cartoon The Phantom Rocket (1933). It is a film in which, as Scott Bukatman offers when describing the sometimes contrapuntal workings of other SF imagery, “the ontologies of space and narrative intertwine” (227). The result is a narrative that seems as much about itself and other cartoons as it does about space and space exploration. The Phantom Rocket begins as a kind of show, one obviously directed to an enthusiastic crowd of onlookers who are anticipating the inaugural flight of a new rocket that we witness under construction. But this show is also being broadcast over the radio to audiences at home and filmed, we might assume, for the newsreels, like the one seen in Sky Larks. Describing yet another of those familiar, 1930s- era, cigar-shaped rockets, the master of ceremonies begins crooning to his audience a message that could serve thematically for the entire cartoon: “It’s a colossal, dynamic, tremendous, gigantic, an awe-inspiring sight!” And to underline the impact of that appraisal, a montage shows groups of scientists, workers, photographers, and even a military honor guard all, in turn, halting their actions to musically echo the announcer’s message (Figure 2.6). But this “colossal” spectacle of both rocket and planned space

Flights of Fantasy [ 39 ] 40

flight is suddenly hijacked by an escaped criminal who sneaks aboard, over- powers Tom and Jerry, and sends the rocket careening wildly through the sky, into a nearby amusement park, through a train tunnel, under the sea, and, ironically, into the very prison from which the criminal had escaped. In fact, the rocket carrying Tom, Jerry, and the criminal seems to go practically everywhere but into space, although its wild journey manages to produce a string of loosely connected and improbable gags throughout its flight.7 With the rocket never achieving its lauded and much-expected extraterrestrial aim, space exploration here literally becomes an exploration of the cartoon’s own nature, especially of its strange and illogical spaces: as the rocket, like a thrown dart, hits the bullseye formed by a nearby Ferris wheel, as the rocket and a speeding train enter a tunnel from opposite directions and exit improbably having exchanged trailing cars and baggage, as the ship emerges from the sea with its rocket exhaust magically replaced by a stream of water and fish, as it collides with a farmer’s outhouse and leaves a trail of fifteen smaller outhouses. As a result, it seems like the “colossal, dynamic, tremendous, gigantic, and awe-inspiring” potential of space flight and exploration has effectively been hijacked by the cartoon creators for their own explor- atory and laugh-producing purposes, much as is the case in many of the cartoons we examine here.

Figure 2.6 The Phantom Rocket (1933) shows the difficult work of preparing for a rocket launch. Van Beuren Corporation.

[ 40 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Of course, we might simply see The Phantom Rocket as just one more animated effort at exploiting the current attraction with science and technology, at mining the era’s cultural fascination with every sort of aerial adventure for loosely linked jokes. However, this piece so underscores the tendency for media ballyhoo, is so much about media coverage, media exploitation, and textual hyperbole that it practically begs to be considered in a self-conscious way. Commenting on a general tendency that he observes throughout “machine-age comedy,” live action, animated, and print, Michael North suggests that this sort of linkage should be more expected than surprising. Rather, he argues that the comic impulse and a level of self-consciousness ultimately work side by side in most modernist texts, with that modernist interrogation of received forms easily morphing into comic subversion—and vice versa—as the machinic text “manufactures, along with all its other products and pollutions, a means of comic reflection on itself” (23). That reflection, at least in the case of The Phantom Rocket, results in a kind of dazzling double effect, as the film, in thoroughly modernist fashion, manages to laugh at the world and itself, at its subject matter as well as the medium and structure that give life to those elements. And yet that amazing attitude and those audience expectations could hardly be commandeered in this way if they were not already in play, if there was not something “awe-inspiring” already at work in and on the culture, waiting to be hijacked by cartoons like The Phantom Rocket. We might recall that the various newspaper accounts of Robert Goddard’s early rocket experiments not only produced hyperbolic headlines herald- ing Goddard’s supposedly imminent intention of sending a rocket to the moon or even Mars, but also brought inquiries from more than a hundred people who eagerly wanted to ride his theoretical rocket, even if it was only to be a one-way trip (Cheng 2). While such extreme enthusiasm simply did not match up with the period’s actual scientific and technological capabilities, as Goddard himself quickly reminded his inquirers and erstwhile participants, it is a signpost of the cultural attitudes that cartoons like The Phantom Rocket and many others were both addressing and exploiting. However, through these sorts of cartoon imaginings, through their transformations of real space into animated space and the animated into the real, we were, as a culture, able to breathe some life into the idea of space travel, that is, to animate this experience that at times seemed so close to real-ization, yet also frustratingly distant, repeatedly blocked by many near-term and indeed monumental objections—the Depression, the limits of scientific knowledge and technological capacity, international

Flights of Fantasy [ 41 ] 42

intrigue, another looming war. If these cartoons could make comic capital out of the popular rhetoric surrounding rockets and space travel, it was because those memes had already begun to stir the popular consciousness, and in a way that we would not see again until the space race of the 1950s. They remind us that the appeal of those ideas—and images—was not limited to SF enthusiasts or readers of the pulps. Yet at the same time there is in the great majority of these films a sense that their comic stories about technological transcendence and new worlds were also a kind of joke that the culture was telling about itself. While our cartoons made the will for such efforts seem present and the technology practically at hand, with the rocket, as the New York World’s Fair illustrated, already widely viewed as a possible conveyance, the trips that they depicted—whether to outer space, below the sea, to other planets, or even through train tunnels—repeatedly qualified that possibility. In film after film, those rocketing flights seemed precarious, prone to being hijacked by unpredictable forces, or devolved into little more than a series of gags. Even though the period’s cartoons would envision a wide variety of such efforts, enabled by vehicles both technological and natural, they would also end up, and perhaps predictably so, comically challenging many of those claims and expectations about space and space travel, while reminding us, perhaps paradoxically, of what was real and what was only animated or a dream, pointing up how our fascination with such things could, at least at this point, be little more than utopian dreams or space-y imaginings.

[ 42 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination CHAPTER 3 Of Robots and Artificial Beings

ne of the most popular images in SF of the pre-war era was the robot,

Oalthough it was also one that always came freighted with some difficulty for the world of animation. At least for a time, this figure all too easily reminded audiences of a number of real-world concerns, particularly issues surrounding labor and the function of technology in modern society. It also challenged the sort of illusionism commonly associated with film, since animated characters—and, in many cases, live-action figures as well—invariably have something of the robotic about them. They are, after all, constructed figures, designed to do the will of their creators and to per- form a sort of labor usually allotted to humans, effectively functioning like actors in live-action films. So in fashioning narratives that foregrounded such figures, animators had to consider how far they wanted to open the door on both the real world and their own craft—how much they wanted audiences to think, in a pointedly modernist way, about the “mechanics” of their lives, about mechanical figures and stories, and about what animation, with its easy transformations, subversive spirit, and fantastic challenge to the real, seemed to imply about the world. In short, the robot was a potentially troubling figure: one of the most forthright embodiments of the modernist spirit and a challenge to some of animation’s more conservative impulses. However, the robot figure, probably more so than any other SF icon, also readily lent itself to the comic, which was, after all, the stock-in-trade of cartoons. Its stylized, controlled movements almost immediately evoke Henri Bergson’s famous description of the comic as “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (49)—a mechanization that is, Bergson explains, 44

rebuffed or reproved through the reaction of human laughter. Moreover, the robot’s typically repetitive, machinic activity echoes the argument that Michael North has made about the new type of comedy that emerged during the Machine Age, noted in chapter 2. It is comedy that, he argues, exploited “something potentially comic in mechanical reproduction itself” (5). Noting how comedians in vaudeville, music halls, and throughout the early cinema all seemed to be “embracing an aspect of modern experience, the way that so much of it seemed to be mechanically organized” (9), North suggests that comic routines offered audiences a way of acknowledg- ing, embracing, and even attaining a kind of mastery over this new and for some unsettling “experience”—all effects that could be readily evoked through the figure of the robot. Helping to balance out these different possibilities was the fact that those same stylizations and repetitions that characterize the figure of the robot also made it a subject that could be easily assimilated into the patterns of animation production. As we have noted, practically all of the studios in this early period produced their cartoons in a kind of machinelike fashion; they were, as Donald Crafton observes, highly “Taylorized” (Before Mickey 163) products, machinelike creations with a machinelike character that emanated from studios—such as Paul Terry’s—that were organized around Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management. As part of that nature, these cartoons depended heavily on cycles of movement, repetitive actions (or what were known as “repeats”), and highly stylized characters and motions. The robot, consequently, became a strangely fitting extension—or what Crafton might term a “self-figuration” (Before Mickey 11)—of the cartoon’s nature. If those same effects might, in keeping with the modernist spirit, at times hint of a level on which the human too is “mechanical,” always just acting like a human, that suggestion might be passed off as part of the broad comic climate of these films, much as when Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd would become machinelike figures in their live-action films. So while creating the usual cartoon gags around robot figures might seem a potentially complicated task and a tricky meeting point with the science fictional, it was ultimately only a bit more difficult—or risky—than depicting the usual adventures of anthropomorphic cats, mice, frogs, and rabbits. Another attraction to depicting the robot is that, as the introduction noted, this figure had already found its way into many other segments of popular culture—as both a fictive and a very real presence. Even before Karel Capek’s landmark SF play R.U.R. (1920), which brought the word “robot” (as “robota”) into western vocabularies—and which, as Max Fleischer’s son Richard claims, was the first play to which his father took him (Fleischer

[ 44 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination 73)—automatons and steam-driven figures had appeared in serious fiction and in dime novels, such as Edward S. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868). Fake robot performances and mechanical man “demonstrations,” like Frederick Ireland’s “Enigmarelle” and Adolph Whitman’s “Occultus,” were commonplace attractions in vaudeville and on British music-hall bills.1 And mechanical figures were featured—or, rather, depicted—in a number of early silent films, including the animator J. Stuart Blackton’s The Mechanical Statue and the Ingenious Servant (1907), the Essanay short An Animated Doll (1908), and the Mack Sennett/Ben Turpin comedy A Clever Dummy (1917).2 Robots were frequently and colorfully depicted on the covers of the pulp magazines, as we find in theAmazing Stories issue of May 1930, Astounding of December 1931, and Wonder Stories of December 1931. Moreover, real robots—or, more accurately, mechanical figures of fairly limited capabilities—made many appearances throughout the 1920s and 1930s at trade shows and World’s Fairs, as both side-show-like curiosities and demonstrations of the latest technological achievements. Such appearances would cul- minate in the widely publicized Westinghouse exhibition at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair of Elektro the Motoman, a mechanical giant that could walk, smoke cigarettes, count, and speak, and that during the Fair’s second season was accompanied by a barking robot dog, Sparko (Figure 3.1). In these and many other such efforts, we can begin to measure the period’s intense fascination with this figure, a tendency to frame it in an exciting— “amazing,” “astounding”—context that bulked beyond the normal realm of SF, and an interest in using it to suggest a positive relationship between humans and the various sorts of machine technology that, throughout the Machine Age, seemed poised to transform people’s lives. Yet that very connection, of the various fictive, fake, and fantastic robots with the real, still posed something of a problem for the cartoon world. The art of animation was itself in the midst of a development that juxtaposed its own provisional nature, indeed its power to visualize anything, even the wildest flights of the imagination, with a competition throughout the industry for a higher quality of animated product. And that notion of quality was typically associated with a more realistic seeming— an aesthetic described at the Disney studio, the leading proponent of such “quality” and the one most often praised for its achievements in this vein, as the “illusion of life.” That “illusion” was, moreover, linked to a host of technological enhancements that were introduced in the 1910s to 1930s, including the use of cels, sound, color, and multiplane cameras. Because the cartoon itself was increasingly technologically driven by and yoked to the real—including the reality of the production process—the robot, as familiar as it was becoming and as appropriate as it must have seemed to

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Figure 3.1 Westinghouse’s Elektro the Motoman on exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

the SF cartoon vision, also struck an odd note, since it could never look, act, or seem natural. The result is a kind of tension between the real and the artificial, machine product and machine source, that challenged even the double vision implicit in the vernacular modernism that characterized most cartoons. Disney’s The Mechanical Cow (1927, reissued in 1932 by Walter Lantz, re-edited and given sound) can give us a quick glimpse of this tension at work, while pointing toward its surfacing in various other early robot depictions. The film begins with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit being awakened by a highly animated, anthropomorphic alarm clock. Since the film was originally silent, the alarm is given an exaggeratedly visual character, as if exaggeration might compensate for silence. This miniature machine sports a worried expression on its “face,” dances around on its leglike supports, and even jumps up and down in an obvious display of annoyance when a sleepy Oswald tries to ignore its wake-up message. Eventually they wres- tle—the animated rabbit and this highly animated machine with a kind of programmed intelligence—until Oswald succumbs to its call to work and then turns to wake up his equally reluctant partner, a metallic robot cow, so they can make their daily rounds, which include mechanically producing milk for various animal customers (Figure 3.2).

[ 46 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 3.2 Oswald and his robotic cow service a customer in The Mechanical Cow (1927). Walt Disney Pictures.

Of course, in this sort of world, one where we encounter a taxi with a tired face that can also walk and jump—as well as roll—on its tires, and that shakes with fright when a gunfight breaks out, practically any object can take on human characteristics. But in doing so, any machine also starts to seem robotic, to have an independent intelligence, as well as an ability to act on its own, and these robotic figures can seem just as normal, natural, or real as any other character, including an anthropomorphic rabbit like Oswald who, in an earlier film,Trolley Troubles (1927), even takes off his own foot—as if he were a robotlike figure of component parts—and rubs it for good luck. The film’s conclusion only underscores this ambiguity, for when the cow sees that Oswald and his girlfriend Fanny are in trouble with gangsters, it steps in, as if it were the real protagonist here, to dispatch the gangsters and rescue the couple. But that shift is hardly surprising given the film’s title and its explicit, if comic blurring of machine and animal, the robotic and the “real.” And yet this blurring is also a large part of the allure—and what we might think of as the modernist “message”—of many of these early works. As Esther Leslie argues, in this period’s cartoons, especially those coming from the Fleischer Studios as well as many of Disney’s first efforts, “everything

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in the drawn world is of the same stuff” (23), shares in the same character, and is equally—if at times only mechanically—alive. That shared nature ultimately opens the door to a variety of gags about liminality, about how things, animals, people, and machines can easily cross the sort of boundaries that in everyday life, or even just live-action film, seem so hard and fast, and appear to exercise such a controlling power over the human world— boundaries that lock the world and its people fast in the status quo. But more than just the opportunity for simple gags, that liminal character, or what Leslie describes as a kind of “ideographic playfulness” (23) marking so many cartoons of this period, projects a modernist message of possibility, suggesting a world that is similarly open to reconfiguration or revision, much as SF itself was beginning to envision through its far more complex explorations of science, technology, and their impact on modern life, that is, through the genre’s fundamentally utopian implications. But while these gags based on boundary blurring or transformation— on the mechanical becoming human, the human seeming mechanical, and both sharing the same living space—are plentiful in early animation, they began to lose currency as cartoons, like so much else in popular culture, became more closely linked in both style and subject to the real world and its persistent concerns. The Depression, unemployment, political unrest, fears of war—all would manifest a stubborn resistance to easy solutions or transformation and prompt a more conservative or simply satiric turn. We can readily see this change in attitude by considering another variation on this theme, a cartoon made a decade later by Paul Terry for 20th Century- Fox on the same subject, and also entitled The Mechanical Cow (1937). Centered on Terry’s Farmer Al Falfa, one of the longest-lived cartoon characters and one firmly linked to animation’s early days, early styles, and early attitudes, The Mechanical Cow pairs the farmer with a similar robotic bovine, but in this case the liminal gags on which the earlier Disney cartoon focused largely disappear. In fact, that very disappearance, the failure of an expected boundary crossing, proves central to the later film’s narrative and a key to its difference. Terry’s The Mechanical Cow begins on what must have seemed a familiar note to audiences of the era, for as the cartoon opens and the old farmer goes to milk his cow, he finds that it is not only out of its stall, but that it refuses to give milk; a sign on its back reads, “Sit-Down Strike” by order of “Local 6 7/8.” In the midst of the Depression, labor issues, including unemployment, unionization, strikes, and the violence often associated with them, were simply difficult to avoid, and that difficulty was only underscored by accounts that painted technology as a large part of the problem. An often-voiced fear was that technology, as it was being introduced

[ 48 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination to mechanize the workplace, would replace laborers of every stripe or, as Chaplin would satirize in his feature of the previous year, Modern Times (1936), to transform them into human extensions of a larger machine, into robotic fixtures. As this context might forecast, Farmer Al Falfa turns to such a technological solution to his labor crisis when he decides to create a mechanical cow to replace the real thing. But the robot, as the era’s cartoons would repeatedly remind audiences, was much more than just a machine. Like such other wonderful new technologies as the automobile, washing machine, and airplane, it was a potentially transformative device, one whose power—or, in a cartoon where anthropomorphism is rife, cooperation—might be difficult to control or even predict. The Mechanical Cow emphasizes this possibility when the farmer’s robotic cow is accidentally fed gasoline, amplifying its power and causing it to go out of control, wreck his barn, plow up his fields, and eventually chase the farmer as well as his striking cow off the farm—effectively displacing both management and labor and thereby resolving their disagreements by putting everyone out of work. As this cartoon violently illustrates, a robotic cow is not interchangeable with the real thing, nor is it a viable technological solution to labor/management disagreements. And as other cartoon narratives increasingly brought such technological figures into a more direct and even disturbing contact with the everyday world, they also increasingly yoked animation’s basic impulse toward transformation to this more recalcitrant reality, the resulting collision becoming a main source of their gags. In considering some of the other robot cartoons of the pre–World War II era, we can see this sort of shift in thrust quickly becoming apparent, as the various mechanical figures encountered change from simple embodiments of machine power—and of the culture’s perhaps naïve hopes for a harnessed machine technology, for its boundary-crossing abilities, and for its possibly transformative effect on everyday reality—to offering a more skeptical assessment of its possible problems or drawbacks, even to warning against that very power. In her commentary on the Machine Age’s attitudes toward the new machine culture, Cecelia Tichi chronicles this shift, noting how, even as a variety of basic technological goals such as “functional regularity, efficiency, stability” (54) had come to seem a natural part of modern life from the 1900s through the early 1930s, during the late Machine Age, and for a culture that was sobered by a lingering Depression that seemed to defy all political solutions, machine technology increasingly “came to represent uncontrolled, destabilizing power” (52). That is, for many—and even as a developing SF literature usually tried to suggest otherwise—it began to seem as much a part of the problem

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as a solution. To further illustrate this shift, we might consider two very distinct types of robot cartoons that would appear, demonstrating this ambiguous situation—both hopes and fears, both the fantasy surrounding the idea of the robot and the reality in which that idea was becoming inevitably enmeshed. Reminding us of the extent to which the animation industry was highly imitative—as studios copied each other’s characters, appropriated their plot lines, and even, as Terry’s The Mechanical Cow obviously illustrates, reused each other’s titles—one group of robot narratives seems remarkably similar in both its positive and negative assessments of this figure. For example, several early efforts, from Fleischer, Disney, and Mintz, all present the robot in a more hopeful light, as a powerful stand-in for their cartoon protagonists and even, as Donald Crafton might suggest, as a “self- figuration” (Before Mickey 11) of the ultimate technologist behind these stories, the animator. These cartoons take the form of boxing narratives that forecast later live-action SF efforts, such asThe Twilight Zone’s famous “Steel” (1963) episode and the more recent feature film Real Steel (2011), both of which craft a tentative, if dangerous, partnership between man and machine. As one example, we might consider the Fleischer Studios’ The Robot (1932), a cartoon that readily suggests some of Max Fleischer’s own enthusiasm for machines and science that we earlier noted, as it depicts the studio’s second major cartoon star, Bimbo, as a skilled inventor and garage mechanic whom we initially see working on his car. When Bimbo’s girlfriend—an early version of Betty Boop—agrees to marry him if he can win the $5,000 cash prize that is being offered for defeating the circus boxer One Round Mike, he determines to capitalize on that mechanical skill. Since One Round Mike is many times his size, he turns to technology as an answer, transforming his car into a metal robot, albeit one that quickly demonstrates human characteristics—smiling with its grill, its headlights becoming expressive eyes, addressing Betty as “Beautiful.” Furthering that note of boundary crossing, Bimbo then hides inside of his refashioned/ anthropomorphized vehicle, covering it with a boxer’s robe and passing it off as a challenger to the circus bully. From within this mechanism, Bimbo then manages not only to knock out his opponent, but also to take on all comers, win an even larger prize, and finally gain his girl’s hand. The film ends on a highly celebra- tory note, with Bimbo and Betty now riding in their obviously sentient car, leading a street parade with people cheering, perhaps for them but, as viewers readily recognize, also for the technological marvel that has brought them such good fortune, and that—through its own expressive

[ 50 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 3.3 Bimbo’s boxing robot in The Robot (1932). face formed by its headlights and grill—acknowledges both its role and the crowd’s cheers (Figure 3.3). In the following year Disney would produce its own variation on this plot line with the Mickey Mouse short Mickey’s Mechanical Man (1933). This film gives that transformative impulse a more resonant twist, as Mickey, a garage mechanic like Bimbo, fashions a robot not so that he can inhabit it or function like it—or even win a large purse—but rather so that the robot can act like a human stand-in, or at least like an anthropomorphic mouse, in a more meaningful encounter. In what a poster describes as the “Battle of the Century,” Mickey’s robot, Sam, its name already hinting of an independent personality, is slated to box a giant ape billed as “The Kongo Killer” in a “Battle” designed to prove which is more powerful, technology or brute force. Although trained to the pleasant and civilized tunes of Mickey’s piano playing, Sam, as the film early on illustrates, loses all control, becomes very un-machinelike, whenever he hears discordant sounds, such as the horn on Minnie Mouse’s car. As Mickey explains to Minnie, and in a way that pointedly frames the robot’s behavior in human rather than mechanical terms, “It makes him go wild; it makes him go crazy.” But as the boxing match progresses and the Kongo Killer seems to be disman- tling the robot, Sam’s very ability to “go crazy”—in effect, to cross the line between human and machine, melding an emotional response to his complex mechanical abilities—proves to be his real strength. For as the massive

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Killer is pounding the robot into scattered bolts and gears, Minnie arrives, blows her horn, and Sam quite literally pulls himself together. Inspired by those sounds, he recalls the training we see at the start of the film, combines his various technological fighting tools with a newly “wild” intensity, and easily beats his bestial rival. Recalling Disney’s Academy Award–winning Three Little Pigs that had appeared just three weeks prior, this narrative about defeating a seemingly invincible and bestial menace with the aid of technology easily positions itself as another counter-Depression story, its characters functioning in almost as simple an allegorical fashion as its predecessor. In fact, with the exception of its reference to “pigs,” Crafton’s account of how period audiences responded to Three Little Pigs could easily be transposed to Mickey’s Mechanical Man, as he describes how “ordinary folks in the figures of pigs could act out the end of the Depression, not with a parade, but with a decisive act of cathartic violence against a despised animal” (Shadow 230). In this case that violent defeat is enabled not by guile and practicality, as in the case of the pigs, but by a SF-like marriage with technology, reminding audiences of a new and potentially powerful ally in the war against economic despair, as embodied in the frightening Kongo Killer. It is the same sort of alliance championed by much SF literature of the period, as well as various cultural movements, such as Technocracy: one of man (or his anthropomorphic stand-in, the mouse) and machine, seemingly common partners in the struggle with economic and cultural catastrophe. Another version of that alliance and of the boundary crossing that repeatedly marks these narratives shows up in a slightly later robot-boxing cartoon, Charles Mintz’s Man of Tin (1940), done for Columbia Pictures. It features the young boy Scrappy as the assistant to an eccentric inventor whose exaggeratedly egg-shaped head quickly establishes his own egg- headed, impractical character. When the scientist’s new robot creation fails to work and he begins sobbing over his failure, Scrappy plans to cheer him up by fooling him: by getting inside of the machine—as Bimbo did—and operating its variously labeled controls,3 including one curiously marked “wrestling.” Buoyed by the sudden demonstration of his machine’s powers, the inventor decides to test his creation in the real world by entering the robot in an advertised wrestling match that here too features a $5,000 prize. Although the Scrappy-driven robot is nearly destroyed in the con- test, with various, and apparently unnecessary, bolts and gears once more strewn all about, it manages to win out against its burly, rather beastlike opponent. However, as testimony to that more realistic imperative we have described, even in victory the robot’s mechanical voice—in a turn that might once more recall the era’s various labor troubles—sounds out

[ 52 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination with “I protest,” apparently at being used in such a crude and violent fashion. Still, this film too suggests that, while robotic technology might not deliver mankind—or even mousekind—from the eternal drudgeries of labor, it might, when properly controlled, when quite literally guided by a human or anthropomorphic intelligence, help produce a world less driven by naturalistic imperatives—and perhaps by the imponderable forces of the Depression. However, this man-machine alliance was more frequently shown to be unsuccessful, unreliable, and plagued by precisely the sort of instability Tichi observes throughout the literature of the Machine Age, as if the new machine technology had also set loose a “destabilizing energy” in society (45). As one example of this interpretation, we can turn to another of Paul Terry’s Farmer Al Falfa cartoons, The Iron Man (1930), wherein the farmer encounters another robot on his farm. As is often the case in the Farmer Al Falfa films, the farmer finds himself at odds with his livestock— his chickens pelt him with eggs, other animals mock him—so he orders a robotic helper, one that, when uncrated, proves no better than the animals. Instead of doing the farm chores, it dances; when kicked into action by the farmer, it kicks him back; and when struck again, it literally blows its top, destroying things before chasing both the farmer and the animals off the farm, much as in the conclusion of The Mechanical Cow (1937). Similarly, the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Mechanical Man (1932) shows Pete the scientist building a robot that immediately turns on its creator because, the inventor believes, it has no heart, a lack that he tries to remedy by kidnapping Oswald’s girlfriend, Kitty, in order to transplant her heart into his monster. All that saves Oswald and his girlfriend from the marauding mechanical man is the chance intrusion of one of those seemingly ubiquitous farm animals, a hungry goat that turns the robot into a tin meal. And when KoKo the Clown falls in love with an illustrated mechanical dancer in Fleischer’s The Dancing Doll (1922), she is accidentally splashed with oil and, just as an animated clergyman arrives to marry them, dissolves into an inky puddle, leaving a disconsolate Koko, resigned to—once again— jump back into the inkwell from which he had originated. In each instance, it seems that, as desirable as the robot technology initially appears to be, it ultimately proves to be unstable, unpredictable, even threatening, and to represent the sort of ephemeral promise that, like KoKo’s attractive dancer, all too easily melts away. Where we might see this anxiety most powerfully demonstrated, though, is in another series of three closely related efforts that, tellingly, all appeared within a few months of 1933 in some of the Depression’s dark- est days: Ub Iwerks’s Techno-Cracked , Charles Mintz’s Technoracket, and

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Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising’s Bosko’s Mechanical Man. Much as with the trio of robot-fighting films we have considered, these cartoons also follow a similar narrative pattern as their central characters—Flip the Frog, Scrappy, and Bosko—set about building robots as a technological solution to their problems. However, the problems in these films are all framed in highly personal terms. In each case the cartoon protagonists are inspired to action when they come across newspaper or magazine articles about the widely heralded Technocracy movement and immediately come under its spell, hoping to change the nature of their worlds, or at least their personal situations, through the advertised transformative power of machine technology and scientific thinking. But in each case the ensuing narrative uses a robot as a tool for mocking the characters’—and the culture’s—all- too-easy embrace of that Technocratic agenda and its supposed scientific solutions to all of society’s ills. Technocracy was the first of several such organized expressions of technological utopianism that appeared in early twentieth-century American culture. Both a political and economic movement, it reflected, as Howard Segal explains, a kind of supreme confidence in “technology as the pana- cea for the problems of American society” (120), as it sought to reform government, industry, and the economic system by using rigid scientific principles, coordinated by a scientific elite. And more specifically, as Andrew Ross notes, Technocracy was widely “hyped as a ‘solution’ to the Depression in a storm of media attention in 1933–34” (118), that is, in the very period that produced these films. Of course, it is hardly unusual for cartoons to tap into or become a part of such a media “storm”; topicality, as previous chapters have noted, was always a primary source for story material. But the Technocratic claims for transforming pubic life through scientific principles were ill understood by the general public and easily exaggerated, making for equally easy comic translation. At the same time, the Technocratic ideology was, throughout this period, closely linked to SF and its more serious agenda: its positioning itself as a literature that often called its readers to take on a more active participation in the world. Thus Roger Luckhurst describes how many of the ideals of the Technocracy movement, especially its vision of “heroic scientists and engineers craft- ing technical solutions to social problems,” had quickly become embedded “into the genre’s DNA” (325), underscoring SF’s own political and utopian thrust, its implicit promise to show how the latest scientific and technological ideas might help reengineer the world. However, we might read animation’s more skeptical translation of that political thrust in the fact that all of these cartoons appeared just months after the triumph of Franklin Roosevelt as president over his Technocratic

[ 54 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination predecessor, the engineer Herbert Hoover.4 In fact, the politics evident in these cartoons is hardly of the progressive sort that was often associated with SF of the pre-war years—or, for that matter, even with the Roosevelt agenda. Rather, these stories are consistently about individual efforts not to do the difficult work of reshaping society according to scientific precepts, but rather to avoid work by simply turning it over to machines. It is a shift that seems symptomatic of a more conservative modernism, with these cartoons emptying out Technocratic ideology—exaggerating its promises, linking it with personal laziness, and satirically dismissing it—as they play with the imagery and concerns that were also attached to SF, with some of “the genre’s DNA,” without actually embracing those elements. This point is worth emphasizing, since it suggests one of the ways in which animation at times worked to blunt or normalize some of SF’s more radical or truly modernist thrust, allowing audiences a space for laughter without risking an uncomfortable political commitment or commentary of the sort that would become more common during World War II and the immediate postwar years. The similar set-up for this satiric vision occurs early in each of these films, as their protagonists accidentally stumble upon stark headlines that they all too eagerly embrace. Techno-Cracked , for example, begins with Flip the Frog, who has abandoned his yardwork for the pleasures of lazing in a hammock, reading an article in Unpopular Mechanics titled “Technocracy: Why Be a Slave?” In that piece he finds directions for freeing himself from work by building a mechanical man to take over the jobs he does not want to do, such as cutting grass. Much like the other robot builders we have seen—Bimbo, Mickey, and Scrappy—Flip quickly and easily tinkers together a robot from an old stove, a car battery, pipe pieces found in his basement, and a pumpkin that can serve for a head. Apparently no rigorous scientific training or specialized materials are needed, and he seems little worried about controlling this seemingly simple technology. While Flip immediately puts the robot to work mowing the lawn, it proves indiscrimi- nate in its labors, as it turns to mowing the flowers, porch, carpets, and even a slow-moving chicken before finally revolting against Flip’s orders and chasing its creator with an axe (Figure 3.4). After taking dynamite to his creation, Flip begrudgingly returns to cutting the lawn himself, obviously unhappy at the way his robotic servant and Technocratic dream have both been blown away. Appearing less than a month later, the Scrappy cartoon Technoracket is even more explicit and detailed in its labor-based commentary on those Technocratic dreams. Here too an obviously lazy Scrappy, whom we first see assigning chores to his little brother Oopy and the various farm

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Figure 3.4 Flip the Frog’s out-of-control robot in Techno-Cracked (1933).

animals while he relaxes, is suddenly inspired by a newspaper headline, “Technocracy: A New Age,” along with an article touting the benefits of using “mechanical farm hands.” Inspired by its ideas, he decides to create a truly modern, fully technologized farm, one not just with robot laborers to do his—or rather Oopy’s—work, but with mechanical cows, chickens, and pigs as well. One result of this sweeping Technocratic solution to agricultural labor is another series of liminal gags, as we see the various robot animals taking the place of their live counterparts and producing already bottled milk, precanned vegetables, processed hams, and so on, as the processing of labor translates into something more problematic, a processed food. Another result, though, is that Oopy and the now-useless real animals are simply turned out from the farm, suddenly left jobless like so many human victims of the Depression. In fact, the film depicts them in a way that must have seemed all too familiar to many audience members, with these characters shown standing forlornly beyond the farm’s fences, locked out from their former jobs and watching their machine replacements operate the now-modernized facility. But in a turnabout that must have been directly aimed at the Technocratic claim of total and reliable scientific control, Oopy easily sabotages the robot control panel, leading all of the new mechanisms to malfunction, destroy

[ 56 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination the farm, and attack Scrappy, who must then, like Flip, fight with and eventually terminate his own creations. And also like Flip, Scrappy, with his Technocratic bubble burst, its promises shown to be, as the title suggests, a kind of “racket,” gets his comeuppance at cartoon’s end, as he sadly returns to the world of traditional work. A more lighthearted satire of Technocracy, at least partly due to the effervescent, musical nature of the Bosko character, is a third such effort of 1933, the Warner Bros. release, Bosko’s Mechanical Man. Here Bosko, a figure usually depicted singing and dancing to tunes from the Warner Bros. musicals, irritates his girlfriend, Honey, when his melodic antics get in the way of helping do the household chores. Coming across the Daily Bugle, the headline of which reads “Robot Will Do Work of Hundred Men Say Technocrats,” Bosko tells her “Why work?” and he then proceeds to fashion his own robot out of flat irons, pipes, an old stove, an automobile engine, and light bulbs (Figure 3.5). Once started up, though, this robot does none of the labor for which he was built; rather—and like the other Technocratic devices we have seen—he quickly goes out of control, as if he has a mind of his own. With a malevolent look, as if he were the very spirit of modern technological culture set loose, he grinds his gearlike teeth menacingly at Bosko,

Figure 3.5 Bosko tinkers together a robot in his basement in Bosko’s Mechanical Man (1933). Warner Bros.

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wrecks Honey’s house, mischievously shocks Bosko’s dog, and then chases Honey and Bosko out of the house. Recalling Flip the Frog’s solution to such a menace, Bosko finally uses a handful of dynamite to return his own Technocratic “solution” to the pile of metal junk from which it was built, but now with a cuckoo clock where the robot’s head once was. While this film too suggests that constructing a robot is one possible response to the era’s labor and economic problems, and Bosko’s “Why work?” an obvious—and ultimately an ominous—corollary to Technocracy’s promise of a technological utopia, reality, much like the reality of the Depression itself, quickly negates that response. As the film ends, the “cuckoo” sound the junked robot makes effectively mocks the notion that robots could ever actually replace human workers, or that Technocracy’s solutions to society’s difficulties might prove anything more than crazy daydreams. While none of these cartoons actually addresses the issue of whether at this time work was even available for those wanting it, each pointedly ridi- cules that Technocratic and science fictional solution, demonstrating that, for all of their appeal, mechanical wonders were not quite the answer to our cultural problems and that they might even exacerbate them by removing the incentive to work. While all three films do raise the issue of whether robots could even be reliably controlled in this period prior to Isaac Asimov’s famed “Three Laws of Robotics,”5 they also suggest that the lure of machine laborers might just further alienate people from the real work that needed to be done. Thus these films’ satiric vantages on Technocracy simply give way to conservative or traditional solutions to the era’s real problems, such as the need for a return to more conventional labor practices—thus the emphases in each case on traditional sorts of work, such as farming and household chores—and, even more fundamentally, the necessity for hard work of the sort that Flip, Scrappy, and Bosko, all descendants of a long line of happy-go-lucky comic types, are demonstrably unwilling to do. While these and other robot narratives at times acknowledge real-world circumstances—the era’s economic situation, massive unemployment, and calls for new solutions, such as those theorized by the technological utopians—they also pull back from the powerfully seductive lure of the machine and the attendant easy theoretical answers to the era’s problems. Rather, they remind audiences, both literally, as in Technoracket, and metaphorically with their robots that consistently run amuck, of what Matt Novak terms “the tremendous upheaval that the ‘mechanization of society’ had wrought”—an upheaval that the robot, promising both a release from labor and the potential loss of a livelihood, so conveniently embodied for pre-war culture.

[ 58 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination As the cartoon robot moved from a kind of transformative figure—one that also reflected animation’s own emphasis on transformation—to a more realistic reminder of powers that might be beyond human control, Walt Disney would offer another, even less optimistic take on this figure. In this case the robot story would not be mediated by his studio’s energetic and always cheerful mouse, but rather by its new star, the more down-to- earth and irascible Donald Duck for whom the world would always prove frustratingly inflexible. In fact, the tension between technological high hopes and their recurrent dashing in the face of reality forms the core of the Donald Duck film Modern Inventions (1937), a cartoon that pointedly ties the ubiquitous robot to the broader landscape of technological innovation and change, which we shall investigate in a later chapter. As Donald inter- acts with various versions of this technological figure, the film repeatedly illustrates how much the culture’s attitude toward the robot—and more generally a machine technology—had shifted in just the few years since the studio’s previous and much more positive effort in this vein, Mickey’s Mechanical Man. Modern Inventions’ setting is from the start somewhat conflicted, for it begins with Donald eagerly entering a building labeled “Museum of Modern Marvels,” that is, a place that suggests both the past and a marvelous future, with its doubled implications also forecasting the vernacular modernist perspective that rules this cartoon too. Neither an inventor nor obvious proponent of Technocracy, Donald simply represents the average citizen, curious about these advertised “marvels”—all of which, he soon learns, are various sorts of robotic creations that have been designed to make modern life easier. The first of his encounters becomes a signature and kind of signpost for the entire film, as a “robot butler” greets him and offers to take his hat, although it is actually more a demand than offer, because it functions automatically and insistently—that is, in a totally robotic fashion—before finally, in a suggestion of how our relationship to the technological world might play out, just snatching the hat from the hes- itant duck’s head. This initial irksome encounter then becomes a running gag, as the robot butler automatically reappears at each exhibit, where it seizes the different hats that the equally insistent and defiant Donald dons as he continues his museum tour. As is the case with this robot, the museum’s many exhibits differ little in function or annoyance; they include a robotic hitchhiking assistant that pokes Donald in the eye with its mechanical finger, an automated bundle wrapper that accidentally wraps the duck; a robot nurse-maid that mistakes the duck for a baby and diapers him, and a mechanical barber/shoe-shiner that embarrassingly confuses Donald’s bottom and his top, working on each end accordingly. All offer variations

Of Robots and Artificial Beings [ 59 ] 60

on the theme of untempered if predictable and insistent machinic action, reducing the hapless duck to a package, a baby, or, more generally, a victim of these supposed wonders of the modern age. But because of the character who is involved here, these encounters take on more than the sort of simple satiric coloring we have seen in the previous robot narratives. For the comically painful interactions with each of these labor-saving devices, along with the irritating reappearances of the robot butler, build to the expected crescendo of most Donald Duck films, and indeed the denouement that audiences of the period had come to expect, as the intellectually curious but foul-tempered fowl is transformed into an emotionally charged adversary for all technology. With these gags pyramiding, he finally launches into one of his signature temper tantrums, raging unintelligibly against the modern technological world and, with fists raised, seems poised to take on his own robotic fight opponent— or any other representative of mechanized modernity. Given the duck’s response, we might well see these various exhibits not just as signs of what is to come, as displays promising a technological utopia, but perhaps as a collection of the era’s frustrating failures, all quite properly relegated to a museum as reminders of an already unfortunate and misconceived past. Of course, by the time of Modern Inventions robots had become more common in live-action films and were particularly a staple of the SF serials, as illustrated by movies like Undersea Kingdom (1936), The Phantom Creeps (1939), and The Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940). However, these films never offered much ambiguity in their presentation of such figures. More than the sort of simple annoyances Donald Duck encounters, the robots are almost always menaces, usually fashioned by mad scientists, ever in danger of going out of control—in fact, the final episode ofThe Mysterious Doctor Satan shows an out-of-control robot killing its creator—and typically used to exert power or evoke terror. In light of these live-action developments, it seems fitting that the last robot cartoon issued prior to America’s entry into World War II was the Fleischer Studios’ Superman filmThe Mechanical Monsters (1941). An elaborately designed, expensive, Technicolor effort, the film presents its robots just as the title signals, in a very grim vein, as monsters. Built by a criminal scientist to carry out a string of robber- ies, they are outsized metal creatures that can fly, shoot flames, and have super strength, a fitting challenge to Superman, and apart from a roughly anthropomorphic shape, they have little of the human about them. Linked not just to the sort of “uncontrolled, destabilizing power” of technology that Tichi locates throughout the late Machine Age, but also to the imminent threat of a world war—with their formation flying and destructive actions easily evoking the blitz that England was already suffering—these

[ 60 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination robots no longer hold out a possibility of partnership or of technological solutions to the various Depression-linked problems. Instead, they are precisely symptomatic of the darker concerns that were haunting audiences, or as Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan dramatically put it, “expressive of the fears and grim expectations about future relations between humans and machines” (74), both in the looming war and after (Figure 3.6). Commenting on the way in which the SF pulps of the period were also treating this figure, Cheng observes how, in the later 1930s, such “revised robots” were beginning to surface throughout the popular literature. Yet while the pulps continued to emphasize the power of their robots, Cheng a bit obliquely notes that in their shift “from the personally familiar to the naturally threatening” these stories also “removed robots’ technological potential beyond the scope of reassuring dynamics” (144). In effect, robots became denatured, pushed beyond the pale of normal human—or animal—needs or even understanding, just as Donald Duck frustratingly discovers. No longer seen as something that might simply be tinkered together by garage mechanics like Bimbo, Flip the Frog, or Scrappy, robots came to seem more a part of a complex real world, with their embodiment of science and technology sundered from such familiar issues as labor and

Figure 3.6 The Fleischer Studios’ Superman combats the robot threat of The Mechanical Monsters (1941).

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efficiency, and becoming linked instead to the pre-war era’s threatening atmosphere, to its machines of destruction. As The Mechanical Monsters illustrates, they would, at least until the mid-1950s, no longer prove the stuff of comedy. This threatening note might also explain why, with the exception of the Fleischers’ The Dancing Doll, none of these cartoons would explore one of the potentials of the robot figure that Fritz Lang had exploited in his Metropolis and by several of the vaudeville-style acts mentioned earlier. For these constructed figures are almost invariably male, their bodies/chas- sis emphasizing their imposing physical power rather than the possible allure Lang had linked to his female robot—an allure that foregrounded in a highly critical way the seductive power of technology itself. But fashioning female robots could have raised a number of troubling sexual and gender issues that would find more purchase in a postwar culture, among them, the role of women in the world of (nondomestic) work, the nature of sexual attraction, even the possible constructed nature of human sexu- ality. Certainly, none of these concerns could have been easily resolved in a seven-minute cartoon narrative or easily blunted by its gag structure. But while, as Lisa Yaszek has chronicled, some women pulp writers were already tackling such issues, using SF as a tool “to speculate … about the ways that advanced technoscience might change sex and gender relations” (540), animation remained, in this respect, bound within the dominant period understanding of gender and gender roles. Despite this glaring absence, our SF cartoons, as I have tried to suggest, both shared in and helped contribute to a noticeable shift in the perception of the robot. These films’ fundamentally modernist character had early on rendered this figure as an appealing emblem of technological aspiration and utopian potential. In fact, as films likeThe Mechanical Cow, The Robot, and Mickey’s Mechanical Man attest, the robot seemed to afford a compelling sign of the modernist partnership between humans and machines, even hinting of some cultural change that could be effected by this figure’s tendency to embody and interrogate the nature of human labor in modern society. However, that vision, much like that of the culture’s technological utopians, did not last. By the mid-1930s our cartoons were already pulling back from this loaded figure, finding in it fewer and fewer possibilities for gags, much less for effectively defamiliarizing their audience’s perspective on their world, while offering more potential for simple recoil. While these cartoons do not easily accommodate the image of the robot, they increasingly reflect a growing cultural dis-ease with this figure, as if it had indeed opened the door too far, not just on the mechanics of the animated realm, as we began this chapter by speculating, or even on gender representation,

[ 62 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination but on the stark reality of a highly technological world that was a part of the modernist vision. As a brief postscript to this discussion, we might just note what was perhaps the first cartoon effort to resurface and recast the robot figure in the immediate postwar era. In the Warner Bros. cartoon Mouse Menace (1946), Porky Pig, when he is unable to rid his house of a pesky mouse through various natural methods—laying traps, adopting several cats, even bringing in a lion—in the best Technocratic tradition seizes upon the perfect technological answer: constructing a robot cat to do the job. When the mouse, in turn, fails in its efforts at evading or destroying Porky’s mouse-catching gadget, it retaliates in like fashion, building its own mechanized aid, an explosive-laden, robotic mouse, which eventually destroys the robot cat, as planned, but also itself as well as the house over which they are fighting, leaving Porky and his real mouse adversary now equally homeless, perhaps to continue their battle ad infinitum. At this point, in the wake of a highly destructive, technologically waged war—a war unmistakably figured in this mechanical cat-and-mouse conflict and the rubble it produces—the robot seems to have become assimilated into the cultural imaginary, not simply as a domestic appliance, but as an unpredictable component of the SF imagination. Whether cat- or mouse-shaped, these robots have obviously lost their immediate links to labor, to machine potential, and to a utopian future, as they accomplish little apart from turning the confrontation between homeowner and rodent into a proxy confrontation, while ramp- ing up the possibility long foreseen by the SF literature for a self-inflicted technological destruction—an effect soon to only be more elaborately and repeatedly staged in the many live-action, robot-centered SF films soon to populate this period, works such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Tobor the Great (1954), Gog (1954), The Colossus of New York (1958), and especially the allusively titled Robot Monster (1953).

Of Robots and Artificial Beings [ 63 ] 64 CHAPTER 4 Alien Visions

riting in 1935, the noted fantasist and SF author H. P. Lovecraft

Woffered his own prescription for depicting aliens and alien worlds. “What must always be present in superlative degree,” he advised, “is a deep, pervasive sense of strangeness—the utter, incomprehensible strangeness of a world holding nothing in common with ours” (qtd. in Carter 67–68). But that advice, as Paul A. Carter observes, had relatively little impact on the fiction of the pre-war years, as most writers fashioned their alien visions from what he terms “mere exoticism” (68), usually evoking the deserts or jungles of Earth, populated by oriental or other recognizably foreign but generally humanoid figures. We see this same approach in the relatively few live-action SF films that depicted alien worlds in this period—the various hawk men, clay people, and shark men of the Flash Gordon serials notwithstanding. Martians and other aliens were generally shown as exotic types, as in the orientalist depiction of Ming the Merciless. Of course, the graphic world of animation would seem to have more potential for the sort of “incomprehensible strangeness” Lovecraft recommends, especially given its well-established menagerie of exaggerated types and the ability to literally draw up almost any sort of world that the cartoonists might imagine—often the wilder the better. And yet here too we find some tendency to restrain the strange, as well as its attendant science fictional effect of estrangement, as that Lovecraftian prescription with its modernist challenge to conventional representation would also pose a challenge to animation’s changing, more realistic style. This chapter focuses on those pre-war cartoons that depict aliens and alien worlds in part because, as the introduction noted, such material 66

is simply iconic to the genre, one of those important visual reminders that we are indeed in the realm of SF. But envisioning such things also seems central to the driving spirit of both animation and SF, thus providing us with a natural and telling point of intersection. For in this body of material—extending from some of the earliest cartoons, such as the 1909 Emile Cohl effortMan in the Moon, to the Fleischer Superman films of 1941–43—the open possibilities of graphic representation and a more conservative, or conventionally realistic, brake on modernism seem to square off, in the process demonstrating both the potential for a subversive vision implicit in these depictions of other beings and other worlds, and a more common tendency to fold these visions of otherness into the comic fabric of our own world in order to naturalize or accommodate some of their strangeness, in effect, to better fit within that realist thrust. A similar tension shows up in another, and probably more familiar, graphic contribution to the SF imagination in this period, namely, the brightly colored, highly dramatic, and often sexually charged covers of the early pulp magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories. Here we do find, thanks to the imagination and talent of such artists as Frank R. Paul, Howard V. Brown, and Hans Wesso, among others, a great many “amazing” images of alien figures, often insectoid, plantlike, or hydrocephalic humanoids—figures that do suggest a conscious effort to push beyond the simply “exotic” in presentation. As Adam Roberts observes, while broadly representational, the pulp covers also had a distinctly “abstract quality” about them (185), thanks to their exaggerations of size and shape, dynamic lines, highly saturated col- ors, and overall dreamlike quality. Moreover, he argues that the intended “achievement” of this artwork was pointedly “not representational: it lay in the creation of a wholly original mode of visual representation, highly varied and yet immediately recognizable” (184). While Roberts is probably overstating the case, that artwork was often at some odds with the fiction beyond those covers, especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s when, as Carter has chronicled, many of the pulp editors, in keeping with their own more realist injunction, began to back off of “alien strangeness in the stories they published” (75). However, the primary purpose of the pulp covers was to stoke the imagination (Figure 4.1) and to lure newsstand purchasers, so they were often quite separate achievements from the pulps’ contents, as if they were just the dream visions that had been conjured up by the less dramatic prose component inside, which usually paid more attention to—and even boasted of—an emphasis on scientific accuracy or plausibility, that is, on a certain level of realism.1

[ 66 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 4.1 More than simply exotic—the pulp aliens of Astounding Stories (1936).

Of course, SF as a genre has always had its own complex attachment to—and detachment from—the real, and its own fascination with alien images seems to run parallel to its modernist leanings. Pulp editors such as Hugo Gernsback often insisted that contributors ground their stories in recognizable or at least plausible science and technology. And as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., offers, even that fiction’s most marvelous visions, including its animated efforts, have typically invited audiences to measure them via “essentially realistic interpretative values” (33). But in its character as what Darko Suvin termed “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (7), SF almost invariably offers some challenge to both familiar cultural

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reality and the norms of realistic representation. The figure of the alien, imagined inhabitant of another world, naturally subject to different physical forces, capable of other patterns of growth and development, and a lit- eral embodiment of the genre’s oft-cited sense of wonder, especially opens the door to new material, to other conceptions of life, and to different ways of treating that matter. Thus we might see SF’s treatment of the alien and the world he/she/ it inhabits in the context of the modernist tendency to recast conventional representation—a thrust wherein SF was challenging not just our “scientific” ideas about other life forms, but also notions of all sorts of otherness, including, as we shall see later, how we represent racial or ethnic Others. This challenge is one of the reasons that the literature of the pre-war period, as Edward James observes, is marked by such a rich and “exotic mélange of different races and cultures” (46). While some of these depictions, such as the serials’ presentation of Ming the Merciless and pulp fiction’s frequent turn to similarly villainous oriental figures, reflect the fears and prejudices of the times, others simply suggest the bizarre, thoughtful, and indeed wonder-ful speculations of various SF authors and artists. As we should only expect, some element of this otherness also makes its way into the era’s cartoons—even in their non-SF forms—which had quickly built up and developed an audience for their own strange menagerie, one of anthropomorphic animals and animal-like humans, including such mainstays as Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat; Max and Dave Fleischer’s KoKo the Clown, Bimbo, and Betty Boop; Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse from Walt Disney; Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper of Ub Iwerks/MGM; or Bosko and Porky Pig from Warner Bros., among many others. Indeed, the physical and behavioral exaggerations of these animated figures would sometimes make their species almost inde- terminate, practically encoding some of them as “alien.” Betty Boop, for example, was initially an anthropomorphic and sexualized poodle before the Fleischers decided to capitalize on the surprising allure of their dog- lady and turn her into a fully human and attractive female. And the ambiguous nature of Warner Bros.’ Bosko character would bring one period commentator to ask, “I know Mickey Mouse, and Krazy Kat, and Oswald the Rabbit … but Bosko the what?” (qtd. in Maltin 225). Of course, as in the case of the SF aliens of the pulp covers, animated figures were hardly bound by any of the “rules” that generally govern our conception of the human. Anthropomorphizing a cat, mouse, pig, or dog was just a way of anchoring that figure in a familiar world or situation, while allowing the character to do—or get away with—things that humans inhabiting an all-too-real world never could. Depicting aliens, even early

[ 68 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination versions of the Bug-Eyed Monsters of later SF literature and film, was in many ways only a step beyond this cartoon norm that more commonly— and comically—tried to display its independence from the real in a great many ways, including the seemingly common ability of many cartoon characters who, after going off a cliff and suddenly finding themselves falling— at least for a moment—are then able to walk or even run on air. But the depiction of aliens and their worlds, usually by bringing them into contact with these more familiar, and slightly less alien, anthropomorphs, points up the tensions in the sort of modernist vision at work in most of these pre-war cartoons. We have already traced out various dimensions of early animation’s intersections with modernism, focusing especially on the provisional, constantly changeable universe it assumes. Growing out of modernism’s broader questioning of all received forms, this provisional nature would help to place animation in a different representational category than live- action cinema and would, as the introduction noted, lead to animation’s embrace by various avant-garde artists of the period. In fact, a figure like the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein would develop a fascination with Walt Disney’s early work, seeing it—especially Disney’s signature character Mickey Mouse—within its own kind of avant-garde category. Thus he would applaud its markedly modern nature, especially its “plasmaticness,” that is, its embrace “of all-possible diversity of form” along with its rejection of what he termed the “mercilessly standardized and mechanically measured” (21) images of conventional art, including much of the cinema. In that ability to evade or overturn conventional forms, to render anything—and especially any being—as visually “possible,” to in a sense visualize alien-ation, animation was, as Philip Brophy explains, just “rep- licating the prime modernist impulse of the 20th century: to destroy representation in the act of representation” (104), that is, to use lines and spaces in ways that were often quite alien to conventional cinematic imagery, thereby underscoring what Miriam Hansen described as modernism’s “new visuality” (72). But we might again consider Paul Wells’s commentary about this “insistence upon a sense of otherness,” since he cautions against making too much of it, arguing that it was a common characteristic of most early animation (Animation and America 23). In this view such othering was just a part of animation’s nature and was distinct from any generic intentions, a way of turning its free-wheeling imagery—and characters—into potential gags, detached from the lived world or even the possible worlds typically conjured by the SF imagination. As a result, he sees animation as projecting the sense that it represented “a magical and comical language,” distinct from the realistic images of live-action cinema, and little given to

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exploiting the possibilities inherent in “its aesthetic openness” (Animation and America 28)—or its estranging potential. And, indeed, for all of their exoticism, animation’s drawn aliens do mostly function within a pattern of such effects: of exaggerations, surprising transformations, strange hybrid combinations, and visual puns that, while capitalizing on the spirit of modernism, often side-step much of its subversive possibility. However, I want to emphasize that qualifier “mostly,” for the cartoons of the pre-war years also at various times, and in ways that have generally gone unnoted, do exploit that representational potential—as in the better SF literature—for a level of cultural critique. A few of these films use wonder-ful imagery like aliens and alien planets as tropes for very real human problems; they point to what is fixed and unchangeable in our world and what is simply a cultural construct; and in some cases they manage to foreground our own psychic needs, even if they also tend to retreat from them. The result is a rather curious dance that we find in a number of pre-war cartoons, including several that we have already discussed, such as The Flying House (1921), as they at times embrace and at others distance their vision from the modernist one. However, it is a pattern that would, in many ways, reinforce the strategies of the larger, emerging SF genre in this period wherein excitement and explanation, wonder and polemic, acceptance and critique would also frequently go hand-in- hand, where strange, even lurid covers and reasoned narratives would work together, where representation, I would argue, always seems both real and estranged. We shall look in greater detail at some of these critical instances of animation’s double vision later in the chapter, but before doing so we should survey the sort of alien conceptions that show up more often in these cartoons and that certainly have a more conservative modernist flavor. These cartoons typically offer wildly inventive images of aliens and alien worlds, but they present them not as corresponding to the real, not as critiques, not even as tools of, as Suvin puts it, “estrangement and cognition” (7), designed to comment on our own nature, surroundings, or way of life. Rather, the images are characterized by exaggeration, transformation, hybrid deformity, and simple visual punning—effects that mine the very open possibilities provided by the concept of the alien or modernism’s own provisional character but do so largely for comic opportunities. Thus when in the Fleischer Studios’ Trip to Mars (1924) KoKo the Clown arrives on Mars, stumbles into the Martian subway, and sees a long line of what are literally straphangers passing in front of him—no two of these strange- looking figures alike, as they literally hang by hooks on a moving conveyor- belt strap—they become little more than a visual gag, a nod toward the great circus of everyday life that a New Yorker like Max Fleischer might

[ 70 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination have viewed on his own daily subway ride to work (Figure 4.2). Such an encounter easily reminds us of Henri Bergson’s explanation that the comic typically “has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities” (62). In fact, wild “eccentricities” describe many of the alien visions that show up in these pre-war cartoons, although that eccentricity of presentation is often not much more than a measure of size or shape, part of the emphasis on exaggeration and transformation that was central to early animation’s great appeal. Winsor McCay, already well known for his exaggerated dream visions, thanks to such newspaper cartoons as Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–14, 1924–26) and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–25), would not only claim to bring a giant dinosaur back to life in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), but also would provide a template for later SF monster films with another story of exaggerated change in The Pet (1921). It is a cartoon that depicts a strange, seemingly alien creature that quickly grows to gigantic proportions, devouring everything it sees before the army has to intervene and destroy it. McCay’s The Flying House, introduced in chapter 2, brings a couple to the moon where they encounter an angry giant who chases them away. And various other cartoon characters would, in the course of their own interplanetary explorations, also meet with such outsized figures, as Felix the Cat is captured by a race of Martian giants in Astronomeows

Figure 4.2 Koko the Clown onboard a Martian subway in Trip to Mars (1924).

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(1928), while both Oswald the Rabbit in Sky Larks (1934) and Krazy Kat in Krazy’s Race of Time (1937) have to escape a gigantic figure of Mars— depicted in remarkably similar fashion2—who looks to eat them. But while such an emphasis on scale afforded an easy way to create surprise, depict alien difference, and even generate gags based on such obvious size differ- ential, it also offered something more. In true modernist fashion, it raised the question of a need to reexamine our point of view and relative relationship to other beings, other worlds—and, by implication, the other inhabitants of our own world. The encounter with beings of a different scale points toward another commonplace cartoon depiction of aliens, as beings who can change shape, who transform, or, as Eisenstein would put it, who are pointedly “plasmatic” in character. While many cartoon figures would themselves have to undergo various sorts of science fictional transformations due to the work of mad scientists—as in the cases of Chemical Ko-Ko (1929), Willie Whopper’s Reducing Crème (1934), and Scrappy in The Great Experiment (1934)—the alien often proves especially unstable in appearance. For example, when KoKo the Clown first lands on Mars inTrip to Mars he encounters a variety of characters who simply pop up out of the ground and then disappear, including two ogres who, as KoKo cowers in fear, turn into puffs of smoke. On Oswald the Rabbit’s first trip to Mars (in the appropriately titled Mars, 1930) he is introduced to a Martian king who, entertained by Oswald’s musical abilities, dances about and demonstrates an ability to deconstruct himself, as he plays pitch and catch with his own stomach. In the Willie Whopper cartoon Stratos Fear (1933), Willie too finds himself on Mars, where he is chased by a group of Martian scientists who want to experiment on him. When he thinks he has escaped, Willie suddenly encounters an attractive woman who, in a Mae West voice, invites him to “come up and see me some time—anytime,” kisses him, leads him to her room, but then, in this pre–Production Code cartoon, just as she appears to be changing out of her clothes, suddenly changes into one of the pursuing scientists and captures him. What Willie and the other cartoon characters repeatedly encounter is a cosmos of instability and unpredictability, populated by aliens who are not always threatening, but whose changeability is itself disconcerting, especially since it makes the difference between these Earth adventurers and the figures they encounter difficult to measure, as if the aliens were simply the products of mental instability or of a dream— which is, in fact, the case in a film likeStratos Fear . The most commonly encountered sort of cartoon alien, though, is one that makes this difficult measure graphically dramatic through a jarring marriage of unlikely parts, such as when Happy Hooligan in A Trip to

[ 72 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 4.3 Moon hybrids entertain Happy Hooligan in A Trip to the Moon (1917). the Moon (1917) encounters a moon man with a lightbulb atop his head, another with a horn for a nose, and a third with a birdcage, along with a bird, where his torso should be (Figure 4.3). These bizarre hybrid forms range in nature and effect—a range we can better gauge by considering Oswald the Rabbit’s two Martian adventure films. When Oswald reaches Mars inMars he lands atop a two-headed creature—part goat, part horse, with a turtle’s shell and long legs. This strange hybrid runs off with him, eventually depositing Oswald in front of the Martian king. His explorations of the planet lead him to discover that Mars is a highly musical world, populated in part by appropriately tuneful combinatory types: goats shaped like fiddles that play themselves, a bird with a fife head and drum body, a part-saxophone fish, and others. However, that pleasant, musical encounter is supplanted by a variety of more puzzling hybrid species, as he meets a kangaroo pig, chicken dog, and flying goat and is chased by a spider dragon. Fleeing Mars and its strange mix of inhabitants via a conveniently passing comet, Oswald lands safely back on Earth, where he and his girlfriend immediately rush off to get married so that, we might imagine, the “lucky” rabbit can settle into a more stable, predictable—and safer—life. While Oswald’s later visit to Mars in Sky Larks (1934) is another one of those dream narratives we have noted, it begins in a highly realistic fashion,

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as the rabbit and a friend watch a live-action newsreel of a balloon ascent, before drifting off and dreaming of taking a similar flight all the way to Mars. But the world and creatures he encounters there are neither realistic nor pleasant; rather, all the Martians are threatening, military-themed hybrids, lorded over by a giant figure of the god Mars, who is supping on “nitro soup” and meatball-like bombs. Entertaining Mars, an anthropomorphic cannon plays a pipe organ made of shotguns, gas masks sprout legs and dance, horse-pistols— part horse, part pistol—gallop by, and sky- rocket dancers light each other’s fuses and soar wildly. While also musical, this host of warlike hybrids is less entertaining than unsettling, the stuff of nightmare, and one from which the rabbit is glad to be awakened by a theater usher just as Mars is about to turn his visitors into dinner. Offering a vision of violent mis-representation, this cartoon clearly measures out the threatening side of the hybrid alien, its strange shapes and fragmented characters no less disturbing for all of their dreamlike impossibility. Although the Fleischer Studios would also repeatedly concoct such hybrid types, it usually did so in a different spirit, less concerned with suggesting the threatening or even the friendly nature of the characters that KoKo the Clown or Bimbo encounters than with exploiting their place in a realm where conventional representation has taken a kind of wrong turn, usually with comic consequences. We have already noted some of the strange figures KoKo sees in his Trip to Mars, such as the subway straphangers. But as he makes his way to the subway, KoKo himself becomes a point of curiosity, as a strange parade of Martian onlookers begins following him: a scowling figure with trumpetlike horns where his ears might be, a rat-faced anthropomorph with lobster claws for hands, a beaked character with a light bulb atop his head, and others constructed in the same logic- defying, inconsistent vein. And when he flees the subway KoKo is caught up in a further variation on this hybrid pattern. In another comic swipe at a New York commonplace, the film has him hail a Martian “taxi crab,” only to find himself trapped in something that is both creature and machine—an out-of- control car that gallops away on four crablike legs but that eventually sprouts a propeller and flies off with him. As in many other non-SF cartoons produced by the Fleischers, KoKo simply finds himself swept up in a surreal world, populated by combinatory types that suggest something of the “incomprehensible strangeness” Lovecraft advocated. But Koko is, after all, a bit of an alien himself, conjured up at the start of most of his films from, as his series was originally titled, “Out of the Inkwell,” and presented as a curious visitor to our world, an animated explorer of the human realm—or more accurately, of the strange hybrid world that the Fleischers consistently produced with their rotoscope and

[ 74 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination rotograph devices that allowed them to combine various live-action images with their cartoon characters. A film likeTrip to Mars thus strikes a particularly self-referential note, using its aliens and alien world to comment reflexively on the nature of the cartoon, on the graphic realm that Esther Leslie terms “flatland,” where “everything in the drawn world is of the same stuff” (23) and therefore equally subject to transformation. Whether that world is labeled “Mars” or “Earth,” it and all of its inhabitants become explorations of graphic possibilities, all equally alien, and reminders that, for the Fleischers, “consciousness of the medium was part of the entertainment” (Leslie 14). Of course, that highly modernist note is itself somewhat disconcerting and might best explain why KoKo ends the film—as is the case in most of his films—by returning to the relative, and relatively conservative, safety of the inkwell from which he had emerged at the cartoon’s start, back to the source of all representation, effectively shutting down animation’s disturbances. While Bimbo’s trip to Mars in Up to Mars (1930) has a less overtly reflexive thrust, it too exploits the graphic challenges posed by a vision of hybrid and irregular aliens. Caught on a runaway sky rocket, Bimbo lands next to a “Welcome to Mars” sign, only to find the planet just as unwelcoming in its unpredictability, illogic, and alien-ness as did KoKo. The landscape is one of craters, giant spotted mushrooms, strangely angular trees, and dome-shaped houses, while the populace is composed of sticklike characters, simple line drawings with circular heads, light bulbs for noses, hands where their feet should be, and feet for hands (Figure 4.4). It is a world that Bimbo quickly diagnoses as “cuckoo”—a judgment that is then borne out by a series of comic scenes wherein we see Martians per- forming various tasks that, once again, surrealistically overturn our expectations: one is cutting saws with a log, a gun-toting robber forces his victim to accept money and jewelry, while another mails a letter by posting a mail- box into a giant envelope. When Bimbo tries to fit in by joining a group of marching soldiers, he finds he cannot match their eccentric movements and is beaten by an officer because of his veryregularity . Of course, each of his loosely connected encounters is simply an opportunity for a visual gag based on how far the Martians diverge from common experience and expectation—on what we might simply term misrepresentation—and bears witness to the larger world of transformations and strange combinations in which Bimbo too has found himself. Here again we find a world that echoes Leslie’s description of animation’s fundamentally modernist character, as an art in which “the unity of an object and its form of representation are severed,” as “the line itself takes on a life of its own, independent of what it represents,” and as “organic unity is broken up” (23). Much as in

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Figure 4.4 The “cuckoo” Martians of the Fleischers’Up to Mars (1930).

KoKo’s Trip to Mars, this cartoon uses these strange Martian line figures or challenges to an “organic unity” both as visual puns and as its own comic trope for the spirit of animation, with the result a similar one, as Bimbo, in frustration at this cuckoo world, uses a large firecracker to blow it all up, ending his—and our—cartoon adventure on a decisively explosive note. The point we might emphasize for most of the alien depictions described here—and others, such as the various hybrid types Willie Whopper encounters in Stratos Fear3—is that there often seems little concern with using the alien image as much more than a gag encounter or as a marker of a dream world, including the world of animation itself. But in some of these instances it clearly poses a challenge to how we see the world and others, and in some cases it also serves a more concrete function, for example, as a trope for Earth figures or situations. Of course, one could make a similar point about much SF pulp literature. As John Cheng observes, even though “the social context of race and race relations in interwar America” (157) commonly surfaced in many pulp depictions of the alien, it was seldom used to explore or critique those relations. In fact, these depictions did not just imagine such figures as different; they frequently encoded them as oriental or nonwhite, as the titles of some of the tales published in Amazing Stories readily suggest, including Malcolm Afford’s “The Ho-Ming Gland,” W. I. Hammond’s “Lakh-Dal, Destroyer of Souls,” and Volney Mathison’s

[ 76 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination “The Mongolians’ Ray” (159). It was simply the case, as Isiah Lavender III offers, that the various media of the pre-war era mostly “reproduced rather than resisted racial stereotypes” (188), with those stereotypes commonly casting Asian and dark-skinned humanoids as villainous aliens, and more generally presenting otherness as a menace. Such depictions reflect the very real prejudices of the era, underscoring the culture’s felt fears and insecurities, while seldom challenging them. In this respect animation’s implicit challenge to representation—especially foregrounded in the Fleischer Studios’ Trip to Mars and Up to Mars—may have insulated some of its SF narratives from following this same path, although even the Fleischers, themselves Jewish, would not prove immune to using racially charged humor, as when they broadly caricature the planet Saturn as a big- nosed Jewish businessman trying to buy the Earth for a bargain price in Betty Boop’s Ups and Downs (1932) or when, in a variety of their non-SF cartoons, such as Old Black Joe (1929), the tellingly titled Ace of Spades (1930), and I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You (1932), they exploit broad, usually negative stereotypes of black characters.4 An additional shift away from the commonplace alien representations of the pulps also deserves brief note, since it reminds us that SF animation’s graphic world is marked by different sorts of exaggerations or treatments of iconic imagery than we expect to find in pulp literature. Although perhaps quite obvious, even expected, one absence from pre-war cartoons is the exaggerated sexual predation often bound up in those pulp visions of the alien. Here again Cheng points us toward an often observed dimension of the popular literature, as he describes the “suggestive and at times lurid depictions of women on pulp covers and in illustrations,” which contributed to the magazines’ “reputation for pandering sex appeal” (118). In fact, Justine Larbalestier suggests that such scenes—whether on covers, in interior illustrations, or within the stories—represented “the most obvious way in which women were present in science fiction during the period from 1926 to the late 1950s” (110). But more than simply offering titillating images, the pulps often depicted those partially clad females under assault from or in the grasp of powerful alien beings, suggesting another fundamentally threatening aspect of that otherness, while effectively advertising that SF in this period was largely a male preserve—or at least one often catering to the dreams of male adolescents. But in truth, such situations find much less play in the fiction than in the illustrations, since at least in this era, the fiction was more often focused on adventure than on exploring romantic possibilities. And given the largely asexual nature of most cartoon characters (early Betty Boop notwithstanding) and the emergence in this period of the film industry’s Hays Office, the absence of the sort

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of lurid or suggestive scenes often found on the pulp covers, especially in the later 1930s, is hardly surprising. Adapting any of those even implicitly sexualized confrontations with alien figures—much less endowing the alien with such a cross-species sexual appetite—would simply have posed too explicit a challenge to the largely conservative cultural context in which animation operated. And yet some of these early cartoons do challenge the norm, demonstrating the sort of critical or double vision earlier described. They use those alien images, those figurations of otherness or hybridity, not just to comically detach us from the real, but also, and more subtly, to reframe it, in the process achieving a limited subversive commentary and fractur- ing that conservative mold that Wells describes. As an example, we might once more turn to a work by the self-professed “father of animation,” Winsor McCay. His film The Flying House, as we have previously noted, depicts a trip into space in a normal house that a couple has fitted with engines and a propeller as part of a scheme to escape their landlord’s fore- closure on their mortgage. As the husband announces at the start of the film, they can “steal the house” and fly around until they are able to locate a place where landlords and banks “will never find us”—a flight that eventually lands them on the moon. However, just as the husband asks his wife, “Should we decide to live here?” one of those exaggerated figures appears, a giant moon man who is apparently angry at their intrusion and is armed with a flyswatter to deal with these pests. After repeatedly evading his swats, as if their house were some sort of lunar fly, they quickly soar back to Earth, their hopes of escape dashed. Theirs is just a brief alien encounter, but it is a vivid reminder of the couple’s relatively insignificant place in the solar system and a prelude to their awakening from what has actually been a dream—quite literally a dream of escape from a very real and hardly uncommon economic plight.5 This encounter takes on both comic and subversive implications, especially since the moon giant’s sudden appearance immediately follows an apparent effort to emphasize the accuracy and representational power of this film—the reality of its animated vision. During the couple’s flight, we see various highly detailed and moving images of the solar system, while a title card urges viewers to pause and pay “special attention” to this “remarkable piece of animation” that McCay has produced, all of it “drawn true to astronomical calculations.” Of course, the suddenly emerging giant, nearly as large as the moon he inhabits, mocks that boast, while his use of a flyswatter puts the couple’s plight in a kind of cosmic context, framing them and their situation metaphorically rather than realistically—as little more than an insectlike annoyance (Figure 4.5). At the

[ 78 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 4.5 The giant moon man encountered in Winsor McCay’sThe Flying House (1921). same time, this alien encounter also points up the hopelessness of their situation, suggesting that there might be no place, on Earth or on the moon, free from the predations of powerful landlords or their metaphoric stand-ins, here equally powerful aliens. What McCay has done, in short, is to use this alien figure for both comic effect and social satire, easing the subversive bite of the latter not by denying his cartoon’s “aesthetic openness” (Wells, Animation and America 28), but by directly commenting on it and then combining his comic thrusts, aiming them at both his own “remarkable” but out-of-all-proportions representations and his couple’s dire economic condition. Another, equally exaggerated—and equally pointed—alien encounter occurs in the Felix the Cat filmAstronomeows . Released in the election year of 1928, it begins with Felix himself electioneering, speaking over the radio and to a gathered live audience of what are, given the signs they hold, apparently state cat delegates to a political convention. Like so many politicians, Felix promises his audience a better future on other planets, but not on Earth. Met with much applause, he travels all the way to Saturn, only to be kicked off by one of the many strange-looking bicyclists who occupy the planet and race around its rings—a race Felix has disrupted. Landing on Mars, Felix here too finds himself an unwelcome visitor among

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various block-headed and ball-jointed giants, including a hammer-headed hybrid figure that chases him and “nails” him into the ground, the huge Martian king who digs him up and gives him to his scientists to study, and an equally large scientist whom we see examining him with an outsized magnifying glass that distorts Felix’s appearance, making him look, even to human eyes, quite alien. Felix’s multiple encounters and dire situation simply mock his—and, by implication, all politicians’—campaign promises, suggesting that cats might expect no better welcome or conditions elsewhere in the solar system. However, Felix’s key facility, his ability to demonstrate what Donald Crafton terms a kind of “polymorphous plasticism” (Before Mickey 329)— or to embody the spirit of modernist transformation—comically alters the political situation for both him and his fellow cats. When the Martians inexplicably begin panicking, a puzzled Felix turns a graphic question mark into a hook, lifting himself up to a nearby Martian window where he sees a rogue shooting star approaching. Magically producing a set of boxing gloves, he boxes the star into exhaustion, receives the thanks of the giant Martian king, and then sends the “tamed” shooting star to Earth, bearing a message for all Earth cats: “Come on up. Everything is great on Mars.” The result is a veritable invasion of the planet by hopeful felines. The closing scene, of long columns of Earth cats, all just like Felix, walking across the strange-looking Martian landscape, suggests that the feline fate—perhaps like that of Americans who were going through their own election—might be open to change after all, although the king’s reaction, fainting at the sight of this horde of new invaders, again frames their “freedom” as a gag, one portending other surprises and probably comic consequences for both them and their giant Martian hosts. A slightly later film, Columbia’s Scrappy’s Trip to Mars (1938), offers a different, more personal double vision through its aliens, using them both to point up the needs of the self and to mock those same needs. Like the McCay cartoon—as well as a number of others in this period—the Scrappy film is a dream narrative, with Scrappy and his dog, Yippy, sneaking out of bed, boarding a rocket hidden in his attic, and flying to Mars. What he encounters there is a welcoming population that is neither hybrid nor gigantic, but in this case almost exactly like him—child-sized with round heads, big ears, and large eyes—a coincidence that obviously made for easier animation at a cost-conscious studio like Columbia, but one that was also prompted by extant footage from the earlier Columbia cartoon Krazy’s Race of Time (1937), wherein Krazy Kat flies to Mars and encounters these same round-headed, childlike Martians. Scrappy’s Trip to Mars, though, adds another dimension of sameness, as we find that even the

[ 80 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 4.6 Scrappy and the Martian Queen in Scrappy’s Trip to Mars (1938). Columbia Pictures.

Martian dogs, although spotted, resemble Yippy. The result of Scrappy’s arrival is a fantasy that must have been very comfortable to a Depression- weary audience—one of celebration, a parade with the Martian queen, and playing with others like himself, in effect, a child’s dream of freedom from restraint and responsibility, played out in a kind of animated Never-Never Land. That initial exhilaration, however, dissolves when the queen takes Scrappy to a nightclub where he has to deal with a troubling difference between appearance and reality. While the Martians all look like children— and like him—here they shift from childlike play to real-world, adult pleasures and concerns, as we see couples dancing and holding hands, a torch singer singing sad love songs, and the queen suddenly making romantic overtures (Figure 4.6). When the queen becomes more aggressive, even telling him, “Don’t be a sissy!” Scrappy finds himself overwhelmed by this adult world, realizes that he is homesick, announces, “I want my mommy,” and rushes back to his rocket so he can get home before “mother wakes up.” While these Martians are not gigantic, hybrid, or monstrous, while their alien nature is naturalized thanks to their resemblance to Scrappy, and while their festivities initially seem like a perfect vision of freedom, these aliens also confront Scrappy with the problems of such an escape

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from reality, including the difficulty of growing up and assuming an adult’s role. His retreat back to Earth, home, and mother dramatically drops a cur- tain on that subversive vision, hastily replacing it with the comforts of the conventional and familiar, of home and family. What makes cartoons like Scrappy’s Trip to Mars, Astronomeows, and The Flying House particularly noteworthy, though, is their use of the alien and alien world to comment on other possibilities for humans—or cats. In the course of their extraterrestrial encounters, these cartoon figures meet with unusual and, in Felix’s case, even gigantic figures, comic in their exaggerated presentation, and amid landscapes that look nothing like that of Earth. Yet in those encounters these films also find a way to represent and even question real-world conditions, as they protest economic circumstance in the first, suggest the possibility for a better, more equitable world in the second, or simply mirror a psychic yearning for freedom from restriction or the cares of adulthood in the third cartoon. Of course, those suggestions are never much more than that, never quite calls for change or modernist alarms, just representations of familiar human circumstances that more often go submerged in the era’s cartoons, lost amid what Wells describes as their “magical and comical language.” But while tapping into the same sort of provisional spirit as the other animated alien visions we have seen, and while capitalizing on their exaggerations for comic effect, they also offer us images that stubbornly resist naturalization, manage to reconnect to the real world in order to interrogate its representations, and then pull back—approximately—to that more conventional vision that we find in many other cartoons. Just as in the pulps and the various SF film serials, the animation of this period was using the image of the alien to explore and exploit one of SF’s common generic protocols. The aliens so often featured in the pulp literature, as John Cheng suggests, evoked “the seemingly infinite possibilities for life in science fiction’s other worlds” (175), even as they provided a highly flexible vehicle for reflecting and, in some cases, interrogating various cultural concerns. While exploiting that same sense of possibility, cartoon aliens during this period generally had a much simpler task, as they typically depicted, through their exaggerated, changeable, and hybrid forms, a comic sense of difference or otherness that their narratives then, for the most part, humorously dispelled or naturalized. But this simple, even conservative pattern, also met with challenges, thanks to the very nature of that alien figure—and of SF’s own nature—as something that existed beyond the borders of our world, pointing to the potential for other versions of that world and perhaps even of the self.

[ 82 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination But these alien visions also offer something more than just a sense of possibility, thanks to the intersection they represent between animation’s own mode of expression and the SF genre’s common strategy of estrangement—or, as Lovecraft emphasizes, its need for “strangeness.” That intersection underscores not only the common modernist impulse that informs and energizes both forms, but also the challenge to conventional representation, what Lovecraft cunningly termed the “incomprehensible” element that SF and animation must commonly negotiate. In fact, it may be for this reason that Disney, the most “realist” of animation studios, driven by its “illusion of life” aesthetic, and despite its efforts to mine some other veins of SF, would absent itself from trying to visualize the alien figure in this period.6 But these animated aliens—at times bulking beyond any limited, conservative vision—remind us of the extent to which the larger world of SF representation always seems both real and estranged, is always the product of a difficult dynamic at work in the SF imagination. While largely emphasizing visual gags or comic shocks, the pre-war cartoons of aliens and alien worlds mobilize the same vernacular modernist spirit at work in the broader SF imagination, their often surreal dreams of transformation, hybridity, and change just a tantalizing—or strange—promise of more subversive, other-worldly visions yet to come, and of other ways for representing our own alien-ation that would be explored in other SF media and in more sophisticated animated efforts of later years.

Alien Visions [ 83 ] 84 CHAPTER 5 Inventions, Modern Marvels, and Mad Scientists

o frame early animation’s fascination with another of those char-

Tacteristic concerns of early SF, in this case with strange inventions and modern marvels (as well as their makers), we might begin by considering two figures of some importance to the genre. Appropriately enough, one of them was involved with pulp literature and was a central figure in the development of SF; the other was a famous newspaper cartoonist who also dabbled in animation. The first of these, Hugo Gernsback, founded and edited a great many pulp magazines, including not just the seminal Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, which published the work of numerous emerging SF authors, but also a variety of what are known as “hobby” magazines—titles like Modern Electrics, The Electrical Experimenter, and Science and Mechanics—in the pages of which instructional pieces and accounts of the latest scientific developments shared space with fictional efforts, including the serialized version of Gernsback’s own pioneering SF novel Ralph 124C 41+. The other figure is Rube Goldberg, a trained engineer more famous for his newspaper cartoons, although like many other print cartoonists working in the early years of the cinema, he produced a short-lived animation series as well. I note these two figures because both were at the height of their popularity and influence in the pre-war decades; both were especially fascinated by the new world of invention, gadgetry, and technical efficiency that is mirrored in so many of the era’s cartoons; and the work of both points to that double vision we have already noted in other SF animation. In fact, taken together, Gernsback and Goldberg suggest the sort of dynamic 86

force that not only drove but also constantly threatened to burst beyond the more conservative attitude we have observed in many of the period’s animated efforts. Gernsback, a founding—and for some a confounding—figure in the development of SF,1 approached work on the genre in a complex light. Not only did his various periodical ventures mix pieces on science and technology with fictional efforts that he early on labeled “scientifiction,” but they also hawked electrical equipment (like build-it-yourself radio kits) and other gadgets that Gernsback sold. As Gary Westfahl has explained, the editor/writer/businessman saw no conflict or contradiction in this sort of combinatory effort. Rather, for Gernsback it was natural to the work of SF, which, he announced, had three core functions: to “provide entertainment,” to “furnish a scientific education,” and to “offer ‘inspiration’ to inventors” or young scientists interested in pursuing “new ideas” (qtd. in Westfahl 20). The sometimes strange mix that his pulps regularly offered was simply consistent with how he envisioned the genre developing: as a new kind of literature that effectively mixed “fiction, science, and prophecy” (Westfahl 23), as it promulgated a new world of scientific and technological possibility, while also offering products that might better enable one to participate in the exciting utopian society that seemed to be just over the horizon. While a trained engineer, Rube Goldberg always seemed to take less stock in the promise of science and technology than Gernsback, although he was equally fascinated by the age’s array of and fondness for gadgetry. Described by biographer Peter C. Marzio as “a comic of American technology” (xii), Goldberg was, in fact, much more. Shortly before his death he published a memoir and exhibition of his best work under the title Rube Goldberg vs. the Machine Age (1968), which neatly codified his satiric skepticism of the very scientific and technological culture in which he had been educated and on which he had focused so much of his energy. Often using the vehicle of such recurring—and bumbling—comic-strip characters as Boob McNutt and Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts (their very names obviously sounding a note of caution, even alarm at their contraptions), Goldberg designed a wide array of absurdly complex inventions for accomplishing the simplest everyday tasks, such as tipping one’s hat, lighting a cigarette, or sharpening a pencil (Figure 5.1). His technological background notwithstanding, he found much of the Machine Age’s fondness for complex, overdesigned contraptions, along with its desire for, as Marzio nicely puts it, “participating in the automatic life” (181), a source of both humor and discomfort. While his comic responses might be seen in the context of what Miles Orvell describes as the “culture’s characteristically

[ 86 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 5.1 Rube Goldberg’s design for a “simplified pencil sharpener.” humorous accommodation to forces that were in any case unstoppable” (160), Goldberg was, like many cartoon animators, not only satirizing machinelike thinking, but also questioning the enormous and seemingly unavoidable forces that were surging throughout American, and indeed much of western culture in the period. It was these powerful forces that he would also take on more forthrightly in his later capacity as an editorial cartoonist for the New York Sun. I think we might see Gernsback and Goldberg—the one promoting the work of science and even hawking scientific gadgetry, the other satirizing and also trying to moderate their impact—as symptomatic spirits of the age, suggesting the same conflicted sense of the modern and pointing up the same strange mixture of hope and skepticism that runs through the group of SF cartoons on which this chapter focuses. For in these films we find an especially wide array of inventions, technological marvels, or what we might more simply term gadgets, much as we do in the pulp magazines; in fact, their strange intricacies often seem modeled on the mysteriously complicated and powerful devices that were so often, and alluringly, being depicted on the covers of magazines like Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories—devices that usually have a very obvious purpose, but whose com- plexities remain mysterious, beyond our immediate understanding. Of course, part of the difference between the pulp and cartoon visions derives from the key functions that the depicted gadgets were intended to serve. On the one hand, all are doing the necessary work of iconically “announcing” the genre, that is, visually establishing the world of science, technology, or the future, while evoking an atmosphere of energy and efficiency that had become attached to that world.2 On the other, they are also providing a specific, usually comic focus for the films’ largely conservative take on this world, in effect providing the subjects for both their accommoda- tions and, in some cases, their critiques.

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Many of these films take their approach to such material from the pre- war period’s obvious fascination with various sorts of technological exhibitions, such as were featured at the era’s numerous World’s Fairs. In fact, the two most popular and widely publicized ones, the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–34 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939– 40, would both, as we shall see, be the focus of specific cartoons. Other films pick out a particular form of technology for amused scrutiny, such as the airplane, submarine, dirigible, or television. Yet another group of cartoons focuses on specific inventions and their inventors, typified by the Fleischers’ character Grampy, who devises machines to do housework or create toys for children, as well as by the various “mad” scientists who suggest the darker side of that technological fascination and devising, even an agenda at odds with our best hopes for a modern, scientific world. Whatever the cartoon pattern, though, the science fictional machines or gadgets are both compelling, in a Gernsbackian fashion, and comically amazing—at times even a bit unsettling—like many of the devices depicted by Goldberg. The resulting mix verges, in its own way, on what David E. Nye and others have referred to as the “technological sublime” (xiii), that is, on the sort of transcendent fascination, even awe, that, taking hold in the nineteenth century, had become attached to the imagery of the machine and its products. But these films, through their comic modernity, provide their own take on that effect, as they invite us to both appreciate and also detach ourselves from these things—and even from the period’s increasingly science fictional character. In light of the pre-war era’s seeming love of great fairs and elaborate cultural displays, we should hardly be surprised that a number of cartoons would offer their own fairlike visions, affording a comic version of those “sublime” exhibitions. For despite the dulling effects of the Depression, many Americans, thanks to massive publicity campaigns and newsreel depictions, were familiar with or had even visited one of the many World’s Fairs that blossomed between 1933 and 1940.3 Moreover, the nature of the fairs suggested a kind of kinship to the world of the cartoons. Generally cinematic in presentation, marked by highly exaggerated images of the future, offering displays that often combined technoscientific and cultural themes while usually following no set pattern, the expositions aimed both to inform—or, in Gernsbackian fashion, inspire—and to entertain the fairgoers. In fact, Glen Scott Allen argues that, at least on the American scene, the World’s Fair of the pre-war era was popularly seen as a kind of “cabinet of wonders” (44), projecting “the image of American technology as science to be consumed” (45). This popular attitude also made it ripe for comic representation, with the typical fair experience easily lending itself to a wide

[ 88 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination variety of gags that commented not only on the displayed technology or the scientists/inventors responsible for it, but also in a slyly subversive way on the audience that was so eager to embrace—or consume—such extrava- gant visions. Among the animated efforts in this vein we might especially note the Fleischer films All’s Fair at the Fair (1938), Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (1933), and Keep in Style (1934), Mintz’s The World’s Affair (1934), and a film we have already cited because of its featured robots, Disney’sModern Inventions (1937). As loosely “plotted” as the fairs themselves, these films typically present their characters in what might be termed Gernsbackian or Goldbergian positions, that is, either as barkers, describing, demonstrating, and suggesting the potential impact of the many technological wonders on display, as Betty Boop literally does in several Fleischer films, or as bemused onlookers—and, in some cases, even the unwitting victims—of those same displays, as is especially the case with Donald Duck in Modern Inventions. In the process, they offer us two different approaches to the “sense of wonder” that, as we have previously noted, has often been described as one of SF’s distinctive characteristics and even essential appeals.4 Adapting this fair-style approach to its cartoon material seems to have been especially easy for the Fleischer brothers. Their studio was one that lacked a dedicated story department until the mid-1930s—a fact that helps explain the cartoon historian Michael Barrier’s assessment that the Fleischer films often appear “haphazardly assembled” (182), as well as Esther Leslie’s similar description of their cartoons as seemingly “impro- vised, … allowing animators to unfold things gag by gag” (174). And the exposition cartoons, with their reliance on a fairlike, almost random sequence of comic displays, support both of these appraisals. Their typical narrative consists of a series of gags, rather “haphazardly” strung together, set against a backdrop of strangely anthropomorphic “oddities”—cars that talk, statues that wink at the audience, loudspeakers that have tongues and literally speak—that are all linked to a central character like Betty Boop or a situation such as the particular exposition being depicted. In fact, their appeal lies largely in that freewheeling approach, in a structure—and tone—that easily shifts between wonder-ful presentation and sharp satire. As an example of this double-edged approach we might consider one of the Fleischers’ seemingly less haphazard efforts, their cartoon All’s Fair at the Fair, an elaborate Technicolor effort, longer than most of their works, and using the Fleischer patented stereoptical process to produce a greater visual richness. It was obviously designed to capitalize on the great ballyhoo surrounding preparations for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the theme of which was pointedly science fictional—“The World of Tomorrow.”

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Figure 5.2 The 1939 New York World’s Fair as anticipated by the Fleischers inAll’s Fair at the Fair (1938).

Paralleling the widely publicized origins of that exposition—the fair- grounds were built on what had originally been an ash heap in Queens— the film begins with a long shot of such a heap, out of which suddenly arises a gleaming, futuristic set of buildings, suggesting that World of Tomorrow as well as the possibility that science and technology could just as easily and quickly transform the current cultural landscape of America (Figure 5.2). It then offers two different, elaborately staged arrival scenes: in one, a highly streamlined train pulls into the Fair station, its doors rolling back like the tops of sardine cans as it discharges a tightly packed—sardine- like—horde of eager fairgoers, a packaged audience. In the other, an old, horse-drawn wagon slowly rolls up, its country-bumpkin occupants, Elmer and Miranda, get out, and an electric crane automatically parks both the wagon and their horse, Dogbiscuit. While everyone seems eager to experience the Fair’s many marvels, it is the two individualized bumpkins who provide the point of view for the narrative, as they wander from exhibit to exhibit, marveling at what they see and emerging, at the end of the cartoon, literally transformed by the experience, ready to inhabit the soon-to- be World of Tomorrow.5 In the course of their experience of the Fair, Elmer and Miranda view a series of technological demonstrations that epitomizes what John Cheng

[ 90 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination describes as the “contradictory tensions within interwar America’s popular culture of science” (101). Some of these wondrous exhibits, such as the cocktail-shaker production of prefabricated houses, a cut-to-order furniture machine, and a host of robot attendants, seem almost in keeping with Gernsbackian hopes for the future,6 and they result in a quite proper sense of comic amazement, with both of the visitors repeatedly noting that they have “never seen anything like” these exhibits. But other displays, including a device for whittling a full-sized tree into just one finished clothespin and another for growing an orange tree in order to produce a single glass of fresh juice, are less amazing inventions than Goldberg-like satires on the exaggerations and inefficiencies of the typical technological imagination. Seen together, within the context of a single film that was, in 1938, anticipating the “wonderful” world of the Fair, these various gag exhibits, together with the longer scenes in which Elmer and Miranda are themselves effectively assembly-lined—that is, run through a series of barber and beauty stations that, with the aid of various robots, transform them into suitable denizens of the World of Tomorrow—demonstrate the vernacular modernist approach at work. The exhibits mix the wondrous and the absurd, the possible and the unthinkable—supportive attitudes and critical ones—into an acceptable mélange of gags, much as does the cartoon’s final image, of the now-beautified, even re-shaped Elmer and Miranda getting into a shiny new roadster, dispensed by a vending machine, inviting their old horse, Dogbiscuit, to “hop in,” and then together speeding off—in an early example of “smear” animation, the blurred lines suggesting the equally blurry vision of the future that this cartoon, and by implication the Fair as well, has offered. Prior to this vision, as we have noted, the Fleischer Studios featured its early star Betty Boop in a number of similar exhibit films, two of which, Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions and Keep in Style, as befits the pre–Production Code attitudes of the early 1930s, have a more critical edge to them. While the former film begins with a title proclaiming “Big Invention Show,” what we see is really just a circus revisioned, with a big tent, a barker, KoKo the Clown, and even an elephant turning the pages of music for Betty as she plays a circus calliope. But that overblown circus atmosphere is precisely the tone (and metaphor) the film wants to strike for its silly displays of complex, motor-driven machinery to accomplish small tasks—stomping out a cigarette, frying an egg, removing a spot from a piece of cloth by cutting it out with automated scissors—and even simple components to do a complex task, such as a voice recorder that has a mouse listening to Betty’s voice while his tale cuts a record. Here the spirit of Rube Goldberg clearly rules, as does Goldberg’s skepticism, especially foregrounded when

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a self-threading sewing machine goes haywire and sews shut a disconcerting array of objects: a gaping spectator’s mouth, the exhibition tent, a trench, a flight of ducks, and even a nearby stream. The latter film, though, tempers this disturbing note at the start, as Betty introduces her “exposition” of the latest inventions with a song reminding her audience that “the inventors’ good intentions bring a lot of new inventions and we have to keep in style.” Thereafter she presents an array of futuristic car models; new, labor-saving household devices; and the latest fashions. In each case the gadgets undergo absurd transformations—for example, a multipur- pose grand piano folds into a sofa, radio, and then practically disappears into a walking cane—while emphasizing that notion of “style,” as science and technology seem to have become little more than the source of new products for eager consumers. In fact, it is as much the consumer as the product that is finally sent up in this cartoon, as Betty demonstrates her own invention—blouse sleeves that turn into skirtlike leggings—which becomes an instant sensation, being worn not only by all manner of people but eventually by their pets as well, all in the name—as the film’s theme song continues to remind us—of keeping “in style.” The Fleischer haphazard gag approach, which characterizes these films just as it doesAll’s Fair at the Fair and another, similar Betty Boop exposition film with the same thrust, Be Up to Date (1938), results in little sustained critique of science and technology, even in the cartoons’ most bizarre presentations of its Goldberg-like inventions. However, their translation of such developments into little more than a circus or a matter of popular “style”—equally applicable to machines, clothing, and human appearance—clearly poses a kind of modernist critique of American culture as one that all-too-eagerly embraces the latest developments, in clothing and household goods just as in technology, simply for fashion’s sake. A similar pattern marks Charles Mintz’s Scrappy cartoon about the Chicago World’s Fair, the aptly titled The World’s Affair. Michael Barrier has noted that in many of the early Scrappy cartoons the characters seem “to be living in a deranged universe” (172), and that judgment certainly suits The World’s Affair, especially as the narrative devolves from the sort of comic demonstrations of science and technology seen in the Fleischer efforts to loony social satire. In more traditional comic fashion, the first half of the film follows the usual Goldberg-style presentation, with Scrappy and his younger brother, Oopy, demonstrating a variety of overengineered contraptions, including a boiler and conveyor-belt machine that simply threads a needle; a machine that brushes, massages, and pummels a bald man’s head until it grows—and the machine then trims—a single hair; and a phono- graph that destroys and blows away unpleasant records (Figure 5.3).

[ 92 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 5.3 Oopy introduces a Goldberg-inspired needle-threading machine at the Chicago World’s Fair. The World’s Affair (1934). Columbia Pictures.

However, in its second half the film devolves into a series of carica- tures of various celebrities who are shown as part of the worldwide enthusiasm—or what the film presents as a kind of derangement—over the Fair. Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, makes a grand entrance bearing a large bowl of spaghetti; President Hindenburg of Germany presents Scrappy with a stein of beer; the entertainer Jimmy Durante and the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi dance a jazzy duet, both wearing diapers—a comic take on Gandhi’s familiar loincloth; and a quartet of world leaders—Mussolini, Gandhi, the French president Albert Lebrun, and Britain’s Prince Edward—then form a tutu-attired chorus line, strut- ting and kicking to the tune of “Chicago.” The film leaves the impression of a world that has gone inexplicably crazy over the Fair, a craziness that serves to call into question the Gernsbackian “Century of Progress” the Fair was supposedly ringing in and that has been measured out in such trivial displays of gadgetry and loony behavior. While no more carefully structured than the Fleischer and Mintz films, Disney’s later effort in this exhibit vein, the Donald Duck cartoonModern Inventions, uses its various robot figures to offer a more complex take on this formula. In keeping with the nature of its “star,” the cartoon shifts

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Figure 5.4 Donald Duck about to lose his hat to a robot in Modern Inventions (1937). Walt Disney Pictures.

focus from marvelous and increasingly complex inventions to the reactions that Donald has to the various affronts he suffers during his visit to the Museum of Modern Marvels. Of course, by 1937 when this film appeared, Donald had become established as almost a formulaic character, perfectly suited to this sort of narrative about the collision between technology and (animal) nature. As the animator Fred Spencer describes, the usual Disney formula was to depict Donald with a “cocky, show-off, boastful attitude that turns to anger as soon as he is crossed,” resulting in a “fighting pose and his peculiar quacking voice and threats” (qtd. in Maltin 49). That attitude is suppressed at the start of this film, as Donald enters the museum, an overhead shot shows an orderly arrangement of large and impressive machines, and the duck expresses both his pleasure and amazement at the various sights—much like Elmer and Miranda do in All’s Fair at the Fair. However, the gadgets toward which he is drawn, such as the previously described hitchhiker’s robotic aid, a package wrapper, and a robotic barber’s chair, either succumb to Donald’s med- dling or simply run amuck, thereby gradually releasing the pent-up but fully expected duck outrage (Figure 5.4). While his outrage is obviously directed at the sort of Gernsbackian “marvels” put on display, it is also, and in a more direct way than in the other exhibit films described here,

[ 94 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination a modernist strike at the nature of a culture that produces such gullible consumers of gadgetry, at all of those who are too eager to be part of “the automatic life.” But Donald’s over-the-top response and that implicit assault on the consumer of the latest wonders and marvels are not shared by many other cartoons of the period. For most of those that explore specific inventions operate in a more conservative vein. And here we might consider a sam- pling of the sorts of futuristic or science fictional machines commonly found in these films. As previous chapters have described, rockets and robots—especially in Gersnbackian build-it- yourself versions—are fairly common subjects, but submarines, dirigibles, planes, and televisions also show up frequently, reminding us, and perhaps even more so than the feature films of the day, of the extent to which the culture was enthralled by SF-like or simply highly technological images, as well as by the suggestion that such contraptions might be tinkered together by anyone—just as a number of ads in the SF pulps regularly promised. While this fascination speaks to the culture’s hopes for the future, especially during a time when the United States was still mired in the Depression and even beginning to contemplate the awful possibilities of war, few of these futuristic images offer a direct critique of the modern world. Rather, the cartoons for the most part seem intent on naturalizing the outlandish developments they depict, suggesting our own need to accept or accommodate the latest scientific and technological possibilities, to be flexible as we entered—or at least awaited—that promised World of Tomorrow. As an example, we might consider a few of the films that focus on one of the most popular technological developments, what Joseph Corn has described as “the winged gospel.” More than just denoting the popular appeal of the airplane, that “gospel” designation refers to the widespread belief that aircraft of all sorts would soon become as ubiquitous as the automobile and flight the commonplace mode of travel, together helping to produce “a transformed society” (Winged 32). Practically every cartoon studio would release films offering a comic take on these new possibilities thought to be afforded by flight, most of them suggesting, just as we are assured in the Disney cartoon Goofy’s Glider (1940), that flight “can be easily mastered by anyone.” Both the first Mickey Mouse cartoonPlane Crazy (1928) and a later Donald Duck film The Plastics Inventor (1944) show their flight “crazy” protagonists eagerly constructing their own aircraft, the first from junk, discards—even other animals—found in a barnyard, and the second from scrap plastics that have been melted and molded into plane parts. In Ko-Ko Hops Off (1927), Dave Fleischer literally draws a plane for Koko the Clown, while Fitz the dog fashions an aircraft using an old box and a

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captured goose, as both enter into a transatlantic air race. The Van Beuren/ Paul Terry Sky Skippers (1930) features a variety of flying contraptions created just by adding wings to boats, trains, and other vehicles, while that same studio’s Cubby Bear cobbles together a Rube Goldberg flying machine from an old washtub, a fishing rod, a pelican, and a fish that takes him on a stratospheric flight and eventually to explore the North Pole inCubby’s Stratosphere Flight (1934). In The Non-Stop Fright (1927), Felix the Cat fashions a high-flying, intercontinental aircraft from advertising boards, an old barrel, and, in one of his customary graphic transformations, a dizzy sym- bol that he sees spinning above another character’s head. And as we have already noted several times, Winsor McCay has his characters in The Flying House (1921) simply add an airplane motor and oversized propeller to make their house suitable for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial flight. By no means critical of that “gospel,” these cartoons largely draw on the excitement of the relatively new world of aviation to catch up their subjects—as well as the audience—in a series of comic adventures that, the films imply, might be readily available to anyone thanks to the latest wonders of science and technology. And yet some cartoons do sound a note of warning about that sort of naïve enthusiasm, about too readily buying into the “easily mastered” technology of flight that the culture was, in some cases quite literally, trying to sell them. Both Paul Terry’s Sky Skippers and Plane Goofy (1940) depict a world that is seemingly captivated—or simply gone “goofy”—over the possibilities of flight, with practically every animal in Farmer Al Falfa’s typical barnyard menagerie constructing its own flying machine. In Plane Goofy that eager response is directly tied to a consumer’s pitch from a plane salesman who drops fliers with the come-on “All the Girls Love an Aviator,” introduces an assembly-line machine that churns out planes for all the animals, and soon has the pigs, chickens, goats, and cows happily flying in formation, with the initially skeptical farmer himself finally succumbing to the sales pitch. The many near-crashes and chaos that result, however, leave the farmer taking a shotgun to the salesman, while also sounding another warning against those insistent calls to “consume” the latest technology. This same pattern is repeated, although it is framed in a pointedly domestic context, in Disney’s The Plastics Inventor. In it we see Donald Duck listening to a radio program, “The Plastics Hour,” which promotes the wonders of making new products from plastic, including technological ones such as an airplane. Presented in the fashion of a cooking show, the program instructs Donald to carefully follow the “recipe,” as he “cooks” the plastic for his plane, cuts out engine parts from sheet plastic using a cookie cutter, and then “bakes” them in his oven (Figure 5.5). Finally, he “toasts” his plane’s

[ 96 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure 5.5 Inventor Donald Duck cooks airplane parts in The Plastics Inventor (1944). Walt Disney Pictures. tail parts and attaches them to produce what looks to be an airworthy vehicle. But only after he tries to fly his new plane does the announcer offer a parting caution—that such plastics, much like real baked goods, melt in rain. When Donald’s plane, aloft in a shower, melts all around him and he crashes to the ground, he takes a watering can to his radio, melting it away as well, while launching into his own—and signature—angry tirade against such supposedly wonderful consumer products. In that evaporation of the home-cooked technology, The Plastics Inventor does more than send up current efforts to link science and domestic activity, after the fashion promoted by the Paramount live-action short Kitchen of Tomorrow, released in the same year. It also, and more subtly, questions the notion that science and technology might, by transforming the home into a kind of laboratory or factory, invent new roles for women whose lives (during this late-war period many had moved into vital war jobs) might have seemed unnecessarily circum- scribed by home and kitchen. In contrast to the ubiquitous airplane, another futuristic device that has a more obvious consumer thrust, television, appears in surprisingly few cartoons of the period. Chronicling its early history, Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan note how, “throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the idea of television

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in our future heated the popular imagination as few technologies ever have” (Yesterday’s 24), and its appearance in a great number of live action features, such as International House (1933), Murder by Television (1935), and Trapped by Television (1936), along with the publication of popular science magazines like Gernsback’s Television News and Radio and Television, attest to that imaginative power and to television’s growing presence in the cultural consciousness. And yet the “idea” would prove especially slow to materialize in the United States. While the first long-distance broadcast demonstration occurred in 1927, and while in the following year RCA used an image of Felix the Cat to test—and attract attention to—its own broad- casting equipment, a host of problems would forestall television’s introduction. The new technology’s cost, poor image quality, continuing effects of the Depression, and what William Boddy describes as “a profound cultural ambivalence” about the new medium (45) would put a brake on its introduction into popular culture, including its use in cartoons. While Paul Terry would feature television in several non-SF Terrytoons of the period, notably Puddy’s Coronation (1937), and Bugs Beetle and His Orchestra (1938), in each case it is presented quite conventionally, as a way to view events from a distance, and with little effort to examine the technology, comment on it, or suggest its potential impact. Charles Mintz at Columbia, however, would build several cartoons around the introduction of television; one in his Scrappy series (Scrappy’s Television, 1934) and another a more elaborate Technicolor “Color Rhapsody” film Tangled( Television, 1940) are especially noteworthy. Both envision television similarly and, as was commonplace at the Mintz studio, recycle some of the same imagery, most notably the conception of the television receiver, which is, in both cartoons, depicted as a wooden chest with dials on its front, a line of tubes protruding from a flat top, and a thin wood-framed screen, resembling a bureau mirror, standing upright behind the tubes. The exposed vacuum tubes recall the advertisements found in Gernsback’s hobby magazines—a point underscored in Scrappy’s Television when we see Scrappy, a Gernsback-style “electrical experimenter,” showing off his home-built television to Oopy and then having to replace the frag- ile tubes as they repeatedly burst. In the later Tangled Television the tubes remain, but the hobbyist/inventor vision has now given way to the introduction of three egg-headed professors who, following a headline announcing “At Last—It’s Here—Television!,” present their brainchild. But when the unveiled technology literally lays an egg, they set to work—in a marked Rube Goldberg turn in conception—on several behind-the-scenes, room- sized machines, as they try to make adjustments and fine-tune their television’s operation. That shift in vision from the amateur and his home-built

[ 98 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination gadget to the scientific research team and an enormous complex of machinery connected to the same, simple-looking receiver suggests not only an increasing sense of how complex this technology actually was, but also— and in spite of its heralded use at the opening of the 1939 New York World’s Fair—a recognition of how much it remained a kind of scientific dream of the future, something that would, in fact, largely be put on the shelf for consumers (and as an animation subject) until the postwar period. While linking a marvelous invention like television to egg-headed scientists instead of garage inventors like Scrappy was certainly a more realistic notion, it also points toward the very different visions of the scientist/inventor that repeatedly surface in such SF-related cartoons— and indeed in much of popular culture—throughout the period. As we previously mentioned, the Fleischer Studios would build an entire series of films around one such character, Grampy, usually featured with Betty Boop as he invents a variety of useful if also Goldberg-like contraptions to help her and others, while most other studios would emphasize the darker side of the scientist figure, one that Christopher Frayling in his study of the cinematic scientist generically describes as “mad, bad, and dangerous” (7). Both visions, Frayling argues, might be laid at the door of a culture that was simply “struggling … to bridge the already widening gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding, to reconcile the specialization of science and the wholeness of life” in this era of growing scientific and technological enthusiasm (59). It is a “gap” that, while allowing space for quite different depictions of the scientist/inventor, as the instances noted earlier suggest, would also produce some surprising similarities (Figure 5.6). In examining the popular culture image of the mad scientist, David Skal points to one element of kinship when he observes a curious “relationship between madness and hyperintellectualism,” a connection that he believes has become “an overwhelming preoccupation of mass media science fiction” (19). And Frayling takes that relationship a step further, observing how these two versions of the scientist, “the mad scientist and the saintly one,” often appear as if they were “two sides of the same Hollywood coin” (166). Of course, the Fleischers’ Grampy character, appearing in ten cartoons between 1935 and 1937, falls more in the “saintly” category, since his cartoons almost invariably tell a story about science as an aid, invention as an act of problem solving, and the inventor—a kindly, grandfatherly figure—as a social benefactor. In most of the Fleischers’ Grampy films, Betty Boop finds herself facing a problem: a bothersome practical joker, too much housework, a neighbor who mistreats animals, a hotel badly in need of repairs, or a child disappointed because his carnival trip is spoiled by a

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Figure 5.6 The Fleischers’ Grampy ponders a problem inBetty Boop and Grampy (1935).

sudden thunderstorm. After the first half of each narrative demonstrates the respective problem, Betty usually calls on her friend—or relative, we are never quite sure what the relationship is—Professor Grampy who, after the fashion of Goldberg’s Professor Butts,7 dons his thinking hat to come up with a solution. The second half of each cartoon then demonstrates a host of Grampy’s comic, Goldberg-esque creations, such as his indoor-carnival rides made from household furnishings in Grampy’s Indoor Outing (1936), his dish-washing and floor-mopping contraptions to solve Betty’s House Cleaning Blues (1937), a gravity-driven clothes cleaner and pants presser in Service with a Smile (1937), or a monkey-powered gyrocopter in Zula Hula (1937). All capitalize on one of the fundamental properties—and attractions—of all animation, its implicitly modernist sense that the world is, as we have several times noted, a place of “transformation, overturning, and provisionality” (Leslie vi). All of the Grampy cartoons embody that sensibility in this saintly scientist/inventor, presenting it as nonthreatening, an impetus to solve problems or simply make life more fun. However, in another case of that double potential earlier described, some of these films also use the character to critique other efforts at problem solving, and to some extent even the scientist himself, as we see in the case of The Candid Candidate (1937). In this film Grampy is elected mayor and must then deal with real-world problems, as well as complaining

[ 100 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination voters who demand action. But instead of workable solutions, here his thinking hat conjures up such things as a multi-hand-shaking device, attractive posters that he then pastes over decaying houses to make them look better, a portable free beer dispenser, and other gadgets that are not about solving problems, but about disguising them, thereby satirizing the empty promises and superficial actions of real-world politicians. But in suggesting how the potential of science and technology might be used to blunt rather than propel useful change, The Candid Candidate is one of the few films to push beyond the usual Grampy mold. In the process it perhaps also hints at why the series had such a relatively short life span. Most of the Grampy narratives were quite predictable and, in their efforts at naturalizing or accommodating the world of transformation, they little corresponded to the seemingly intractable changes facing a late-Depression nation and world. The other side of what Frayling terms this “Hollywood coin” are the cartoons that emphasize the gap between the scientist and the ordinary being, as they take up the image of the mad or simply obsessed scientist— a figure who had become a fixture in live-action SF films, especially in the serials. In the cartoons of this sort there is no need for a thinking hat to turn the kindly Grampy into a scientist/inventor, for the figures repeatedly depicted in such efforts as Felix the Cat’sGerm Mania (1927), Scrappy’s The Great Experiment (1934), Mickey Mouse’s The Mad Doctor (1933), Willie Whopper’s Stratos Fear (1933), or Terrytoon’s A Mad House (1934), and Frankenstein’s Cat (1942) obviously have little connection to or concern with the human. And that point is typically underscored by the look of these figures. Drawing on animation’s natural tendency for exaggeration and caricature, the cartoons commonly paint their scientists in extreme terms—with beards or goatees, long arms and fingers, hunched backs, dark eyes, and a generally manic look—all visually encoding them as menacing or “mad.” Moreover, in contrast to the anthropomorphic mice, cats, rabbits, and other subjects of their experiments, they are almost invariably human. The various films play out that sense of human madness in the sorts of activities in which their scientists are usually engaged. In Germ Mania Felix wanders into a laboratory seeking milk, but he is seized by a scientist and quickly turned into the subject of an experiment in which he is shrunk to the size of a germ and must literally fight—against real germs—for his life. The Great Experiment opens with Scrappy already captured and turned into an unwilling lab subject, injected with various drugs that transform him into a fish, prematurely age him, and eventually give him “perpetual youth” in preparation for sending him on a time trip.

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The Martian scientists in Stratos Fear try to turn Willie Whopper into a test subject for their ray that deconstructs things into their component parts, as we see with a pig that is turned into hams and footballs. And the titular “Mad Doctor” of the Mickey Mouse film kidnaps Mickey’s dog, Pluto, for what he describes as “the great experiment”—transplanting the dog’s head onto a chicken’s body and the chicken’s head onto Pluto (Figure 5.7). The explanation that the doctor offers, that he wants “to find out if the end result will bark, or crow, or cackle,” is especially telling, because it underscores the trivial, even seemingly pointless rationale behind most of these “great experiments,” linking them to the similarly trivialized schemes—and the attendant scientific skepticism—portrayed in the many Rube Goldberg–type cartoons. We should also note that a number of these narratives end with the characters awakening in their beds or chairs, as do Scrappy, Willie Whopper, and Mickey in their respective films. While such endings present these scientists and their schemes as just the stuff of dreams, they also suggest that such nightmarish visions could not easily be dissolved—or familiarized— in typically comic fashion. Rather, they imply that the scientist, thanks to the various ways he embodies and enacts that modernist spirit of transformation and change, was a highly charged figure in this period. It is a point

Figure 5.7 The “mad” scientist of Disney’sThe Mad Doctor (1933) prepares to experiment on Pluto. Walt Disney Pictures.

[ 102 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Skal underscores when he describes the typical scientist of live-action cinema as a popular device for representing the “otherwise unbearable anxieties about the meaning of scientific thinking and the uses and consequences of modern technology” (18). Those anxieties show with special clarity in the trajectory of the Fleischer Studios’ efforts in this vein, as the constantly helpful Grampy would completely disappear from its slate of offerings by late 1937 to be replaced in the late pre-war and early war years by a host of realistically drawn and more globally threatening mad scientists who populate the studio’s early Superman cartoons. These menacing characters are all isolated geniuses who direct their inventions not against unwitting cats, dogs, or mice, but against society at large, and whose schemes include a death ray (Superman, 1941), a robot army (The Mechanical Monsters, 1941), an earthquake machine (Electric Earthquake, 1942), and a rocket car (The Bulleteers, 1942). While the Superman series would eventually replace these threatening thinkers with various Nazi and Japanese menaces, as World War II increasingly crowded our SF visions off the screen, the spirit they embodied, the devices they fashioned, and the changes they tried to bring about all point to the difficulties that were troubling SF’s development as a genre in this time. If these cartoons describing “mad, bad, and dangerous” scientists do not quite align with the High Modernists who, as Adam Roberts chronicles, expressed some “hostility to increasing technological change” (157), they do, especially in what Roberts terms “the drift of the world” (159) toward a period of instability and war, sound an understandable note of caution, much as Goldberg comically does, about the broader modernist sensibility that had driven the form since its earliest days. Of course, the sort of conflicted presentation we have described, one that we have conveniently—and a bit forcibly—anchored in such figures as Gernsback and Goldberg, should come as no surprise. Animation, particularly in the conventional form of the seven-minute cartoon, was largely comic, and eagerly capitalized on the sort of oddities and exaggerated ideas that littered the landscape of scientific and technological development, that often filtered into the world of popular culture through World’s Fairs and other venues, and that were finding a more serious treatment in the new literature of SF. Moreover, those modernist impulses toward transformation and a provisional worldview have almost inevitably framed the animated vision of such developments, along with those responsible for them, in a different way than did that emerging SF literature, as well as the popular science writing found in such periodicals as Popular Science Monthly, The Electrical Experimenter, or Science and Invention. But what these animated visions of the Fleischers, Disney, Walter Lantz, Paul Terry, and others

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located within the many modern marvels, sometimes strange inventions, and often strange-seeming inventors or scientists was an important spirit of the times. Their cartoon images, no less than the more serious projec- tions of a Gernsback, in various ways seem intent on, as Leslie puts it, trying to “displace and estrange the world” (300). But while the laughter these cartoons direct at such gadgets and gadgeteers certainly helped audiences to assimilate or embrace a dynamic, even unpredictable world, that elaborate imagery of the unfamiliar also, much after the satiric fashion of a Rube Goldberg, repeatedly sounded a note of caution, reminding us of forces that might not be so easily accommodated in the culture, and perhaps not even in the vernacular modernist vision that had proven so useful to most early animation.

[ 104 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Postscript

New SF Images for a Postwar World

Are cartoons instrumental performances that “infect” their viewers and inspire them to respond in predictable ways, or are they simple benign amusements that generate feel- good laughter, distraction, forgetfulness, and nothing more? —Donald Crafton, Shadow (9)

onald Crafton’s leading question regarding the influence—and Dsignificance—of cartoons is one that, for some readers, has probably haunted this book from the start. Certainly, few heads of major film studios would have seen the cartoons they were distributing during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system as doing much more than filling out the bill, generating precisely the sort of “feel-good laughter” that Crafton describes, a laughter designed to create a favorable mood for the audience to better appreciate the more important feature film—which was, after all, the bill’s highlight. Yet some cartoons, even in the pre–World War II era, were clearly seen, and functioned, as something more. Disney’s Three Little Pigs (1933), as we have noted, was in its own time often viewed as a kind of social alle- gory, urging fortitude in the face of the Depression, affording audiences, as Stefan Kanfer puts it, “a rallying cry against despair and economic misery” (83). What Crafton terms the “polymorphous plasticism” of Felix the Cat was applauded, even perceived as inspirational by many in the Surrealist movement of the 1920s (Before Mickey 329). And a character like Mickey Mouse, as the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein assessed, was widely seen as emblematic of the human desire “to achieve a mastery and supremacy in the realm of freedom from the shackles of logic, from shackles in general” (22). At least some cartoons of the pre–World War II era, it seems, were 106

recognized as easily answering that question about their instrumentality, even if each of these answers points in a slightly different direction—as propaganda, as aesthetic expression, as ideological statement. But Crafton’s question is doubly important for our context, because it is the same sort that was often asked about SF throughout its early history and especially in its pulp manifestations. As Edward James observes, SF literature has generally occupied an “odd, if not isolated position … in the world of fiction” (98), for even as it frequently focuses on what might be termed “big issues,” it has also often been regarded “as escapist … as failing to grapple with real concerns” (96). Even the historian Adam Roberts reflects something of this attitude when he dismisses many stories of the early SF pulps as “rarely more than a literature to pass the time, a literature of distraction” (175), while Paul A. Carter wryly observes that it was not until the late 1960s that the genre finally “suffered a fall into respect- ability” (3). Carter’s comment came on an occasion when at least part of that question about SF’s own instrumentality seemed—finally—to have been settled, as genre authors such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein were being interviewed on national television on the occasion of the first manned moon landing and what it meant for humanity. No longer seen as writers who largely catered to a juvenile taste, they were now viewed as prophets, supporters, even instigators of such space exploration. Placed on a national stage at a signal moment in human history, they were being seriously queried not just on how this event might affect our lives, but on what the next step in space travel might be, and what humanity might expect to find as we went even further “out there”—precisely the sort of speculation that was the stock-in- trade of SF literature. SF, it seems, had hit the big time and was becoming widely regarded not as a literature of distraction, but as an instrumental part of the larger scientific enterprise, helping to effect its aims not so much by spurring new inventions, as Hugo Gernsback might have argued, but by contributing to what Brian Stableford effectively describes as “perspective-shift” (Sociology 68), that is, by creating the possibility for seeing things differently—and seeing new things.1 If SF literature—and after the appearance of a film like2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), SF cinema—had contributed significantly to developing new ways of seeing humanity’s place and potential in exploring and understanding the universe, it is also worth considering whether SF animation functioned in any way approaching this sort of instrumental fashion. That has obviously been one of the arguments of the preceding chapters, as they have tried to suggest ways in which the emergent body of animation, which appears practically in parallel with genre SF’s own early development and search for an identity, contributed in some way to the sort of “perspective-shift” that

[ 106 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Stableford attributes to the larger SF imagination. As we have described in some detail, SF cartoons repeatedly explored the same key memes on which the new literature of SF was also largely focused, and it often explored others that we have not examined here, including time travel, apocalyptic events, and destructive rays, all of which increasingly surfaced in the genre. In terms of subject matter, then, these cartoons were clearly mining the same vein of cultural fascination that the larger body of literary SF did. Of course, animated films were exploiting this material in part simply because it was new, exciting, and topical—part of the spirit of the times, much like the emergent SF literature, part of what we have described as a modernist vision of the world. That material also lent itself to the visual, to what animation did so well, which is to fashion a visual image of whatever we might imagine. But all of these appeals also linked that material to film and animation’s own modernist properties, particularly to their technologically driven ability to provide us with what Miriam Hansen terms a “new visuality” (72), to the possibility for letting us see things anew. While our cartoons also often tempered that vision, frequently adopting what we have identified as a kind of compromised stance, they did so while visualizing other possibilities, in keeping with that notion of a vernacular modernism, and while framing them in a comic or satiric way. Yet even in that comic manner—which is, after all, the cartoons’ common coin—they contributed to that shift we are describing, if for no other reason than that they made a certain element of that modernist thrust safe for consumption by rendering SF’s driving ideas more familiar, less threatening, and ultimately more imaginable. But these early cartoons also need to be seen as instrumental on another level. Esther Leslie has demonstrated the extent to which early animation was a highly dynamic form, thoroughly imbued with a modernist spirit, and especially at home with modernism’s implicit suggestion that we inhabited a “universe of transformation” (vi). It is an emphasis that figures like Felix the Cat, KoKo the Clown, and early Mickey Mouse humorously, almost effortlessly, and repeatedly conveyed to a broad audience, as these characters easily altered their worlds—and at times their bodies—to suit their needs. That point should remind us as well of the transformative character of those ideas, those cultural memes that drove SF in all of its stripes during this era, opening the door for more ambitious efforts later and in various media, especially television. The many robots, aliens, and over- reaching scientists depicted—and in most cases also lampooned—in these short films created an imaginative space for a wealth of later SF classmates, such as Marvin the Martian, Duck Dodgers, Astronut, the Jetsons, Rocket J. Squirrel and his moose companion Bullwinkle, Bender of the Futurama television series, and others, while also casting additional generic markers

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in a new light. In effect, the pre-war films provided extensive material that instrumentally contributed to the transformation of the genre’s memes, allowing for a host of new depictions better suited to a postwar, more obviously SF-inflected culture (Figure P.1). In several of the preceding chapters we cited in passing a few of the films that appeared in that postwar/Cold War climate, works such as the robot story Mouse Menace (1946) or the space-opera satire Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century (1953), as we have tried to suggest how early cartoons looked toward these later developments. But in order to maintain a focus on those pre-war efforts and their parallels or links to a developing SF literature, we have so far done little more than nod in this later direction. At this point, and as a kind of postscript to that body of earlier material, we should give some attention to both the continued fascination with those SF memes in this era and some of their key shifts or transformations, as cinematic, and increasingly television animation picked up where our pre-war cartoons left off, exploring the same primary elements of the genre, but also working changes in them—changes that reflect postwar attitudes toward the work of science and technology, as well as new developments in the SF imagination. Since we briefly sketched the nature of the animation industry in the pre-war era, it is also important that we note its shifting character in the postwar period. Driven by seismic changes occurring in the film industry

Figure P.1 Duck Dodgers confronts a new nemesis, Marvin the Martian, in Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century (1953). Warner Bros.

[ 108 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination after the war, a number of those early animation studios closed their doors or turned their attention strictly to the new medium of television. Both Ub Iwerks’s studio and the Van Beuren organization disappeared before World War II. As we have previously noted, Fleischer Studios was taken over by Paramount in 1942 and renamed Famous Studios, although Famous continued to produce Superman cartoons for several years, while also using its Popeye character as a bridge into the postwar era, even casting him in remakes of some earlier SF efforts, such as All’s Fair at the Fair (1947). Shortly after the death of Charles Mintz in 1939, Columbia abandoned its Scrappy character who had figured so prominently in many of the films discussed earlier and who was quite literally a child of the Machine Age, and in 1948 it contracted with a new animation house, UPA, that would become primarily known for its Gerald McBoing Boing and Mister Magoo characters—both suitably handicapped inhabitants of a postwar, war-marked world. Both Paul Terry’s Terrytoons and the former lead cartoonists at MGM, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, began to create animated television series with an eye to the new Saturday morning cartoon market and a true children’s audience. Disney by 1956 would largely abandon its short cartoon business, although it continued to create significant animation in a SF vein for the studio’s new television series Disneyland. Moreover, much of the cartoon material produced by these and other studios in the immediate postwar era would have a distinctly domestic or everyday focus. And yet, as a flourishing live-action SF cinema and a flurry of television space operas through the mid-1950s demonstrated that there was a growing market for the genre, most of the surviving studios, as well as some of the new ones, such as DePatie-Freleng, began to explore variations on those earlier generic memes. Just as pre-war images of rockets and space flight had been inflected by the experimental rocketry efforts of Robert Goddard and the comics’ images of Buck Rogers’s and Flash Gordon’s cigar-shaped space ships, the postwar cartoons similarly drew on a combination of real-world and imagined developments to fashion a new vision of space flight. The old regime of rockets, often little more than the primitive sort of sky rockets that accidentally take KoKo, Bimbo, and even Max Fleischer to Mars, gave way to vehicles obviously modeled on the German V-2, introduced as a terror weapon during the war but making headlines throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s in a different guise, as the base technology for new American experiments with space flight and the development of ballistic missile technology.2 Such rockets accidentally take Popeye to Mars in Rocket to Mars (1946), Bugs Bunny—unwillingly—to the moon in Haredevil Hare (1948), Woody

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Figure P.2 Coney Island becomes outer space in Destination Magoo (1954). Columbia Pictures.

Woodpecker to the moon in Woodpecker in the Moon (1959), Mister Magoo to an amusement park—which he mistakes for the moon—in Destination Magoo (1954) (Figure P.2), and Tom and Jerry into Earth orbit in Mouse into Space (1962). But more than simply dream devices or vehicles for suggesting a sort of “nuttiness” about space and space flight, as Max Fleischer offers inA Trip to Mars (1924), these rockets are most often framed in a real-world context: as feasible technological products, as part of a scientific effort to explore the universe, even as components of a national space program. Essentially transformed and taken seriously, the iconic rocket in these films is not just a transport to adventure—comic or otherwise—but an emblem of Big Science, a postwar science that, as Bugs, Woody, Popeye, and other reluctant cartoon astronauts would all learn, seemed ready to fly away with us, with or without our cooperation. Those new rockets would, moreover, be complemented by another sort of featured vehicle, one that, in Edward James’s opinion, more properly belongs in “one of the corners of the field of pseudo-science,” namely the flying saucer (149). A designation first popularized by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 when he claimed to have seen several disk-shaped vehicles flying over Washington State, the flying saucer quickly made its way into the popular imagination with notable appearances in such early postwar live-action

[ 110 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination features as The Flying Saucer (1950), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), among many others. Readily matching up with this feature-film fascination, the animation industry would offer numerous variations on the flying saucer narrative: flying saucers kidnap Bugs Bunny in Hasty Hare (1952), Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat in Jumpin’ Jupiter (1955), and Gerald McBoing Boing in Gerald McBoing Boing on the Planet Moo (1956); flying saucers bring mischievous, childlike Martians to Earth in the Paramount cartoons Out of This Whirl (1959) and The Kid from Mars (1961), a bored Martian looking for excitement in Warner Bros.’s Martian through Georgia (1962), and predatory cats from the moon in the Terrytoon Flying Cups and Saucers (1949); Daffy Duck and Porky Pig would have to track down the notorious “flying saucer bandit” in Warner Bros.’ police/space opera satire Rocket Squad (1956); and Woody Woodpecker would bring panic to the streets when he is accidentally swept up in a dis- lodged hubcap that both citizens and the military immediately assume to be a flying saucer inWoodpecker from Mars (1956). These and other cartoons draw upon and in some cases directly address—as Woodpecker from Mars particularly illustrates—the way in which the cultural imagination had been rapidly gripped by this image. It was one that, as Patrick Lucanio and Gary Coville observe, “managed to touch all of the political buttons of 1950s America” (92), especially with its suggestion of superior alien technology and of our vulnerability to invasion, both of which were fundamental Cold War anxieties. But because of its very otherworldly—or pseudo-scientific—character, the flying saucer could also quickly shift into a comic register, becoming a kind of conservative vehicle for countering, by way of comic exaggeration and psychic displacement, some of those key anxieties of the times. As chapter 3 observed, the robot, another of those central SF memes, was also one of the first to be resurrected in the postwar era with the Porky Pig cartoon Mouse Menace (1946). That film’s depiction of a domestic apocalypse that results from the introduction of a robot mouse-catcher not only looked back to the quite visible effects of the recent world war, but also anticipated a spate of powerful and potentially destructive robots that would increasingly feature in live-action SF films throughout the 1950s. While robots had a long history in literature and popular culture, and had been featured in films since the 1910s, postwar cinematic robots differed significantly from most of those forebears, since they were typically linked to another, culture-changing scientific development of the era, the com- puter or artificial brain. As films likeTobor the Great (1954), The Colossus of New York (1958), The Invisible Boy (1957), and especially Forbidden Planet

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 111 ] 112

(1956) suggested, robots with such onboard intelligence, with an ability to think like, or even better than, humans, brought with them a new potential for anxiety, posed a new threat of human displacement—one that our cartoons too would quickly confront with stories of similar cat, mouse, rabbit, even coyote machine replacements. Certainly, many of the postwar cartoons drew to some extent on the models of their pre-war antecedents. Paramount’s Electronica (1960), for example, recalls some of those efforts of the 1930s centered on the promise of Technocracy, as it depicts a henpecked husband who reads an ad, “Tired of Doing Household Chores? Buy a Mechanical Servant,” and thus quickly rushes out to purchase a robot to do his housework so that he can be free to have a beer with the boys at the local bar. Similarly, Jinks the Cat becomes bored with chasing mice in Rapid Robot (1959), and, prompted by an adver- tisement, he sends away for a robotic cat to do the job for him. And in the same vein, MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoon Push-Button Kitty (1952) has the usual—albeit usually only partially glimpsed—housekeeper replace the lazy Tom with Mechano, a robotic mouse-catcher or, as an ad describes it, “The Cat of Tomorrow” (Figure P.3). But in all of these cases and in several other cartoons featuring robots, the mechanical solution proves to be just as single-minded, persistent, and powerfully destructive as were those mechanical figures tinkered

Figure P.3 Push-Button Kitty (1952) introduces a robotic “cat of tomorrow.” MGM.

[ 112 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination together by Flip the Frog, Scrappy, Bimbo, and Mickey Mouse in the 1930s. Moreover, the advent of these figures seems practically inevitable. Thus, in a line that could just as easily fit into one of those earlier cartoons, the housekeeper in Push-Button Kitty explains to Tom that being replaced is simply the inevitable result of “progress … the Machine Age … and stuff like that.” Yet a point hidden in the seemingly throwaway reference to “stuff like that” is also a key to one of the transformations worked on the robot meme in postwar cartoons. These films consistently—and with a pointedly nonconservative critical thrust—revise the source of these robots, re-placing them within the new postwar culture. No longer just cobbled together by garage mechanics like Bosko and Bimbo out of scrap metal and spare parts, nor the products of Gernsbackian do-it- yourself kits, most of these figures are presented as mass manufactured, widely advertised, and sold in department stores, as we see in cartoons like Electronica and Robots in Toyland (1965), or through mail-order companies such as Warner Bros.’ famed Acme in Robot Rabbit (1953), from which farmer Elmer Fudd is able to order a “rabbit-control”—that is, exterminator— robot. These new robots become, consequently, less emblems of personal accomplishment—or folly—than signs of a pervasive culture of mechanization and “progress,” one that easily produces such contraptions, adver- tises their abilities, and then makes them widely available as supposedly adequate replacements for cats, rabbits, and perhaps even humans. In fact, as a film like Paramount’s Robot Ringer (1962) suggests, the robot has become such an integral part of the commercial world that, when one runs amuck and wanders into an advertising company, it so readily blends in among the many lookalike and talkalike ad executives that the head of the agency cannot tell the real executives from the robot, especially when the mechanical figure, by looping together several of the agency head’s comments, generates a series of successful promotional slogans. Faced with such success, the agency head can only describe it as one of “the best cre- ative brains in the advertising business.” Such cartoons not only satirize the notion that the robot might become ubiquitous, as the marketplace increasingly panders to our desires for such creations, but also suggest a level on which we might all become, in a sense, robotized, taking our personal and cultural direction from the world of advertising and business, not just buying its products, but buying into its vision of a thoroughly mechanical, programmed culture. The other transformation at work in this image is akin to the robotic vision found in those feature films noted earlier. They almost invariably implicate the problem of control, of trying to impose our thoughts

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 113 ] 114

on what has become essentially a powerful thinking machine. Thus, while Wile E. Coyote might fashion a giant coyote robot to help in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Roadrunner in The Solid Tin Coyote (1966), he quickly finds that translating his thoughts into the robot’s electronic brain proves just as frustrating and dangerous as all of his previous efforts at using Acme Company products. The robot ad executive of Robot Ringer, as we have already seen, clearly has ideas of his own—ideas that, to his boss, sound even better than those of his human colleagues, even if they are, ultimately, just random combinations of the boss’s own thoughts. And even when the robot cat of Push-Button Kitty is destroyed, Tom accidentally swallows its electronic brain, with the result that he too becomes robotic, acting beyond his own control. What these and other films repeatedly suggest is that the robotic mind—not just the mechanical body—is increasingly the source of problems and of humor, as Bugs Bunny makes explicit at the end of Robot Rabbit. After repeatedly outwitting the Acme Company’s pest-control robot, finally reducing it to a bucket of bolts that he delivers to its owner, Elmer, he observes to the audience with a chuckle that is also an implicit and finally not very conservative warning: “You know, someday these scientists are going to invent a gadget that will outsmart a rabbit”—or, we can readily assume, a human. Another, and probably more expected, sort of threat shows up in postwar cartoons that feature aliens and alien worlds. While pre-war animation offered a wide variety of alien visions, most were, as we have seen, monstrous, oversized, or strangely hybrid in character, and discovered when figures like KoKo, Bimbo, Oswald, and Scrappy land on their equally strange planets. In the postwar era, animated aliens most often resemble Earth creatures—cats, mice, woodpeckers, humans—and they are typically more mischievous than dangerous, but most importantly, they are here rather than simply out there. Of course, the war had forced cultural confrontations of various sorts, making the cultural alien—whether occupied enemy national, refugee, or a foreign ally—a familiar visual component that was part of the new, postwar global consciousness. The anxieties that had become attached to that confrontation would be played out on a large scale in the many live-action SF features detailing alien inva- sions, whether by horribly inhuman creatures, as in The War of the Worlds (1953); formless, shapeless things, such as The Blob (1958); or figures that adopt a familiar human shape only to better undermine Earth culture, as we see in the tellingly titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). These aliens were not simply on some far-distant planet but unavoidably, even invisibly, here in our world, creating new challenges and dangers for everyday life.

[ 114 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination But our cartoons would, in most cases, try to naturalize that troubling presence by making the alien, even as he/she/ it walks among us, a largely unthreatening figure, or in the case of Terrytoons’ popular Astronut cartoons, even a surprisingly helpful one. In some instances the alien is little more than a child, as we see in Paramount’s Space Kid (1966), a film that begins with a Martian mother, sounding like many an Earth parent, telling her son to “go out into space and play awhile,” prompting him to fly to Earth where he then babysits, with expected comic consequences, for an Earth mother while she shops. Terrytoons’ Outer Space Visitor (1959) depicts a mysterious metal egg arriving on Earth, unfolding into something that resembles a baby’s pram, and yielding a small robot that, when discovered by a group of mice, is described as “only a little kid.” Thanks to a collision of passing comets, Rocket-bye Baby (1956) from Warner Bros. brings an accidental and troublesome mix-up of Martian and Earth babies—which turns out only to have been imagined by an overly anxious expectant father. In Warners’ Martian through Georgia (1962), the titular Martian is a small green figure who has simply grown bored with life on Mars and is told by his doctor that “travel will do you a world of good,” and so he comes to another world—Earth—for relaxation. Here, however, he finds far too much excitement when he is quickly miscast by newspa- pers and television as “a ravening alien monster … bringing terror to the hearts of millions.” Other alien visitors often turn out to be misidentified locals, as in the case of the mouse protagonist of Paramount’s The Planet Mouseola (1960) or Woody Woodpecker in Walter Lantz’s Woodpecker from Mars (1956). In contrast to most of the live-action SF films of the period, the collective—and reassuring—sense projected by most of these cartoons seems to be that we have relatively little to fear whenever our alien neigh- bors come to visit. However, a number of animated works do more directly echo the threatening pattern of the live-action invasion features—and, in the process, our own Cold War fears. For example, Popeye in Popeye, the Ace of Space (1953) still seems to be playing out a World War II dynamic, as he has to tame Martian invaders with the aid of his spinach, transforming them, as he says, from “hateful” to “playful.” The mice of Terrytoons’Goons from the Moon (1951) also manage to repel alien cats, but only thanks to the usual intercession of Mighty Mouse. And Bugs Bunny—or in one case Daffy Duck—repeatedly manages to outwit the diminutive Marvin the Martian in a series of Warner Bros. cartoons: Haredevil Hare (1948), The Hasty Hare (1951), Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century (1953), Hare-Way to the Stars (1958), and Mad as a Mars Hare (1963). While the always-plotting Marvin the Martian seems to have struck a popular chord, his diminutive

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size, overconfidence, and woeful assistants—the dim-witted Martian dog K-9 and his plantlike, dehydrated “instant Martians”—constantly undercut Marvin’s grandiose schemes, most often for destroying Earth with an Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator. Even though these and a few other cartoon aliens possess an advanced technology allowing them to travel to Earth and even to threaten the planet’s existence, they are also almost formulaically dismissed, as if they were indeed little more than tropes for those Cold War anxieties and our overstimulated SF imaginations. The many inventions and modern marvels chronicled in pre-war animation seem to show up with the least amount of alteration in postwar cartoons, although the way in which they surface is itself perhaps a telling development. For while every studio of the pre-war era offered at least one film in this vein—with the Fleischer Studios, as we have noted, building a short-lived series around its inventor character Grampy—postwar producers would turn the demonstration of the modern marvel into a kind of subgenre, relegating the invention or futuristic gadget to a component in a formulaic comic presentation. The most obvious—and certainly best— example is the series of films produced by one of the comic geniuses of the animation industry, Tex Avery. His House of Tomorrow (1949), Car of Tomorrow (1951), T. V. of Tomorrow (1953), and Farm of Tomorrow (1954), all done for MGM, recall his series of travelogue-like cartoons done at Warner Bros. before the war. Like those earlier cartoons, these are all blackout narratives, that is, a series of short comic sketches, loosely connected, usually by a voice-over narration, and with each scene ending in a punch line and fade-out. In the case of the Avery films, all of the sketches are thematically linked by their reference to the future, to scientific and technological developments that are, in the best SF tradition, supposed to provide us with a better, even utopian “tomorrow.” Yet these films are never really about tomorrow; rather, they are all about stylistic surprise or, as Michael Barrier suggests, about “a violation of style,” of what audiences had come to expect from the cartoon story (412), as they typically undercut narrative expectations and exagger- ate imagery, turning the modernist thrust of their subject matter into a late-modernist strike at narrative itself. In fact, the MGM Tomorrow cartoons, like such similar postwar efforts as Paramount’s Invention Convention (1953), Silly Science (1960), and Giddy Gadgets (1962), or Terrytoons’ Post War Inventions (1945), are simply col- lections of visual puns or comic juxtapositions of different, even generally commonplace images, tenuously linked by popular notions of science or technology. In Car of Tomorrow, for example, a narrator notes that more

[ 116 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Figure P.4 Tex Avery’s Car of Tomorrow (1951) envisions a car-crowded world. MGM. powerful engines are being developed for future automobiles but that there are still “bugs in the motor,” which prompts the appearance of a new car with insects crawling over its engine. T. V. of Tomorrow combines several such puns, as when it depicts a “thrifty Scotsman’s model” television—a flashlight that displays a small image—with a variety of comic juxtapositions that show how television will eventually find its way into everyday life, as with a “watch while you wash model” that has a screen in a washing machine or a stove with a screen where the oven should be. Farm of Tomorrow relies almost entirely on such strange juxtapositions, as it catalogues the sort of hybrid wonders that the new “science” of farm cross-breeding will bring, including an ostrich-chicken to provide larger drumsticks, a kangaroo-cow that will keep its milk in a handy pouch, and a banana-duck whose feathers can be peeled off more easily. Hardly really concerned with science or technology, all of these films are simply formulaic gag reels, set within a postwar science consciousness, but nonetheless revealing a shift in cultural attitudes. For they all frame their forecast developments not quite as marvels but—especially in the Avery films—as increasingly absurd variations on a theme, as rhetorical pieces in a scheme that, with a hint of Rube Goldberg influence, actually puts the often-heralded accomplishments of science and technology into question (Figure P.4).

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And while the “mad scientist,” who is typically seen as behind some of these stranger developments in science and technology, does not disappear in the postwar period, he increasingly seems to take on some of this same absurd character. As films like Warner Bros.’s Hair Raising Hare (1946) and Birth of a Notion (1947), MGM’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1947), or Walter Lantz’s Science Friction (1963) demonstrate, the mad scientist remains largely as a stock character; in fact, the two Warners films both use a caricature of the actor Peter Lorre to serve in this role. Like the manic, foreign-accented figures Lorre often played in Warners features, the postwar mad scientist of the cartoons is typically a comically exaggerated type, found alone in an old house or laboratory, and producing monsters or experimenting on unsuspecting rabbits, mice, and woodpeckers. Depicted as distinctly human, so that he stands in pointed contrast to the cartoons’ various anthropomorphic animals, he essentially embodies the extremes of science as a foil for those other—and always smarter—human stand-ins, such as Bugs Bunny. However, it might be argued that the scientist’s most successful animated incarnation is less this sort of stereotypical figure than an anthropomorphic inheritor of the Rube Goldberg tradition, a new version of Boob McNutt or Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts—Warners’ Wile E. Coyote of its long-running Roadrunner/Coyote cartoon series. One of the most familiar figures of postwar animation, the coyote is a character defined in part by his supposed intellect; as he introduces himself to Bugs Bunny in the nonseries film Operation: Rabbit (1952), he is “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius.” And his intricate plotting and use of the various devices he is able to build or obtain from the Acme Company seem to support that boast, as they consistently demonstrate his understanding of and facility with what we might simply term mechanical engineering. In fact, Barrier observes that, for all of his failed plots at capturing the roadrunner, his Rube Goldberg devices that work only when they want to, or his inability to reckon with such basic laws of nature as gravity, the coyote is not really “a dunce,” just “more often unlucky than stupid” (498). But in that unlucki- ness, and too in the sort of hubris that attends his inability to acknowledge his constant failures and shortcomings, the coyote reveals much about postwar attitudes toward both science and the scientist. Commenting on his own approach toward his creation, the famed Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones explains that, after Wile E. Coyote’s initial effort, “catching the Road Runner becomes unimportant. What’s important is the next contraption he’s going to set up” (Furniss 55). Regardless of any one outcome, he remains obsessed by the contraption and the calculations involved in it—and in that obsession he becomes a constant reminder of a cultural

[ 118 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination tendency throughout the postwar era to become equally enraptured with the promises of science and to buy all too readily into what Jones terms “the absurdities of technology” (Furniss 95), particularly as abetted by companies like the ubiquitous Acme. While this Goldberg-like skepticism found a new, almost postmodern life3 in a figure like Wile E. Coyote, it did not totally replace the Gernsbackian spirit in the world of postwar animation. Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker character would lead in another, and highly significant, direction with a cartoon inserted in the pioneering live-action SF film Destination Moon (1950), a film that Mike Ashley credits as having “ush- ered in the science fiction boom of the fifties” (226). Walt Disney would also follow in this vein with a series of what he termed “science-factual”4 and animation-heavy episodes produced for his new Disneyland television series in the 1950s. And another program, the Bell System Science Series, would, through a mixture of live-action and animated footage, explore a variety of scientific concepts, while recognizing, in late-modernist fashion, that our knowledge about those concepts is always rooted in both factual and cultural understandings, and thus is constantly being reshaped. The key significance of these efforts is that they all spring from—and defini- tively demonstrate—animation’s “instrumental” nature, as they were designed to function not just as instances of entertainment or, as Crafton puts it, “distractions” from the real world, but as pointedly educational pieces, effectively binding their audiences of adults and children to the same reality that SF was then powerfully and plentifully exploring, as it became an increasingly prominent part of the literary, cinematic, and tele- visual landscape. The Walter Lantz–Woody Woodpecker cartoon has an especially important role in this development, in part because it is featured in a key position within a groundbreaking SF film, and also because it dramatizes the potential impact of the SF cartoon. We should first note thatDestination Moon is itself a significant generic marker of the period, because it was the first major SF film effort in the United States after the war, was loosely based on noted SF author Robert Heinlein’s novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), brought Heinlein into the movie industry as a cowriter, won an Academy Award for its special effects, and, with its gross of more than $5.5 million, demonstrated in a way that no previous SF film had that the genre could be a highly profitable undertaking.5 It was also directed by George Pal, an Academy Award–winning animator who, with this film, would begin a long career of SF efforts, many of which, but perhaps most notably The Time Machine (1960), would involve various sorts of animation in their narratives. Figuring prominently in such a landmark film, as

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 119 ] 120

Figure P.5 Woody Woodpecker proves “instrumental” as he learns about space travel in Destination Moon (1950). George Pal Productions.

the Woody Woodpecker sequence does, is itself a testimony to animation’s arrival within the world of postwar SF (Figure P.5). But the approximately five-minute animated sequence takes on added importance because of the way it functions within Destination Moon’s larger narrative. The sequence depicts a reluctant Woody Woodpecker tabbed as a potential astronaut, learning about the possibilities—and the attendant difficulties—of a rocket flight to the moon. He begins skeptically, by refusing to cooperate and announcing that “this is ridiculous, comic book stuff”—in effect, science fictional, just like the film in which the cartoon is embedded. But as a narrator answers Woody’s questions about gravity, rocket power, and flight dynamics, all with animated illustrations depicting a rocket’s flight to the moon and its return, Woody gradually comes to understand both the science involved and the importance of such a mis- sion, eventually announcing, “I’m sold!” However, the real “selling” is that which occurs within the larger narrative, as the cartoon has supposedly been prepared by the wealthy industrialist Jim Barnes to convince a group of similarly wealthy and—like Woody, highly skeptical—businessmen to back his private efforts to build a rocket and fly to the moon. By the end of Barnes’s cartoon presentation and thanks to the comic persuasions of

[ 120 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination Woody Woodpecker, these men too have been “sold” on the idea and agree to invest in the project. It is precisely the sort of impact, we might assume, that George Pal would have hoped the cartoon would similarly have on his own film’s audience, and an indication of his obvious belief in the educational or instrumental power of an animated SF. An even more telling—and real-world—demonstration of this power can be found in a series of Disneyland episodes generally referred to as the “Man in Space” shows. In an effort at developing programming for the Tomorrowland segment of his new television program, Walt Disney turned for inspiration to a series of articles that appeared in several issues of Collier’s magazine in the early 1950s, all of them written by leading figures in the field of space flight and exploration: German rocket scientists like Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun; the space medicine expert Dr. Heinz Haber; the astronomer Dr. Fred Whipple of Harvard University; Dr. Joseph Kaplan of the University of California; and others. The articles were also illustrated by the noted space artist Chesley Bonestell, who had produced the highly realistic matte paintings featured in Pal’s Destination Moon and his later production Conquest of Space (1955), as well as numerous covers for pulp SF magazines. Enlisting many of these figures as consultants or on-air experts for the “Man in Space” shows, a Disney animator and director, Ward Kimball, eventually produced three related episodes—“Man in Space” (March 9, 1955), “Man and the Moon” (December 28, 1955), and “Mars and Beyond” (December 4, 1957)—that together depicted sequen- tial steps in proposed efforts to explore space, the moon, and Mars. The episodes employed a mixture of model work, live-action dramatizations, file footage, and lectures by the experts, but their highlights—especially the opening and closing sequences of each show—were extended animated efforts that combined comic takes on scientific history with quite serious depictions of the suggested steps in human space exploration. Seen on their first broadcast by an estimated forty-two million viewers (Korkis), these episodes were so popular that each would be rebroadcast (with “Man in Space” appearing four times), and some of the animated footage would be incorporated into later Disney television episodes, such as “Inside Outer Space” (February 10, 1963). Moreover, the three “Man in Space” shows were so well received that they managed the difficult task of bridging the worlds of film and television, with all being subsequently released theatri- cally and the first episode receiving an Academy Award nomination as best documentary short.6 More significantly, these episodes, which freely mixed SF notions and animation with highly detailed, factual material, had a measurable, real- world impact. Not overstating the case, Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 121 ] 122

describe the broadcast as “an event of signal importance in the shaping of popular perceptions of the future” (30). One obvious measure of that importance is the report, attributed to Ward Kimball, that soon after the initial airing of the “Man in Space” show, President Eisenhower requested a copy to be screened for members of the Pentagon as a “primer” for “the country’s forthcoming campaign” of outer space exploration (Lucanio and Coville 146). A Disney historian, Jim Korkis, also notes that, as part of the American Rocket Society’s annual convention in 1955, the conference’s participants were offered a special screening of this episode—along with a trip to Disneyland, where they might experience a conflation of the science factual and the science fictional in the park’s Tomorrowland section, and where there would soon be a show-inspired Rocket to the Moon ride. Later in the same year “Man in Space” was featured at the International Astronautical Federation’s Sixth Congress in Copenhagen where it was viewed by Leonid Sedov, head of the Soviet commission on space-flight programs, who subsequently requested a copy for screening before Soviet scientists (Korkis). Disney animation, it seems, powerfully and convinc- ingly supported what had in the past most often been seen as science fictional ideas about space flight and humanity’s future in space—ideas that, in the postwar environment, were being seriously advanced by von Braun, Ley, and others and that would rather quickly eventuate in the launching of satellites, the orbiting of animals and astronauts, and an international race to land on the moon. If not quite as momentous in its impact as the Disney shows, the Bell System Science Series probably had a longer-lasting influence with its linkage of animation, SF, and real-world science. A series of nine shows broadcast between 1956 and 1964, the first four of which were produced, directed, and partly written by the famed director Frank Capra, these films much resembled the Disney “Man in Space” efforts. All of them mixed documentary- like footage, expert commentary, and animation in an effort to, as Marcel LaFollette offers, enhance scientific “public education through entertainment” (51). While Capra was well established as a director of entertaining features, such as the Academy Award winners It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), he had also been trained as an engineer at California Institute of Technology and so had a fine appreciation for the importance of science and science education. In addition, he had valuable experience as a documentary filmmaker during World War II, when he had created the “Why We Fight” series, a much-lauded group of documentaries done for the US Army that combined captured enemy footage, stock images of American life, and animation provided by the Disney studio, and when he produced the instructional Private Snafu cartoon series

[ 122 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination for the Army-Navy Screen Magazine newsreel. Both of these wartime projects demonstrated to Capra that animation could be used to speak directly and powerfully to a widely varied audience, and that it could be effectively incorporated into a documentary or pedagogical framework. Faced with the daunting task of explaining to an equally broad postwar viewership an assortment of abstract or theoretical notions, including weather, time, language, the circulatory system, and cosmic rays, Capra brought these same lessons to bear on the Bell television shows (Figure P.6). While Joseph McBride, Capra’s biographer, sees little difference between the director’s wartime documentaries and his work for the science series, dismissively labeling the latter as just “a return to propaganda, although of the more sophisticated Madison Avenue variety” (612), the Bell shows are more complex efforts than his description allows. Capra’s own explanation of the programs’ formula better suggests the intricate way in which they functioned; as he offers, “by weaving together live scenes, fantasy, traceries of diagrams, animated cartoon characters, puppets, and—above all—humorous illustrative parables, metaphors, similes, and analogies, we reduced the complex to the simple, the eternal to the everyday” (443). But the real key to that strategy, it might be argued, was the lengthy animated segments, which involved creating cartoonlike personifications of many

Figure P.6 Scientific mystery personified: the seductive Miss Gamma Ray of theBell Science System’s The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays (1957).

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 123 ] 124

of these concepts—Mr. Sun, Father Time, Thermo the Magician, Chloro Phyll of the plant world, Miss Gamma Ray, and others—who would often interact with the shows’ live-action host, Dr. Frank Baxter, a University of Southern California professor. That high-quality animation, produced by some of the top postwar studios—UPA did the first episode, Shamus Culhane Productions the next three, Warner Bros. the following four, and Disney the last—was instrumental in bringing together, in an entertaining yet clearly instructive manner, the worlds of science and the arts, or as Capra offers, in “making education as exciting and entertaining as any comedy, drama, or whodunit” (443). And the result, as with the Disney programs, was not only high television ratings, but also a quick transition into a second—and equally influential—life, as the various episodes were released as 16mm films to schools throughout America for classroom view- ing, where they helped several generations to better understand the sort of basic scientific concepts that were in many ways presumed by SF films and literature of the period. Of course, neither the Disney nor the Bell films were meant to be seen as SF. Rather, they were efforts at speaking to the rising science and technological consciousness of the postwar era, using animation as both a visual attraction and a primary tool. But in that approach they also functioned much like SF itself did, as the genre, under cover of fiction, illustrated basic scientific principles, envisioned new sorts of technology, and sought to better our understanding of the universe and humanity’s place in it. With animation, as Capra had learned during the war, and as figures like Disney, Fleischer, and Lantz long understood, audiences could be entertainingly engaged, new ideas—like rocket flights to the moon and planets—could be easily visualized, and attitudes could be shaped. Animation, in short, was shown to be as instrumental in its own entertaining way as the more serious SF literature and the increasingly popular live-action SF cinema. As the various instructional efforts described here illustrate, it could help lead a postwar generation to a better understanding and appreciation of the science and technology that was becoming so pervasive—and so unavoidable—in their lives. Where this body of animation would prove less effective was in reflecting some of the fundamental cultural dynamics of the postwar era, particularly the rising tide of feminine and racial awareness that was already beginning to reshape the culture. While SF literature had already, if somewhat tentatively, started to explore issues of gender and race in the pre- war period, animated SF, as this brief survey has at times observed, offered relatively little of note in these areas. A singular character like Betty Boop, once tamed by the caveats of the Production Code, had become little more than an appreciative audience for Grampy’s demonstrations of applied

[ 124 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination science and technology. And the black-faced Bosko, with the exception of the previously discussed Bosko’s Mechanical Man (1933), would have relatively little contact with the world of SF, instead being relegated to singing and dancing, to constantly demonstrating his high spirits for a less-spir- ited Depression-era audience. Disappearing from screens before the war, these characters would find no replacements in the immediate postwar period, and cartoon SF would generally revolve around conventional white male figures or, more commonly, their anthropomorphic stand-ins. While SF literature would often be described as gender and racially neutral, as if it were assuming a world in which these concerns had, over time, become what Elisabeth Leonard terms “non-issues” (254), SF animation would unfold in a realm of gender and racial absence. That element of the modernist vision would simply become a convenient blind spot, echoing Francesco Casetti’s observation about film, that its “gaze is undoubtedly a slippery terrain” (75). Despite this failing, SF animation did indeed play another sort of instrumental role. As part of that modernist thrust of the pre-war period— coincident with the origins of the movies and, effectively, of SF as a literary form—cartoons had helped insinuate or reinforce a variety of modernist attitudes in the popular culture. They were, like the rest of the film industry, a part of that broad modernist emphasis on new ways of looking at the world. And more specifically, their speed, the energy of their characters, their usually explicit challenge to the conventional order of things, their sense of the world as constructed and, as such, always open to reconstruc- tion or transformation—these are all characteristics that recur across the products of the many animation studios that sprang up in the pre-war era, as well as characteristics that also made them, after all, quite logical vehicles for early SF, marked as the genre was by its own emphases on wonder and estrangement, or what chapter 1 referred to as “world-invention” and “subject-formation.” In its literary version, the genre had quickly developed a number of signature and easily visualized memes, those rockets and other vehicles for space flight, robots, aliens and alien realms, and a variety of gadgets and gadgeteers signifying a world of technological change. All of these would also became key visual attractions of the form, thanks, in part, to those alluring, four-color covers of the many pulp magazines that helped breathe life into early SF. Easily translated into animation, these common icons not only linked cartoons to that burgeoning SF literature, but also linked audience attitudes, sedimenting SF motifs into the popular culture by giving that culture simple access to what I have referred to as the SF imagination. While sometimes challenging audiences, after the fashion of the best SF

New SF Images for a Postwar World [ 125 ] 126

literature, these cartoons probably did their most effective work in a more subtle way, allowing audiences to be amused by their new images and the new ideas that underlay them, providing those audiences with another version of what Michele Pierson and others have described as the “aesthetic experience of wonder” (168) that has been so central to SF’s appeal. In the process, they also made those ideas familiar and nonthreatening, part of the vernacular, helping to clear a space for the evolving visions of the future and of other worlds that our SF literature was already powerfully imagining for us.

[ 126 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination A PREWAR AND EARLY WAR ANIMATED SCIENCE FICTION FILMOGRAPHY

The following is a representative selection of extant cartoons (and in a very few cases, hybrids of animation and live action) made between 1909 and 1942 that fall within the precincts of SF. Because of problems with film preservation and record keeping, many works from this period are presumed lost. As a result, it is difficult to gauge precisely how many SF-themed cartoons were actually produced. The prolific Bray Studios, for example, produced approximately fifty-nine cartoons focused on its Colonel Heeza Liar character in 1913–17 and then 1922–24, but only twenty-three are currently known to exist. And while some registered titles, such as Col. Heeza Liar and the Zeppelin (1915) and Col. Heeza Liar, Sky Pilot (1924) suggest possible SF kinship, they are among the lost films, so I cannot verify their generic status and have not included them in this filmography. Also not included here are various “trick” films that were popular in the first two decades of the movies, works such as George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), Thomas Edison’s A Trip to Mars (1910), and the Charles Urban–Walter R. Booth production The Aerial Submarine (1910). While pointedly science fictional in character and mentioned in the text, these films are largely live-action narratives that incorporate some limited use of animated models or cut-outs. In any case, I would anticipate that there are other films in a SF mode still to be uncovered, especially films made outside of the United States. Each of the following entries offers (when available) title, distribution company, animation studio, central character name or cartoon type, a characterizing attribute, and approximate running time.

All’s Fair at the Fair (1938) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Elmer (Marvelous Inventions), 8 min. 26 sec. The Arctic Giant (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Superman (Superhero), 8 min. 34 sec. 128

Astronomeows (aka Astronomeous, 1928) Educational Pictures. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Space Adventure), 6 min. 41 sec. Betty Boop and Grampy (1935) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Betty Boop/Grampy (Marvelous Inventions), 7 min. 8 sec. Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (1933) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— Betty Boop (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 55 sec. Betty Boop’s Penthouse (1933) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Betty Boop, Bimbo, and KoKo (Mad Scientist, Monster), 6 min. 55 sec. Betty Boop’s Ups and Downs (1932) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— Betty Boop (Strange Adventure), 7 min. 13 sec. Billion Dollar Limited (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— Superman (Inventions/Superhero), 8 min. 47 sec. The Birth of the Robot (1936) Shell Oil. Len Lye (Robot), 5 min. 57 sec. Bosko’s Mechanical Man (1933) Warner Bros. Leon Schlesinger/ Harman and Ising—Bosko (Robot), 6 min. 58 sec. Buddy’s Lost World (1935) Warner Bros. Leon Schlesinger—Buddy (Fantastic Voyage), 7 min. 15 sec. The Bulleteers (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Superman (Inventions/Superhero), 8 min. 2 sec. Chemical Ko-Ko (1929) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Mad Scientist/Transformation), 7 min. 56 sec. Clair de lune espagnol (aka Spanish Moonlight, The Man in the Moon 1910) Gaumont (France). Emile Cohl—Pedro (Alien Encounter/ Space Adventure), 4 min. 30 sec. Cubby’s Stratosphere Flight (1934) RKO. Van Beuren Studios—Cubby Bear (Airship Adventure), 7 min. 1 sec. The Dancing Doll (aka Dresden Doll, The Mechanical Doll 1922) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Robots), 7 min. 20 sec. Dancing on the Moon (1935) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Color Classic (Space Adventure), 7 min. 46 sec. Dog Gone Modern (1939) Warner Bros. Leon Schlesinger (Chuck Jones)—Merrie Melodies (Inventions/Robots), 7 min. 3 sec. Doomsday (1938) 20th Century-Fox/Terrytoons. Paul Terry—Gandy Goose (Marvelous Inventions/Apocalypse), 6 min. 58 sec. Electric Earthquake (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Superman (Mad Scientist/Deadly Invention), 8 min. 44 sec. Ever Been Had (1917) Kine Komedy. Dudley Buxton (Global Apocalypse), 10 min. 40 sec. Felix Flirts with Fate (1926) Educational Pictures. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Martian Adventure), 8 min. 18 sec.

[ 128 ] Select Filmography Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923) M. J. Winkler. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Time/Space Travel), 3 min. 19 sec. Felix Trifles with Time (1925) Educational Pictures. Pat Sullivan— Felix the Cat (Time Travel), 7 min. 51 sec. The First Man to the Moon (1921) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— KoKo the Clown (Space Adventure), 8 min. The Flying House (1921) Winsor McCay—“Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” series (Space Adventure/Dream), 11 min. 25 sec. Frankenstein’s Cat (1942) 20th Century-Fox. Paul Terry—Mighty Mouse (Mechanical Monster), 6 min. 12 sec. Funny Face (1932) MGM. Ub Iwerks—Flip the Frog (Scientist/ Transformation), 7 min. 51 sec. Futuritzy (1928) Educational Films. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Time Travel), 7 min. 53 sec. Germ Mania (1927) Educational Films. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Mad Scientist), 7 min. 38 sec. Grampy’s Indoor Outing (1936) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Betty Boop/Grampy (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 15 sec. The Great Experiment (1934) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Mad Scientist), 6 min. 55 sec. House Cleaning Blues (1937) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Grampy/ Betty Boop (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 19 sec. I Wished on the Moon (1935) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Screen Song series (Airship/Inventions), 7 min. 21 sec. Interplanetary Revolution (1924) State Tech Kino (Russia). Z. Komisarenko, Y. Merkulov, N. Khodataev—Comrade Cominternov (Space Adventure), 7 min. 50 sec. The Iron Man (1930) Pathé. Van Beuren Studios/Paul Terry—Farmer Al Falfa (Robot), 7 min. 28 sec. Just Ask Jupiter (1938) 20th Century-Fox. Paul Terry—Wee Willie Mouse (Transformation/Flight), 5 min. 42 sec. Keep in Style (1934) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Betty Boop (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 14 sec. Ko-Ko Hops Off (1927) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Air Adventure), 6 min. 37 sec. Ko-Ko in 1999 (1924) Red Seal Pictures. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Time Travel, Robots), 6 min. 37 sec. Ko-Ko’s Earth Control (1928) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Technical Apocalypse), 5 min. 48 sec. Krazy’s Race of Time (1937) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Krazy Kat (Time Travel/Space Adventure), 6 min. 56 sec.

Select Filmography [ 129 ] 130

Little Buck Cheeser (1937). MGM. Harman and Ising—Cheeser (Space Adventure/Dream), 7 min. 39 sec. The Mad Doctor (1933) United Artists. Walt Disney—Mickey Mouse (Mad Scientist), 6 min. 55 sec. A Mad House (1934) 20th Century-Fox/ Terrytoon. Paul Terry (Mad Scientist), 5 min. 10 sec. The Magnetic Telescope (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— Superman (Mad Scientist/Deadly Invention), 7 min. 39 sec. Man of Tin (1940) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Robot), 6 min. 23 sec. Mars (1930) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Space Adventure), 5 min. 50 sec. The Mechanical Cow (1927) Universal. Walt Disney—Oswald the Rabbit (Robot), 6 min. 13 sec. The Mechanical Cow (1932, reworked sound version of the 1927 Disney film) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Robot), 6 min. 30 sec. The Mechanical Cow (1937) 20th Century-Fox/Terrytoon. Paul Terry—Farmer Al Falfa (Robot), 5 min. 38 sec. The Mechanical Handyman (1937) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Robot). Mechanical Man (1932) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Robot), 6 min. 14 sec. The Mechanical Monsters (1941) Paramount. Fleischer Studios— Superman (Robots/Superhero), 10 min. 24 sec. Mickey’s Mechanical Man (1933) United Artists. Walt Disney—Mickey Mouse (Robot), 6 min. 52 sec. The Milky Way (1940) MGM. Rudolf Ising (Space Adventure/Dream), 7 min. 59 sec. Modern Inventions (1937) United Artists. Walt Disney—Donald Duck (Robot/Inventions), 8 min. 50 sec. Monsieur de Crac (1910) Gaumont. Emile Cohl—Baron Munchausen (Fantastic Adventures), 2 min. 3 sec. The Motorist (1906) R. W. Paul. Walter R. Booth (Space Adventure), 2 min. 27 sec. Mutt and Jeff in the Submarine (1916) Celebrated Players. Bud Fisher/ Charles Bowers—Mutt and Jeff (Undersea Adventure). A Nautical Adventure (1918) Kineto. Charles Urban—Slim and Pim (Submarine Adventure), 8 min. 45 sec. The Non-Stop Fright (1927) Educational Pictures. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Marvelous Invention/Flight), 7 min. 14 sec.

[ 130 ] Select Filmography The Nutty Network (1939) 20th Century-Fox/ Terrytoons. Paul Terry (Alien Invasion Satire), 6 min. 53 sec. Oceans of Trouble (1925) Fox. Barre Studio—Mutt and Jeff (Submarine Adventure), 6 min. 47 sec. Ohm Sweet Ohm (1928) Educational Pictures. Pat Sullivan—Felix the Cat (Marvelous Inventions), 7 min. Perpetual Motion (1920) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Marvelous Inventions), 5 min. 9 sec. The Pet (1921) Winsor McCay (Giant Monster), 10 min. 40 sec. The Phantom Rocket (1933) RKO. Van Beuren Studios—Tom and Jerry (Rocket Flight), 6 min. 38 sec. Plane Dippy (1936) Warner Bros. Leon Schlesinger—Porky Pig (Robot Airplane), 8 min. 24 sec. Plane Goofy (1940) 20th Century-Fox/ Terrytoons. Paul Terry— Farmer Al Falfa (Flight/Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 39 sec. The Plastics Inventor (1944) RKO. Walt Disney—Donald Duck (Inventions/Flight), 7 min. 9 sec. Porky’s Papa (1938) Warner Bros. Leon Schlesinger—Porky Pig (Robot), 7 min. 26 sec. Reducing Crème (1934) MGM. Ub Iwerks—Willie Whopper (Inventions/Transformation), 7 min. 41 sec. The Robot (1932) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Bimbo (Robot), 6 min. 48 sec. Rocketeers (1932) Pathé. Van Beuren Studios—Tom and Jerry (Rocket Flight), 7 min. 3 sec. Scrappy’s Television (1934) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Television/Inventions), 6 min. 18 sec. Scrappy’s Trip to Mars (1938) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Space Adventure/Dream), 6 min. 40 sec. Short Circuit (1927) Pathé/Fables Studio. Paul Terry—Farmer Al Falfa (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. Sky Larks (1934) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Space Adventure/Dream), 7 min. 40 sec. Sky Skippers (1930) Pathé. Van Beuren Studios—Farmer Al Falfa (Aerial Adventure/Inventions), 7 min. Something for Nothing (1940) Jam Handy Organization—Rube Goldberg (Inventions), 8 min. 48 sec. Stoopnocracy (1933) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd (Inventions), 11 min. Stratos Fear (1933) MGM. Ub Iwerks—Willie Whopper (Space Adventure/Dream), 7 min. 5 sec.

Select Filmography [ 131 ] 132

Superman (aka The Mad Scientist, 1941) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Superman (Mad Scientist/Deadly Ray), 10 min. 25 sec. Tangled Television (1940) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Television/Inventions), 7 min. 14 sec. Techno-Cracked (1933) MGM. Ub Iwerks—Flip the Frog (Robot), 7 min. 29 sec. Technoracket (1933) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Robot), 6 min. 59 sec. Television (1928) British Pathé. Joe Noble—Sammy and Sausage (Television/Inventions). A Trip to Mars (1920) Fox. Bowers/Barre Studio—Mutt and Jeff (Space Adventure). Trip to Mars (1924) Red Seal Pictures. Fleischer Studios—KoKo the Clown (Space Adventure), 6 min. 47 sec. A Trip to the Moon (1917) International Film Service. Gregory La Cava/ Walter Lantz—Happy Hooligan (Space Adventure), 3 min. 21 sec. 20,000 Feats under the Sea (1917) A. Kay Co./Paul Terry Productions— (Undersea Adventure/Burlesque). 20,000 Laughs under the Sea (1917) Universal. Pat Sullivan—(Undersea Adventure/Burlesque). 20,000 Legs under the Sea (1917) International Film Service— Katzenjammer Kids (Undersea Adventure/Burlesque). The Unpopular Mechanic (1936) Universal. Walter Lantz—Oswald the Rabbit (Marvelous Inventions), 9 min. Up to Mars (1930) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Bimbo (Space Adventure), 6 min. 38 sec. Volcano (1942) Paramount. Fleischer Studios—Superman (Invention/ Superhero), 8 min. 7 sec. Whatrotolis (aka Was It a Dream? 1929) British Pathé. Joe Noble— Sammy and Sausage (Marvelous Inventions/Utopian Satire), 3 min. 13 sec. The World’s Affair (1933) Columbia. Charles Mintz—Scrappy (Marvelous Inventions), 6 min. 17 sec.

[ 132 ] Select Filmography NOTES

CHAPTER 1 1. In his history of the genre, Edward James chronicles the varying titles used for the form, reminding us that even a venerable resource guide like the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature reflects this uncertain titling, since it used the term “pseudo-scientific stories” until 1961. 2. Here I borrow a useful metaphor from the recent work of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, who describe the workings of certain “spreadable” images in contemporary media, particularly images that are able to inhabit different parts of the media landscape, in this case extending their SF character in a variety of directions, meaning for different sorts of audiences, including a non-SF audience. 3. For a discussion of the Machine Age with a particular emphasis on its impact on a global SF cinema, see the “Introduction” to Telotte’s A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age. 4. In this linking of modernism with not only a new subject matter but also new conceptions of time and space, I follow the lead of Stephen Kern in his landmark study The Culture of Time and Space. 5. For otherwise exemplary and probing discussions of SF animation that, for various reasons, omit pre-war cartoons from their commentary, see Csicsery- Ronay, Jr.’s “What Is Estranged in Science Fiction Animation?” and Paul Wells’s “Animation.” 6. For a discussion of that “naïve” attitude toward science and technology, an attitude often linked to one of the founders of the modern SF genre, Hugo Gernsback, see Andrew Ross’s Strange Weather, pp. 101–35, and Brooks Landon’s Science Fiction after 1900, pp. 52–53. We might also note that, starting in 1938, Amazing Stories frequently featured on its cover the boast “Every Story Scientifically Accurate.” 7. In her discussion of SF’s primary icons, Gwyneth Jones focuses on approximately the same images as I have selected here, while opening up her categories a bit more in order to accommodate contemporary SF. Her catalogue is divided into the following groupings: “rockets, spaceships, space habitats, virtual environments” (164), “robots, androids (and gynoids): cyborgs and aliens” (166), “animals, vegetables, and minerals” (169), and “mad scientists and damsels in distress” (171). 134

CHAPTER 2 1. A Princess of Mars was originally published in a shorter, serialized form in the pulp The All-Story Magazine in 1912. In this form, entitled Under the Moons of Mars, Burroughs’s story already employed the dream-transportation device, although it might be argued that the novelization of this and the author’s subsequent Martian (or Barsoom) stories would make this device—as well as Martian adventuring—much more popular and ripe for cartoon take-offs such as Little Buck Cheeser. 2. Squash-and-stretch, anticipation, and follow-through are just a few of the familiar animation techniques developed at the Disney studio in the 1930s and 1940s. These basic “principles of animation,” as the Disney artists Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston term them, helped to constitute what has come to be known as the “illusion of life” aesthetic that marked Disney cartoons and features for several decades. For a complete list of these principles, see Thomas and Johnston’s Disney Animation, p. 47. 3. While the Buck Rogers comic strip did not appear until 1929, it was actually an adaptation of the novella Armageddon 2419 a.d. that was originally published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in the previous year. 4. Interplanetary Revolution is the only instance of a Soviet SF cartoon I have found in this period. Animation was apparently slow to develop following the Russian revolution, with the early Soviet film industry, as the historian Jay Leyda recounts, generally regarding “the animated film … merely as a programme- filling novelty” (274). 5. Further testimony to Max Fleischer’s interest in science and SF might be seen in his son Richard’s recollection that his first theatrical experience came when his father took him to a production of Karel Capek’s landmark SF play R. U. R. See his Out of the Inkwell, p. 73. 6. This same launch device would also be featured in one of the most scientifically accurate SF films of the period, the Soviet space-exploration filmCosmic Journey (1936). The technical consultant for this film was the noted Soviet rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. 7. We should note that the year before The Phantom Rocket the Van Beuren Studio produced a similar film, also starring Tom and Jerry as erstwhile astronauts. That film,Rocketeers , begins with a parade of the Royal Experimental Society, which aims to launch a rocket to the moon. However, this rocket too fails to get very far into the sky; in fact, it falls into the sea where its intended astronauts, Tom and Jerry, have a series of encounters with various sea creatures and attractive mermaids. The narrative concludes when Tom and Jerry resurface with several of the mermaids and the scientists of the Royal Experimental Society all jump into the water after them, their interests now clearly turned Earthward rather than skyward.

CHAPTER 3 1. While little has been written about these robot acts, many have been chronicled on the Internet, and recently Paul Matthew St. Pierre has included them in his discussion of the music hall’s influence on British films. These were essentially fake robot acts, designed to entertain audiences with their illusion of controlled, mechanical operations, usually abetted by a variety of effects—machinelike sounds, exposed metallic parts, elaborate electrical control boxes, visible

[ 134 ] Notes to Pages 28–45 connecting cables—while posters and print advertisements often posed the essentialist question “What is it?” 2. For a background on early film depictions of the robot, see Telotte’sReplications , especially pp. 54–57. 3. This motif of inhabiting the robot also becomes a plot point in several live- action SF films of the period, includingThe Phantom Empire (1935) and Undersea Kingdom (1936). For a discussion of this motif, see Telotte’s Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film, pp. 23–41. 4. We should note that Warner Bros., distributor of the Harman and Ising cartoons, took a very public stance in relation to the election of President Roosevelt. While the various Warner brothers were Republicans, the company pledged to support the new Democratic president’s programs by placing the seal of Roosevelt’s signature program, the National Recovery Act, within the credits of many of its films. See Roddick, p. 65. 5. Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” were first introduced in 1942 in his short story “Runaround,” later a part of his I, Robot collection. These laws or programs were essentially a safety feature, designed to ensure human control over robots, while also preventing robots from injuring humans. In various versions they would eventually become a standard feature in many subsequent robot stories and films, perhaps most famously featured in the movieForbidden Planet (1956).

CHAPTER 4 1. While various pulp editors are well known for their insistence on a scientific accuracy in their magazines’ stories, it might be worth noting the irony built into some instances of that policy. Several covers of Amazing Stories in 1938– 39 carried, along with their usual hyperbolic, almost lurid imagery, a banner promising “Every Story Scientifically Accurate.” That implicit clash between cover and promised content underscores the sort of tension that characterized many of the pulp publications. See, for example, the June and August 1938 issues of Amazing Stories. 2. While Sky Larks and Krazy’s Race of Time were produced for different studios— Universal for the former and Columbia for the latter—imitation, as we have already observed, was a fairly common practice in early animation. We might note that, following the great popularity of Felix the Cat, Walt Disney would introduce a similar-looking Julius the Cat to his early Alice comedies, while Paul Terry would also follow suit by giving his Farmer Al Falfa character a comparable companion, Henry the Cat. 3. The Martians ofStratos Fear have no singular shape and the planet’s landscape seems to have no consistent logic. Everyone Willie Whopper encounters looks different and is a kind of amalgam of crudely matched pieces: one is an anthropomorph with a tail, bolts in his jaws, and blocks for feet; another has an extendable telescope for an eye and an exhaust pipe emerging from his head; others are partly musical instruments that play themselves. Even the Martian scientists’ laboratory is a strange blend, containing mummies as well as robots. It is, in short, a world in which mismatched representation seems the natural order of things, although that mismatching finally seems more intended to mark this world as a product of Willie’s dreaming rather than simply an alien reality with a logic of its own.

Notes to Pages 45–75 [ 135 ] 136

4. For a more extensive discussion of racial depictions in the cartoons of this era, see Christopher Lehman’s The Colored Cartoon. 5. This motif with its rather explicit critique of the economic conditions of Depression-era America recurs in Betty Boop’s Ups and Downs (1932) wherein Betty loses her home. In fact, the entire Earth goes up for sale in a cosmic auction, and the buyer, a personified Saturn, removes Earth’s magnetic core, producing a variety of comic consequences centered on the loss of gravity. While Betty’s closing refrain, that “any old place on this Earth is home sweet home to me,” suggests the lament of those displaced by the period’s economic conditions, the main focus of the cartoon is on a pointedly SF notion: the various surprises that would attend the sudden disappearance of gravity. 6. In the postwar era, Disney would finally move into this area with animated segments done for the “Man in Space” series produced for the new Disneyland television series. We might especially note the cartoon sequence that depicts a “typical” pulp narrative about Martian invaders, done for the “Mars and Beyond” episode broadcast on December 4, 1957. Here the aliens envisioned are wildly varied in size and shape, are able to transform, and even have a desire for Earth women.

CHAPTER 5 1. For background on Gernsback’s publishing activities, as well as on his often contested role in the development of SF as a genre, I have relied heavily on Gary Westfahl’s work, especially his Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction. 2. For a discussion of those concerns with energy and efficiency as prime indicators of the Machine Age, see Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears, especially pp. 75–91. 3. As evidence of this cultural fascination with fairs, we might note that between the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition and the opening of the New York World’s Fair of 1939, major expositions were also held in San Diego (1935), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1936), Paris (1937), Miami (1937), and San Francisco (1939). 4. In her effort at defining SF as a literary genre, Veronica Hollinger, like many others, makes this same point, as she describes SF’s “strategy of imaginative extrapolation, its significant intersections with and differences from the historical novel, its commitment to a certain kind of logical plausibility, and its evocation of the ‘sense of wonder’ ” (141). The editor and SF historian David Hartwell described this genre characteristic more simply—but no less effectively—when he suggested that “a sense of wonder, awe at the vastness of space and time, is at the root of the excitement of science fiction” (42), while Brooks Landon, noting the frequent evocation of this phrase, observes that “the sense of wonder” is simply “one of the most important aspects of SF” (18). 5. The effect of this visual guide was not lost on the Fair’s organizers. Prior to its second year, and in an effort to reach out to more of Middle America, the organizers created a mascot figure, a common man, appropriately named Elmer, who would help publicize the Fair, pose for pictures with visitors, and travel to various cities as an ambassador representing the Fair. 6. In fact, such a “poured” and molded house would reach the American market fifty years later in the shape of the Xanadu “Foam House of Tomorrow.” See the discussion of such homes in Corn and Horrigan’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows, p. 85. 7. Rube Goldberg’s Professor Butts is usually credited with putting on his thinking cap, turning his “think faucet” on, hitting his head, and thus coming up with a

[ 136 ] Notes to Pages 76–98 crazy idea, or some other variation of treating the brain like something that, as with other devices, might simply be turned on—or off. For several examples, see the illustrations in Tichi’s Shifting Gears, p. 88.

POSTSCRIPT 1. For an eloquent and detailed discussion of “perspective-shift” and its role in the development of the SF imagination, see Brooks Landon’s Science Fiction after 1900, especially pp. 6–10. 2. An obvious measure of the extent to which the German V-2 rocket was connected to a new space consciousness—or imagination—can be seen in one of the key live-action space operas of the time, the television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–55). The rockets shown in the series were all modeled on the V-2, allowing the series to insert historical footage of the rocket in order to represent Tom’s craft, the Polaris, taking off at the start of each episode or later in flight. 3. We might think of Wile E. Coyote as part of an emergent postmodern sensibility, in large part because the character increasingly comes to function not so much as character, as a figure with a complex internal life, but as what I have termed a rhetorical figure, a sign of science and technology’s place in the culture, while the narrative in which he is immersed remains largely the same, a “story” without real progression, much less closure, that simply serves to replicate the absurd struggle between the coyote’s attitude and the nature of what he would take for “nature,” the natural world of the roadrunner. 4. In his biography of Walt Disney, Steven Watts describes Disney’s interest in producing a “science-factual” formula for his television series (310). That aim was made explicit in Disney’s own introduction to the first “Man in Space” episode of 1955, wherein he promised viewers a combination of “the tools of our trade with the knowledge of the scientists to give a factual picture of the latest plans for man’s newest adventure.” 5. Destination Moon’s box-office gross of more than $5.5 million was a considerable payback for a relatively modestly budgeted film of approximately $586,000. For details on the film’s budget, creation, and reception, see Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies, pp. 221–27. 6. For a detailed examination of the “Man in Space” episodes, especially their use of animation, and the public reaction to them, see Telotte’s “Disney in Science Fiction Land.”

Notes to Pages 98–119 [ 137 ] 138 A SCIENCE FICTION ANIMATION BIBLIOGRAPHY

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[ 142 ] Bibliography Telotte, J. P. “Disney in Science Fiction Land.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.1 (2005): 12–21. Telotte, J. P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1999. Telotte, J. P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995. Telotte, J. P. Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film. New York: Routledge, 2016. Telotte, J. P. The Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston.Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Rev. ed. New York: Disney Editions, 1995. Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties. 21st Century ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997. Wells, Paul. “Animation.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 184–95. Wells, Paul. Animation and America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002. Westfahl, Gary. Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Wilson, Richard Guy. “America and the Machine Age.” The Machine Age in America: 1918–1941 . New York: Abrams, 1986. Yaszek, Lisa. “Feminism.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 537–48.

Bibliography [ 143 ] 144 INDEX

Academy Awards 120, 121 as industry 11, 44 Adams, Douglas 16 instrumental character of 105–8, 119, Adorno, Theodor 7 121, 124, 125 Aelita, Queen of Mars (film) 35 and machine culture 4, 44 Aerial Anarchists (film) 24 plasticity in 6, 32, 69, 72, 80 Aerial Submarine, The (film) 24 propaganda use 14, 35, 106, 123 Airship Destroyer, The (film) 24 realism in 32, 34, 35, 37, 45, 78–79, aliens 1, 20, 65–83, 107 82, 83, 134n2 alien invasion 22, 114, 115–16 self-consciousness in 6, 27–28, 29, 31, exoticism of 65, 76–77 33, 36, 39–41, 62, 75 hybrid depictions of 70, 72–74, 76, 78, as technology 23, 50 80, 82, 83, 114 transformation in 5, 19, 20, 22, 31, 32, postwar images of 114–16 41, 43, 48, 49, 59, 70, 71, 75, 80, in pulp fiction 66–67, 68 83, 96, 100 as racial image 76–77 Arnold, Kenneth 110 and realism 66, 68 Ashley, Mike 119 and representation 68–70, 72 Asimov, Isaac 58, 135n5 as science fiction meme 17, 18, 20, 29, Astounding Stories 45, 66, 67, 87. 125, 133n7 See also pulp magazines subversive character of 66, 82 Astro Boy 22 Allen, Glen Scott 88 Avery, Tex 116 Amazing Stories 45, 66, 76–77, 85, 87, Car of Tomorrow (film) 116–17 133n6, 134n3, 135n1. See also pulp Farm of Tomorrow (film) 116, 117 magazines House of Tomorrow (film) 116 American Interplanetary Society 24–25 T.V. of Tomorrow (film) 116, 117 American Rocket Society 122 Animated Doll, An (film) 45 Ballet Mecanique (film) 5–6, 15 animation Barbera, Joe 109 aesthetic development of 45 Barrier, Michael 14, 89, 92, 116, 118 audience for 12–14 Baxter, Frank 124 as avant-garde practice 6, 69 Bell System Science Series 119, 122–24 domestic focus 109 and Frank Capra 122–23 early history of 6 as propaganda 123 hybrid character of 74–75, 121 Bendazzi, Giannalberto 6 146

Bergson, Henri 43–44, 71 as documentarist 122, 123 Betty Boop 10, 13, 33, 50, 68, 77, It Happened One Night (film) 122 89, 124 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in Betty Boop and Grampy (film) 100 (film) 122 in Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (film) Private Snafu cartoons 122–23 89, 91–92 Why We Fight films 122 in Betty Boop’s Ups and Downs (film) Captain Video (television series) 22 77, 136n5 Carter, Paul A. 65, 66, 106 in Be Up to Date (film) 92 Casetti, Francesco 125 in Keep in Style (film) 89, 91, 92. censorship 72 See also gender in animation Hays Office 77 Bimbo 4, 10, 33, 52, 55, 61, 68, 74, 109, Motion Picture Production Code 72, 113, 114 77–78, 91, 124 in The Robot (film) 50–51, 62 Chaplin, Charlie 5, 15, 44 in Up to Mars (film) 33–34, 75–77 and Modern Times (film) 49 See also Fleischer brothers Cheng, John 3, 12, 17, 18, 24–25, 31, 41, Blackton, J. Stuart 45 61, 76, 77, 82, 90–91 Blob, The (film) 114 Cholodenko, Alan 23, 28 Boddy, William 98 Chomon, Segundo de 26 Bonestell, Chesley 121 Excursion to the Moon (film) 26 Booth, Walter R. 24 A Trip to Jupiter (film) 26 Bosko 4, 57, 68, 113 Clarke, Arthur C. 106 in Bosko’s Mechanical Man (film) 54, Clever Dummy, A (film) 45 57–58, 125 Cinecolor 37 and racial imagery 125 Cohl, Emil 26 See also Warner Bros. Clair de lune espagnol (film) 26 Bradbury, Ray 106 Man in the Moon (film) 66 Bray, John R. 6 Monsieur de Crac (film) 26–27 and Max Fleischer 36 Cold War 22, 23, 108, 111, 115–16 Brophy, Philip 69 Collier’s (magazine) 121 Brown, Howard V. 66 Colossus of New York, The (film) 63, 111 Buck Rogers (serial) 1, 34, 109 Columbia Pictures 10, 20, 38, 52, 81, 97, Bugs Bunny 11, 110, 118 135n2. See also UPA in Hair Raising Hare (film) 118 comics 2, 31, 71, 109, 134n3 in Haredevil Hare (film) 109, 115 Conquest of Space (film) 121 in Hare-Way to the Stars (film) 115 Constructivism 6 in Hasty Hare (film) 111, 115 Corn, Joseph 24, 61, 95, 97, in Mad as a Mars Hare (film) 115 121–22, 136n6 in Operation Rabbit (film) 118 Cosmic Journey (film) 134n6 in Robot Rabbit (film) 113, 114 Coville, Gary 111, 122 See also Warner Bros. Crafton, Donald 34–35, 39, 44, 50, 52, Bukatman, Scott 39 80, 105–6, 119 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 28 Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan 10, 67, 133n5 influence of 30 A Princess of Mars (novel) Daffy Duck 1, 11, 22, 107 28–29, 134n1 in Birth of a Notion (film) 118 in Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century Capek, Karel 44 (film) 1, 108, 115 R.U.R. (play) 44, 134n5 in Rocket Squad (film) 111 Capra, Frank 122, 124 See also Warner Bros.

[ 146 ] Index Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (film).See in The Iron Man (film) 53 Fleischer brothers in The Mechanical Cow (film) 48–50 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (film) in Plane Goofy (film) 96 63, 111 in Sky Skippers (film) 25, 96 DePatie-Freleng Studio 109 See also Terry, Paul Depression, the 41, 49, 56, 61, 88, 95, Felix the Cat 5, 68, 98, 107, 135n2 98, 101 in Astronomeows (film) 33, 34, 71–72, as animation subject 48, 52–53, 79–80, 82 105, 136n5 in Felix Flirts with Fate (film) 33, 34 and movie audiences 81, 125 in Felix Trifles with Time (film) 26 and Technocracy 54, 58 in Germ Mania (film) 100, 101 Destination Moon (film) 119–21, 137n5 in The Non-Stop Fright (film) 24, 96 Disney, Walt 1, 4, 6, 20, 33, 45, 50, 68, and Surrealism 105 103, 135n2 film industry 10–11, 105 and the avant-garde 69 postwar changes in 108–9 and cartoon distribution 10, 11 and the seven-minute cartoon 11–12 and Disneyland (television series) 109, and technology 19, 37 119, 121, 136n6 Flash Gordon (serial) 1, 34, 65, 109 Goofy’s Glider (film) 95 Fleischer brothers 1, 4, 6, 9, 15, 19, 20, Man in Space shows 16, 121–22, 35, 47, 50, 68, 70–71, 74, 75, 103, 136n6, 137n4, 137n6 109, 110 Mechanical Cow, The (film) 46–47, 62 Ace of Spades (film) 77 and realism 32, 39, 45, 83, 134n2 All’s Fair at the Fair (1938) and “science-factual” television 119, 89–91, 92, 94 124, 137n4 All’s Fair at the Fair (1947) 109 Three Little Pigs (film) 14, 52, 105 and cartoon distribution 10, 11 See also Donald Duck; Mickey Mouse The Dancing Doll (film) 53, 62 Disneyland (television series). See Dancing on the Moon (film) 35–38 Disney, Walt Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Donald Duck 10, 61 (film) 16, 36 in Modern Inventions (film) 59–60, The Einstein Theory of Relativity 89, 93–95 (film) 16, 36 personality of 59, 94 “exhibit” films 89, 91–92, 94–95 in Plastics Inventor, The (film) 95, and Grampy cartoons 15, 99–101, 96–97, 102 103, 116 See also Disney, Walt and hybrid animation 33, 39 I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (film) 111 Rascal You (film) 77 Edison, Thomas 26 Old Black Joe (film) 77 Eggeling, Viking 6 Out of the Inkwell series 6, 36, 74 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 122 and racial humor 77 Ellis, Edward S. 45 Richard Fleischer 44–45, 134n5 Einstein Theory of Relativity, The (film). Robot, The (film) 50–51, 62 See Fleischer brothers rotoscope 74–75 Eisenstein, Sergei 4, 6, 35, 69, 72, 105 scientific interests of 16, 36–37, Essanay Studio 45 44–45, 134n5 stereoptical apparatus 37–38, 89 Famous Studios 109 and Superman cartoons 10, 38, 60–61, fandom 12, 14–16, 32, 125–26 66, 103, 109 Farmer Al Falfa 10, 135n2 See also Betty Boop; KoKo the Clown

Index [ 147 ] 148

Flip the Frog 10, 54, 57, 58, 61, 68, 113 and visuality 69, 107 in Techno-Cracked (film) 16, Happy Hooligan 27–28, 29, 30, 53–54, 55–56 39, 72–73 See also Iwerks, Ub Harman, Hugh 11, 31, 54 Flying Saucer, The (film) 111 Hartwell, David 136n4 flying saucers 110–11 Heinlein, Robert 106, 119 Forbidden Planet (film) 111–12, 135n5 Rocket Ship Galileo (novel) 119 Foyles, Edward J. 36 Herriman, George 6 Frayling, Christopher 99 Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Freedman, Carl 3, 4, 9 (novel) 16 Frierson, Michael 38 hobby magazines 35, 85, 98 Fuller, Matthew 16 Hollinger, Veronica 136n4 Furniss, Maureen 118, 119 Hoover, Herbert 55 Futurama (television series) 107 Horkheimer, Max 7 Horrigan, Brian 24, 61, 97, gender in animation 13–14, 37, 68, 121–22, 136n6 77–78, 124–25 Huxley, Aldous 21 and robots 62 Gerald McBoing Boing 109 I Married a Monster from Outer Space in Gerald McBoing Boing on the Planet (film) 114 Moo 111 Impossible Voyage, The (film) 26 Gernsback, Hugo 67, 85–86, 87–89, 91, International Astronautical Federation 122 93, 94, 103, 106, 119, 133n6 International House (film) 97 as businessman 86, 113 Internet 16, 134n1 as publisher 85, 97, 98, 136n1 Interplanetary Revolution (film) 8, 10, 35, Ralph 124C 41+ (novel) 85 39, 134n4 and scientifiction 86 Invaders from Mars (film) 111 Globe Trotters (film) 25 inventions 85–104 Goddard, Robert H. 17, 24–25, 41, 109 postwar developments 116–17 Gog (film) 63 Invisible Boy, The (film) 111 Goldberg, Rube 85–86, 88, 92, 98, Ising, Rudy 11, 31, 54 100, 102 Iwerks, Ub 10, 11, 16, 17, 30–31, 68, 109 influence of 117, 118, 119, 136n7 and modernism 103 James, Edward 17–18, 23, 30, 68, 106, as satirist 86, 87, 91, 104 110, 133n1 Grampy 88, 99–101, 116, 124 Jetsons, The 107 in Betty Boop and Grampy (film) 100 Johnston, Ollie 134n2 in Candid Candidate, The (film) 100 Jones, Chuck 118, 119 disappearance of 103 Jones, Gwyneth 18, 133n7 in Grampy’s Indoor Outing (film) 100 Just Imagine (film) 34 in House Cleaning Blues (film) 100 narrative pattern 100 Kanfer, Stefan 12 in Service with a Smile (film) 100 Kaplan, Joseph 121 in Zula Hula (film) 100 Karl, Frederick 7 See also Fleischer brothers Keaton, Buster 15, 44 Kern, Stephen 133n4 Haber, Heinz 121 Kimball, Ward 121, 122 Hanna, Bill 109 Klein, Norman 9 Hansen, Miriam 7–8, 9 KoKo the Clown 4, 6, 10, 19, 24, 33, 36, and vernacular modernism 7–8 68, 91, 107, 109, 114

[ 148 ] Index in Chemical Ko-Ko (film) 72 postwar development of 118–19 in The Dancing Doll (film) 53 as science fiction meme 133n7 in KoKo Gets Egg-Cited (film) 6 Maltin, Leonard 68, 94 in KoKo Hops Off(film) 24, 95–96 Marvin the Martian 11, 20, 22, 107, in Ko-Ko in 1999 (film) 26 115–16. See also Bugs Bunny in KoKo’s Earth Control (film) 20 Marzio, Peter C. 86 in A Trip to Mars (film) 33, 70–72, McBride, Joseph 123 74–75, 77, 110 McCay, Winsor 29–30, 34, 71, 78, 80 See also Fleischer brothers The Flying House (film) 29–30, 35, 39, Korkis, Jim 121, 122 70, 71, 78–79, 82, 96 Krazy’s Race of Time (film) 26, 34, 72, Gertie the Dinosaur (film) 71 80, 135n2 as newspaper cartoonist 71 Kuleshov, Lev 35 The Pet (film) 71 Sinking of the Lusitania, The (film) 30 labor issues 43, 48–49, 52, 55, 56, 58, as social commentator 29, 35, 39 61, 62, 63 Mechanical Statue and the Ingenious Landon, Brooks 2, 20, 133n6, Servant, The (film) 45 136n4, 137n1 Melies, Georges 9, 10 Lang, Fritz 20, 62 Deux cents milles sous les mers (film) 9 Lantz, Walter 4, 10, 30, 34, 46, 103, 115, The Impossible Voyage (film) 26 118, 119, 124 A Trip to the Moon (film) 26, 28 self-referentiality in 39 memes 16 Sky Larks (film) 31, 39 changes in 109, 111 See also Woody Woodpecker characteristics of 16–17 Larbalestier, Justine 77 in science fiction 17–18, 28, 29, 30, 42, Latham, Rob 3 43, 107, 109, 125, 133n7 Lavender, Isiah, III 77 Messmer, Otto 1, 68. See also Felix Leger, Fernand 5–6, 15 the Cat Lehman, Christopher 136n4 Metropolis (film) 2, 20, 21, 62 Leonard, Elisabeth 125 MGM 10, 14, 31, 32, 109, 118 Leslie, Esther 4–5, 32, 34, 47–48, 75, 89, and live-action shorts 12 100, 104, 107 Mickey Mouse 4, 10, 33, 55, 68, 69, 105, Ley, Willy 121, 122 107, 113 Leyda, Jay 134n4 in The Mad Doctor (film) 20, 100, Lindbergh, Charles 24 101, 102 Little Buck Cheeser (film) 31, 32, in Mickey’s Mechanical Man (film) 34, 134n1 51–52, 59, 62 Lloyd, Harold 44 in Plane Crazy (film) 19, 24, 25, 95 Loewy, Raymond 25 in Steamboat Willie (film) 19 Lorre, Peter 118 See also Disney, Walt Lovecraft, H. P. 65, 83 Mighty Mouse 10 Lucanio, Patrick 111, 122 in Goons from the Moon (film) 115 Luckhurst, Roger 54 Mintz, Charles 11, 16, 31, 50, 52, 89, 92, 93, 98 Machine Age 3, 16, 45, 49, 86, 113, 133n3 at Columbia Pictures 10, 97 comedy in 41, 44 death of 109 and efficiency 49, 62, 85, 87, 136n2 and Technocracy 17, 53 instability in 53, 60 See also Scrappy and Scrappy 109 Mister Magoo 109 mad scientist 20, 88, 99, 100–103, 107 in Destination Magoo (film) 110

Index [ 149 ] 150

modernism 1, 20–22, 24, 69, 70, 83 Phantom Creeps, The (serial) 60 characteristics of 3, 100, 101, Phantom Empire, The (serial) 1, 135n3 125, 133n4 Phantom Rocket, The (film) 34, 39–41 and comedy 15–16, 41, 44, 47, 88 Piccard, Auguste 31, 38, 39 conservative modernism 7, 66, Pierson, Michele 126 70, 82, 83 Popeye 10, 109, 110 high and low modernism 3–6, 23, 103 in Popeye, the Ace of Space (film) 115 narrative influence of 116 in Rocket to Mars (film) 109 and representation 68, 69 See also Fleischer brothers and the robot 62–63, 94–95 Porky Pig 11, 68 as subversion 19, 41, 95 in Jumpin’ Jupiter (film) 111 and transformation 5, 48, 70, 72, 80, in Mouse Menace (film) 63, 108, 111 83, 100, 101, 103, 107, 125 in Rocket Squad (film) 111 vernacular form 7–8, 21, 24, 38, 46, See also Warner bros. 59, 83, 91, 104, 107, 126 Pound, Ezra 3 visuality in 8, 13, 30, 69, 107, 125 pulp magazines 12–13, 18, 21, 25, 30, 67, Murder by Television (film) 97 85, 106 Mutt and Jeff in the Submarine (film) 25 advertising in 95 Mysterious Doctor Satan, The (serial) 60 alien representation in 76–77, 82 Mysterious Island, The (film) 2 covers of 13, 66, 67, 68, 77–78, 87, 125 National Recovery Act 135n4 readers of 38, 42 Noble, Joe 20 robots in 45, 61 North, Michael 15, 41, 44 satirized 136n6 Novak, Matt 58 and scientific accuracy 32, 38, 135n1 Nye, David E. 88 See also Gernsback, Hugo

Orvell, Miles 86–87 racial imagery 76–77, 124, 125, 136n4 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 4, 10, 31, 39, Rapid Robot (film) 112 68, 114 Real Steel (film) 50 in Mars (film) 33, 34, 72, 73 Red Dwarf (television series) 15–16 in The Mechanical Cow (film) 46–47, 62 Richter, Hans 6 in Mechanical Man (film) 53 Rieder, John 20 in Sky Larks (film) 39, 72, RKO 10 73–74, 135n2 Roadrunner-Coyote cartoons. See in Trolley Troubles (film) 47 Warner Bros. See also Lantz, Walter Roberts, Adam 3–4, 5, 6, 21, 23, 66, 103, 106 Pal, George 119, 120, 121 robot 1, 10, 20, 45–63, 107, 135n2 Paramount Pictures 10, 14, 38, 97, 109, 113 and the comic impulse 43 Electronica (film) 112, 113 as genre meme 18, 43, 125, 133n7 Giddy Gadgets (film) 116 and labor issues 43, 48–49 Invention Convention (film) 116 and performance 45, 134n1 The Kid from Mars (film) 111 postwar image of 63, 111–14 Out of This Whirl (film) 111 three laws of robotics 135n5 The Planet Mouseola (film) 115 as transformative figure 59 Robot Ringer (film) 113, 114 at World’s Fair 46, 91, 94 Silly Science (film) 116 Robot Monster (film) 63 Space Kid (film) 115 Robots in Toyland (film) 113 Paul, Frank R. 66 Rocketeers (film) 134n7

[ 150 ] Index Rocky and Bullwinkle 22, 107 space opera 22, 108, 109, 111, 137n2 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 54–55, 135n4 space race 23, 42, 106 Ross, Andrew 54, 133n6 Spencer, Fred 94 Ruttman, Walter 6 St. Pierre, Paul Matthew 134n1 Stableford, Brian 28, 106–7 Schlesinger, Leon 11. See also MGM Stapledon, Olaf 21 science fiction Starr, Cecile 6 and comedy 15–16, 18–19 Steam Man of the Prairies, The (novel) 45. and fandom 14, 16, 32, 125–26 See also Ellis, Edward S. as genre 17–18, 106, 107–8, 125 Sullivan, Pat 68. See also Felix the Cat history 2, 21–22 Superman 2, 66 memes in 17–18, 28, 29, 30, 42, 43, in The Bulleteers (film) 103 107, 109, 125, 133n7 in Electric Earthquake (film) 103 and modernism 55, 125 in The Mechanical Monsters (film) naming of 2, 133n1 60–62, 103 and postwar attitudes 22, 55, 63, 108, in Superman (film) 103 110, 111, 113, 114, 117–19, 124, 125 See also Fleischer brothers spreadable character of 2, 3, 133n2 surrealism 6, 75, 105 and Technocracy 54 Suvin, Darko 3, 18, 67, 70 utopianism in 54 wonder in 89, 125, 126, 136n4 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 44 See also pulp magazines Technicolor 19, 89, 98 science writing 12, 35, 97, 103 Technocracy movement 16, 17, 38, 52, scientific management 44 53, 54, 58, 63, 112 Scrappy 4, 11, 17, 55, 57, 58, 61, 98, 109, satire on 55, 56, 57–58 113, 114 technological sublime 88 in Great Experiment, The (film) 20, 26, television 1, 97–98, 108, 117, 119, 72, 100, 101 121, 137n4 in Man of Tin (film) 52–53 and adaptation 2 in Scrappy’s Television (film) 97–98 and children’s programming 109 in Scrappy’s Trip to Mars (film) 31, comedy on 15–16 34, 80–82 cultural impact of 97, 106, 115 in Technoracket (film) 16, 17, 38, 53, as futuristic device 88, 95, 97 54, 55–56, 58 at New York World’s Fair 98 in World’s Affair, The (film) 89, 92–93 ratings 124 See also Mintz, Charles and science fiction 17, 107, 109, 121, Segal, Howard 54 136n6, 137n2 Seldes, Gilbert 6 Telotte, J. P. 133n3, 135n2, 135n3 Sennett, Mack 45 Terry, Paul 1, 4, 20, 25, 44, 103, 135n2 serials 1, 2, 17 Bugs Beetle and His Orchestra (film) 97 aliens in 65, 82 Flying Cups and Saucers (film) 111 influence of 21, 34 Frankenstein’s Cat (film) 101 mad scientists in 100 The Iron Man (film) 53 robots in 60 A Mad House (film) 100 Serviss, Garrett P. 36 The Mechanical Cow (film) 48–50, 53 Shamus Culhane Productions 124 Outer Space Visitor (film) 115 Shelley, Mary 17 Plane Goofy (film) 96 Skal, David 99, 101 Post War Inventions (film) 116 Smoodin, Eric 11 Puddy’s Coronation (film) 97 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (film) 14 Sky Skippers (film) 96

Index [ 151 ] 152

Terry, Paul (Contd.) War of the Worlds, The (film) 114 and Terrytoons series 10, 97, 100, 109, Warner Bros. 1, 11, 14, 57, 63, 68, 111, 115 111, 118 See also Farmer Al Falfa and Bell System Science Series 124 Thing from Another World, The (film) 111 Buddy’s Lost World (film) 25 Things to Come (film) 2, 24 Looney Tunes series 26 Thomas, Frank 134n2 Martian through Georgia (film) 111, 115 Three Little Pigs (film) 14 Mouse Menace (film) 63 Tichi, Cecelia 49, 53, 60, 136n2 politics of 135n4 Time Machine, The (film) 119 Roadrunner-Coyote cartoons 114, time travel 26 118–19, 137n3 Tobor the Great (film) 63, 111 Rocket-bye Baby (film) 115 Tom and Jerry 110 Solid Tin Coyote (film) 114 in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse (film) 118 See also Bosko in Mouse into Space (film) 110 Warren, Bill 137n5 in Push-Button Kitty (film) 112, Watts, Steven 137n4 113, 114 Welles, Orson 2 See also MGM Wells, H. G. 17, 24 Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (television Wells, Paul 6–7, 8, 12, 14, 18, 26, 69–70, series) 137n2 78, 79, 82, 133n5 Trapped by Television (film) 97 Wesso, Hans 66 Trip to the Moon, A (1902) 26, 28 Westfahl, Gary 86, 136n1 Trip to the Moon, A (1917) 27–29, 30, Whatrotolis (film) 20, 21 39, 72–73 Whipple, Fred 121 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 134n6 Willie Whopper 4, 10, 31, 68 Turpin, Ben 45 in Reducing Crème (film) 72 20th Century-Fox 10, 14, 48 in Stratos Fear (film) 31, 72, 76, 20,000 Feats under the Sea (film) 100, 135n3 20, 25–26 See also Iwerks, Ub Twilight Zone, The 50 Wonder Stories 45, 66, 85 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 106 Woody Woodpecker 109–10 in Destination Moon (film) 119–21 Undersea Kingdom (serial) 1, 60, 135n3 in Science Friction (film) 118 United Artists 10 in Woodpecker from Mars (film) 111, 115 Universal Pictures 10, 135n2 in Woodpecker in the Moon (film) 110 UPA 109 See also Lantz, Walter and Bell System Science Series World’s Fairs 17, 45, 88–89, 103, 136n3 119, 122–24 Chicago 88, 92–93 Up to Mars (film) 9 Fleischer cartoons about 89–91, 94 utopianism 24, 39, 42, 48, 54, 58, New York 25, 42, 45, 46, 88, 60, 116 98, 136n5 World War II 1, 2, 22, 60 Van Beuren Studio 11, 96, 109, 134n7 audiences during 14 Cubby’s Stratosphere Flight impact on science fiction 103 (film) 25, 96 and postwar influence 10, 63, 115 vaudeville 44, 45, 62 and rockets 109 Verne, Jules 3, 17, 25 Voyages extraordinaires 3, 23 Yaszek, Lisa 62 Vertov, Dziga 35 Von Braun, Wernher 121, 122 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 21

[ 152 ] Index