In the forties and fifties, Mel Blanc appeared in a series of kids' records with the Warner Brothers characters that were released (and recorded for) Capitol Records. They were quite wonderful, what with Capitol using the same orchestra that backed up Sinatra and other "adult" recording artists, and many of the same arrangers like Billy May. The records were mostly written by the same gagmen, like Mike Maltese and Warren Foster, who were writing WB cartoons. Some of them were kind of like Looney Tunes without the visuals.
Recently, someone over at Warner Bros. Animation had the bright idea to add visuals to a couple of them. The first one is I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat and it stars, as you might imagine, Tweety and Sylvester. Mel recorded the song in 1950 and it was a best seller for Christmas that year. It's basically a three-minute song sung by Tweety and Sylvester, both voiced by Mel…and now it's a cartoon directed by Matt O'Callaghan. They located Mel's old vocal tracks in a vault somewhere and applied them lovingly to a new arrangement of the song…and that adorns some pretty funny animation of Sylvester chasing the Tweety Bird while Granny snoozes.
Last evening, I attended a screening that doubled as a party celebrating June Foray, who recorded a few new lines for the short as Granny. We toasted her, watched some other WB shorts for which she supplied voices, previewed the new short (in 3-D!) and then took in a Q-and-A with June, Matt and WB head honcho Sam Register.
So how is the new short? Well, some will have a hard time accepting those characters in CGI. Tweety has feathers. Sylvester has fur…and a frequent spray of saliva every time he says a word with an "S" sound in it. I think I've gotten past the traditionalist's objection to computer animation and especially to it being applied to characters who started life as line drawings. I've decided that if I can accept them in three-dimensional form as toys and statues, I can accept them that way on a screen. (And yes, it took me a while to get used to Garfield making the same transition, just as I've finally gotten used to Frank Welker doing his voice instead of Lorenzo Music.)
If you don't let something like that stop you, you'll probably enjoy it tremendously. It moves like crazy. It employs 3-D to maximum advantage. The Blanc vocals sound great. What more could you want? Oh, yeah: It's funny, too.
(And another nice thing: For years, Warner Brothers cartoons voiced by Mel and others only credited Mel. Daws Butler didn't get credit. Stan Freberg didn't get credit. Arthur Q. Bryan didn't get credit. Bea Benaderet didn't get credit. June didn't get credit…but on this one, she does. Finally.)
The party, by the way, was great…and long overdue since June hasn't been honored for at least a week.
If I understood correctly, I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat will reach screens as the warm-up for Happy Feet Two when it hits theaters in a few weeks.