As I hope I made clear in an article I wrote and posted on this site, I treasured my friendship with the late, great Bob Clampett. (That's Bob at lower left on the set of Time for Beany. The puppeteers are, left to right, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg; the gent with the clipboard is Klaus Landsberg, who founded KTLA television in Los Angeles.) I loved the cartoons Bob directed of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I loved the puppet and cartoon shows he produced of Beany and Cecil. But most of all, I just loved Bob…a witty, friendly gent who took a genuine interest in his many fans and who was unsparingly generous with his time and knowledge. It's nice to see that he still lives, not just in his amazing body of work but all over the Internet.
Here's a rundown of six venues…
Bob Clampett Productions, which does a splendid job of presenting and protecting Bob's work, maintains a must-visit website at www.bobclampett.com.
One of the best things they've done is to issue a wonderful DVD that is ostensibly a collection of cartoons from the Beany & Cecil cartoon show. But it's so loaded with extras about Bob's life and times that it's really an interactive look at the man and, either way, well worth your purchase. The cheapest place I've found to order it online is a place I've never patronized called Digital Eyes. They sell it for $20.99 plus $2.90 shipping, as you'll see if you go there. (You can also obtain it at any decent DVD dealer.)
Each week, Cartoon Network presents three uncut Clampett classics on their series, The Bob Clampett Show. To find out when it airs, click here and go to their schedule.
The opening titles for The Bob Clampett Show feature a wonderful mix of animation and puppetry (much as Bob's career did). They were executed by an outfit called Curious Pictures and you can read how they did it — and view what they did — at their website. Click here to go there.
An expensive limited-edition portfolio of cels has been made from the Clampett-supervised model sheets of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Tweety. If you can't afford the folio, you can at least view it online at their website.
Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman has written a number of fine articles about Bob and his work. One is over on the www.bobclampett.com website while another can be read at this link.
All of this is a woefully inadequate way of expressing my thanks to Bob's wife and son, Sody and Rob, Jr. Last week, they made the long trek from L.A. down to the Comic-Con International in San Diego where they presented the annual Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award to a 49-year-old kid whose mother watched Time for Beany when she was carrying him. I have a lot of awards in which I place little stock. This one's different…because it has Bob's picture on it.