The Bear that Wasn't (1946/67)

I'm sort of amazed that anyone still remembers the Looney Tunes.  That kind of goes double for the fact that a group of some of the most iconic rogues gallery of characters in the history animated cinema is still able to maintain a great deal of recognition not just from long time fans, but also from ongoing generations of newcomers.  Something like that has got to be a testament to the staying power of genuine Art.  If that weren't the case, would any of us still be talking about films like Pinocchio, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves all these years later?  The fact that make-believe figures like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, and Wiley Coyote are able to take on a life of their own (the strange kind of half-life afforded to figments of the Imagination that sometimes makes them seem more real than reality) must also say a great deal not just about how we relate to the Arts, but also to the world around us.  It's with these thoughts in the mind that I'd like to look at one of the later products from the creators of Bugs and Daffy.  The Bear that Wasn't is a story from the mind of Frank Tashlin.  He was one of the original creators of the Tunes, way back when.  Tashlin worked on all of this comedy gold as part of a collection of animators looking for work as the idea of cartoon pictures began to take on a life of its own in the industry.

Tashlin himself was born in the Weehawken section of New Jersey in the early 1900s.  From what little is known about his personal background, I can't help but get the sense that we're dealing with one of those wayward class clown types.  These are the guys (they're most often guys) who for one reason or another find trouble fitting in to the usual social hierarchies assigned to them by their parents and teachers.  They tend to get along with their fellow kids as peers, more than they do the world of adult responsibility.  I think George Carlin gave a pretty good description of this type in one of his stand-up routines.  "Most of the time, in class, I was tempted to "Fool around, man"...You'd be bored and figure, well, why not deprive someone else of their education?  And you would set about disrupting the class by "attracting attention to yourself".  That is the name of this job, you know?  It's called "Dig Me"!  It was like, "Hey guys, didn't make the team, but bleurgh"!!!  They'd say, "Hey, he's crazy, man!  Hey, you wanna go to a party"?!  Yeah, you went to all the parties.  You got the last girl, but you went to all the parties...When I would try to attract attention in class I wasn't really like a very daring, bold youth.

"I was a little timid, really.  I didn't get right into fake epileptic seizures in the aisles, you know.  You'd just start out and test the water a little bit (web)".   He was speaking from his own personal experience, here, yet I can't help thinking that if Tashlin ever heard these words spoken aloud, he'd have been able to identify with pretty much all of it.  That's because what Carlin said about Class Clowns is just as good a description of Tashlin as it was of himself.  With that said, it just makes sense to me that Frank was the kind of brat who was willing to be flat out stupid crazy enough to fake a seizure if meant a chance to play hooky.  That's the best I can give you on this guy's character, anyway.  It should come as now surprise that he dropped out of high school early on, and promptly began a successful career of drifting from one odd job to another.  With guys like Tashlin, things can go either way.  You either find your niche (the one that helps you to scratch that ever nagging, restless itch, that causes you to act out so many times) or else you remain a kind of walking-taking non-entity drifting your way through life.

In Frank's case, he turned out to be one of the luckier Class Clowns.  He discovered (perhaps to his own surprise) that his skills with drawing and illustration could come in handy with a bunch of independent companies that were sprouting up across the country.  These companies were in this business of making and distributing some new-fangled contraption known as "moving pictures".  Some of them were even interested in seeing if they could take drawings on pieces of paper, and make them appear to come to life with a bit of camera trickery.  Whatever the hell all that was, those guys were offering good money, and so Tashlin took up his first professional job in showbiz.   Perhaps to his own surprise, he found the niche he'd been looking for.  The then burgeoning world of cartoon animation took him from working for John Foster on an animated theatrical short series known as Aesop's Fables.  Then, in his own obvious way, Tashlin found himself drifting into the employ of Leon J. Schlesinger, a film producer working at and for Warner Bros. studios.  Schlesinger is one of those major players in cinema history who seems forever doomed to never get as much credit as he deserves.  The complicating factor here is that he's also one of those guys who goes out of their way toward making that very easy to do.

Schlesinger is the man with the most over-arching credit for giving us the Looney Tunes.  He was the guy that the studio commissioned to set up Warner Bros. first animation unit.  It was by no means the first ever created.  It also wasn't anything like the second in line after the big breakout success that Walt Disney had with the creation of Mickey Mouse.  For whatever reason, yet to his own credit, studio head Jack Warner decided to take Walt's success seriously enough to decide to try and see if his own people could maybe find a way to compete with the newly minted Mouse Kingdom in terms of the creation, production, and distribution of animated cartoons.  They hired Schlesinger to get the job done, and it will forever be to his eternal credit that he was able to do it in such a way as to setup, for a time, the only other major competitor that Disney had in the field of American Animation.  That's where his credit is due.  It's also almost the point at where it all comes to an end.  What Schlesinger basically did is he located a few blocks of unused warehouse space on the Warner lot, gave it a once over and called it good, then had the studio move in a bunch of animator's drawing boards into this dingy, damp, and cramped work space where the lighting was subpar (which is kind of a problem when you need it to see what you're drawing) and the heating/cooling was a mix of on the fritz to next to non-existent.

The place was later designated by all the disgruntled employees who had to work there as Termite Terrace.  It was here, in the most unpromising of settings, that cinematic history would be made.  All that Leon did was really just to scout around for any available animators that Disney hadn't scooped up already, and offer them a job.  The punchline is that it really seems to have been the smartest course of action.  His offers got accepted, and sometimes the people hired on turned out to be more than good.  Guys like Warren Foster, Maurice Noble, and Bob Clampett proved to have more talent and humor in their hands and minds than you'd expect guessed just by looking at them.  Others, like Irving "Friz" Freleng and Charles M. "Chuck" Jones were later brought in after being lured away from Disney.  Perhaps the greatest irony of the entire Termite Terrace operation was that they were making animated legends that would be able to achieve this amazing yet somehow real timeless quality, and yet the studio that was responsible for distributing it would always seeing it as not even anything such as a marketable product, which would at least make sense from a  profit oriented business perspective.

Instead, Leon Schlesinger himself kind of summed up the studio's whole attitude to their animator's ability to turn pen and ink into gold by a constant refrain he had when acting as pretty much the boss of the entire outfit.  Each time he took up his accustomed viewer's spot in the screening room to view the latest finished product by the likes of Chuck Jones (even if it was classics like Duck Amok) was to always begin the preview with the phrase: "Okay, roll the trash".  Let's just say the reputation that the Tunes now enjoy today is a testament to the dedication of the fanbase over the limited thinking of the studio system as a whole.  What I'm starting to realize is just how much that legacy remains reliant on those who've grown able to recognize the artistry of people like Jones, Freleng, and Tex Avery.  It's pretty amazing when you consider how bad the working conditions were at the Terrace.  Staff like Noble, Foster, and others would quit multiple times on the studio, and would then have to be coaxed back to work by making Schlesinger and the Warner management agree to certain terms and promises.  When you consider they were all the victims of a toxic working environment, the achievements they made both in the realms of animation and comedy are more than just damned amazing.

Frank Tashlin didn't just manage to find himself in the thick of all this, he was able to leave his own mark on it.  His most notable efforts for me are 1945's Nasty Quacks, which marks the only time I'm aware of that Daffy was ever given anything close to an origin story.  The other is Hare Remover from 1946.  That one is an entire spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Elmer Fudd tries to turn Bugs into a monster.  Of all the legends in the Termite Terrace staff, Tashlin is interesting just as much for the career he would go on to have after he left Warner Bros. for good in 1946.  It comes as something of a pleasant surprise to discover that one of the artists who taught us what a sense of humor was like as a child went on to have fairly successful and steady career as a comedy writer for the likes of Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers.  That means he might have had a hand in creating some of Groucho's best lines.  In addition, he was able to find a later decent niche for himself as a director of live action films.  It should come as no surprise that most of these were laugh fests.  Tashlin's most famous work in this regard is The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where he was kind enough to go a long way towards popularizing then emerging phenomenon of Rock 'n Roll to mainstream audiences.

That's a subject for another day, however.  The film were here to look at now marks the last time the former Termite Terrace filmmaker ever worked in the field of animation.  And the interesting part is that it didn't start out as a theatrical short, but as a book.  The Bear that Wasn't first saw life as a children's book that Tashlin seems to have written in his spare time, perhaps as he was finishing up his stint at Warner's and casting about for his next niche.  It seems possible that at one point, one of the avenues he might have thought about exploring was life in the world of book publishing.  If so, then the story of a normal forest bear who wakes up to discover a big city block building sight has been constructed over his cave, and now everyone he meets insists that he's not a bear at all, but just a funny little man in a brown fur coat who needs a shave, sounds like it might have begun life at or around this time.  It's difficult to say for sure when Tashlin began the story, or how long he was at work on it.  What I can say for certain is that in 1967, Frank reconnected with his old fellow animator Chuck Jones, and the two agreed to turn the book into an animated short subject.  The results are what we're here to discuss.

Ur (2009).

Stephen King has had a very ambivalent relationship with technology.  This is something that may apply just as much to his real life as it does to anything that happens in his works of fiction.  This sense of inherent ambiguity about the Machine is something worth stressing, because a lot of times it can seem that this is anything but the case.  In his study of some of the author's most famous works, Bev Vincent establishes what might be considered an opposite, more or less positive take on the Maine writer's relationship with the Gadget.  "Over the years", Vincent points out, "King has experimented with nontraditional forms of publication (158)".  From there, Vincent goes on to provide the reader with a catalogue of all the times the Bangor Scribe has been willing to utilize the digital space to advance the publication of his stories.  He makes these little experiments in digital publishing sound like fun for the most part.  At the same time, the one thing none of this changes is the way the author treats machines within the confines of the product that matters most in King's career.  That would be the writer's books in and of themselves, and also the way that the theme of the Gadget keeps getting handled in them, even past the point where King owed his life to modern medical science.  Caution is still mixed with gratitude.  

By and large, it seems that King's thoughts about modern machinery (or at the very least, the mindset that exists in back of most pieces of our current tech) was summed up long ago by scholar Tony Magistrale in his book, Landscapes of Fear.  It's in that study that Magistrale lays out the best academic summation of King's thinking about machines.  "The more pessimistic side of science fiction..."stresses the danger of the machine age and how reliance upon science and technology weakens the basic human body and spirits" (7).  This awareness of the darker aspects of technology and the moral sacrifices that accompany its proliferation is an issue that often appears in Kings fiction (50)".  That's an accurate enough assessment so far as Magistrale is concerned.  Yet even here, it seems like just scratching the surface of things.  He notes the negative portrayals of technology within King's fiction.  However, I'm not sure he gets us any closer to the mindset underlying it all.  In order to get that, it seems like you have to get the information direct from the artist's own personal testimony.  It seems that the best explanation King ever offered for his technical themes is in the pages of Danse Macabre.

In the introduction to this sprawling non-fiction study, King talks a bit about how his upbringing in the Post-War America of the 1950s had an enormous effect on the way he's looked at the Machine more or less ever since.  "We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth...but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium 90 in our milk from nuclear testing.  We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call “the big one,” and when the dust cleared, America was on top.  Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation.

"Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: pioneer spirit. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America’s pioneer spirit—a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with pioneer spirit. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fustest and bestest with the mostest (9-10)".  Consider this aspect of his life as the first part of those "terror seedlings" that King and his peers got sprinkled with as young, impressionable minds back in the day.  The second ingredient in the recipe the artist is describing for us came about through the gradual arrival of an inevitable understanding about the so-called adults in the room who are ostensibly "responsible" for modern technological life.

King sums this up through a neat and precise quotation from Sci-Fi author Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.  From the way the quotation is framed, it's clear that while Finney might have been writing about imaginary people in make-believe circumstances, it's pretty damned obvious that King see it all as a reflection of his own personal experience.  "I was... an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better in¬ formed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than most of the rest of us (333)".  In other words, it was the slow dawning recognition that often the people who create and are in charge of machinery often wind up not knowing as much about the consequences their creations will either create or unleash.  In other words, even with a lot of know-how under the hood, it's still no guarantee of an entirely one-hundred-percent optimum outcome.  This paints a picture less of someone who is any kind of thoroughgoing luddite, and more an artist with a healthy recognition of the balanced benefits and hazards of modern machinery.

When it can be demonstrated to work well, then it's enough to consider it good.  If any number of downsides begin to multiply in near perfect compliment to all the benefits, then at this point I'd have to say we're all aware in one form or another of being stuck in a land of perpetual mixed blessings, at best.  The fact of modern technology at its worst is when the design is made with the express purpose to harm or disrupt daily life.  It seems to be this negative mindset that can infuse the making of the Gadget, and the consequences that can sometimes stem from it, that fascinates King, more than anything to do with the Machine, in and of itself.  This train of thought might be expressed in a series of questions.  Is there such a thing as a bad machine?  If so, what kind of mind would be capable of constructing such a man-made monstrosity?  How much damage can such technology inflict upon the world?  Even worse than this is a very troubling corollary.  How much would it take to turn an ostensibly good machine into a bad one?  In many cases, the answer is as frightening as it is simple.  All you have to do there is to find the right way to abuse its otherwise correct use, and then, you have turned a help into something more horrible than a hindrance.  It's thoughts such as these that appear to be at the back of King's treatment of machines.  It's also at work in a short story simply called Ur.