My Son's Tastes

My Boy has been rather interested in all things related to my childhood. This seems like a reasonable thing for a nearly-6 year old who's into his dad. The fact I've given him my old toys, many of my old comics, and many of my old baseball cards has certainly be integral.

Another thing my son obsesses over is Japan. Home of Godzilla, Pokemon, and lots of other stuff he doesn't quite understand, his love for all-things Japan is also age-appropriate.

Sometimes when his interests point to the past---er, my past---he starts to ask about what cartoons I watched, when I watched them, and then this interest points to even older things. He's found the Looney Toons on HBO Max, but only likes the old, pre-Bugs Bunny, black and white cartoons. He's also found the 1969 version of Scooby Doo, and has watched both seasons (they only made two seasons, with maybe 28 or 30 episodes total) more than once. He loves Scooby Doo.

Well, I found a cool thing in the intersection of this Venn diagram---old-timey cartoons and Japanese things---that I got the chance to expose him to: the 1966 first season of Speed Racer, a DVD collection on loan from friends.

"It's older than Scooby Doo?" he asked with wonder. "It's from Japan?" he asked with shock. Watching it together I felt would give me the chance to discuss the animation style as a comparison to the American mystery show cartoon from a few years later.

The animators working on Speed Racer were ingenious and knew how to maximize their action scenes relative to their budgetary limitations. The approach makes for a far more dynamic looking product, considering there's likely far less character key animation going on, and likely less character movement happening in a given episode.

The "limited animation" techniques that these Japanese studios enlisted---barely movie foreground objects and quickly cycling backgrounds---trick your eye into seeing speed and movement combined with anticipation, while there may be very little object animation.

Think about the way the crew from Scooby walks together:

You can probably see it in your head. The five characters---four human and one dog---are all animated in mostly realistic detail. Given whatever budget they were working with, this is probably pretty decent work. 

Compare this with a frame from the opening credits to Speed Racer:

The bottom of the frame has stationary cars jostling up and down slightly with the background zooming by. In the top half of the frame a car that's lost control moments earlier crashed through the guardrail, and here soars through the air, its parabolic arch the only "real" animation in the scene. It crashed and an explosion fills the screen.

As Cassius matures, it's going to be so cool exposing him to different kinds of artistic problem-solving, as well as artistic masterpieces from all sorts of media. This is the start of deep comparisons, and he's not even six yet. Rad.