Monday, October 25, 2021

Cartoon Connections to the Past

This past Sunday when the watching-witching hour descended upon our place, Cass asked to watch a Disney Special Spooktacular, starring Mickey and the gang. This iteration is from the Paul Rudish redesign, a redesign I'm fond of. Cass had already seen it at some point, but was excited to watch it again. When it started, what struck me immediately were the costumes of Huey, Dewey, and Louie:


Also visible in the picture is Horace Horsecollar, another of the Rudish callbacks to the history of Disney animation.

The reason Donald's nephews costumes caught my attention was because of another regular Donald Duck cartoon we have on the rotation, "Trick or Treat" from 1952:


The collection of Rudish shorts are peppered with little tidbits like this, sometimes momentary animated blips that show how much homework the animation team did, and make the shorts both rewarding and rewatchable.

Even in this Spooktacular there's a tiny joke that Mickey makes about captaining a boat (or something), where he glances at a picture on his wall of the steamboat from "Steamboat Willie" and says, "Isn't that right, Willie?" In response, the boat toots its smokestacks just as in the original from 1928.

It's good to see that sometimes people still care about their work, still want to push forward while being able to revere the past.

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