live in a show-business neighborhood. Not in Hollywood (which isn't that show-bizzy, anyway) or Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades, but in a little San Fernando Valley enclave not far from a good-sized television studio. My neighbors are largely the middle class of the entertainment business: session drummers, character actors, TV movie producers, writers for both screen and page.
And those who work on cartoons. One of my neighbors does character voices. A second writes the odd script. A third is an animator—his license plate says "ZIPS OS," which is a phrase from the cartoon world describing the faster-than-sound if not faster-than-light movement of a character out of frame. (After all, this is supposed to be a column about sci-fi and television, is it not?)
Whenever I see that plate, I am transported back through time and space to the world of Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Halfth Century, to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (and their frequent violations of Newton's laws of motion) and the Jetsons and the fantastical land of Disney's cartoon characters, in which a dog named Goofy talks and wears clothing, but the one named Pluto does neither.
In fact, my neighborhood is the center of the cartoon universe.
Living in an animated neighborhood
When I say cartoons, I mean those six-minute marvels that used to be part of any moviegoing experience: After the coming attractions, but before the start of a feature, you would view a cartoon starring Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, or, yes, Mickey Mouse.
I also mean the television cousins to the theatrical cartoons—which largely replaced them. (The major studios closed down their theatrical units around 1960, leaving animators like Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, looking for new frontiers, which is to say, work. These gentlemen, and many others, turned to television.)
And while I know there were other producers in the world creating perfectly wonderful cartoons, the San Fernando Valley is where my favorites came from. Hanna-Barbera's creative factory was located on Cahuenga Boulevard, across the highway from Universal Studios. The Warner Brothers lot, home of the fabulous "Termite Terrace," was on the other side of Universal, in Toluca Lake. Disney Studios were and are just a couple of miles north and east of Warner.
For years, the producers, directors, writers and artists, the painters and in-betweeners, largely lived in the little communities of Burbank, Toluca Lake, Studio City and North Hollywood. Creators inevitably take inspiration from their surroundings; images from these 50-year-old cartoons still strike me as stylized pictures of locations in the San Fernando Valley. And God knows the Warner Brothers cartoons are filled with in-jokes about about Tarzana or Ventura Boulevard.
(Sometimes I tell people that I moved to the San Fernando Valley because I would watch Leave It to Beaver or the annual Rose Parade at my childhood home on the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, and see sunshine. It's not the whole truth: I really moved here because of Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers.)
Even now, though the basic animation labor has migrated to China, Spain and Korea, and Disney and DreamWorks have shifted their feature animation teams to nearby Glendale, I still feel as though I'm surrounded by cartoon people. Film Roman (The Simpsons) is just up Laurel Canyon at Chandler Boulevard. Klasky-Czupo (Rugrats) is to the south, in the heart of Hollywood.
Most encouraging of all, Joe Dante is currently directing a film starring Bugs and Daffy (and Brendan Fraser) for Warner titled Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Storyboarding science fiction
For a long time, cartoons were the creative center of the sci-fi and fantasy universe in the movies and on television. Unbound by the limits on special effects—remember the difficulty and expense of creating traveling mattes, like those in George Pal's War of the Worlds or the original Star Trek?—cartoons were able to show any kind of imaginary world, from the richly imagined dreamscapes of Fantasia to the flat and silly future world of The Jetsons.
Landscapes and settings were only part of the fantastical nature of cartoons. Most of them featured talking animals—or, in the case of Tom and Jerry, animals who didn't talk but treated each other with a human-scale nastiness.
The action itself was fantastical, bending and twisting time and space.
In these days gone by, cartoons were not scripted in the traditional sense. They were storyboarded by directors and "gag men," from Disney's "nine old men" to the amazing Tex Avery. When Droopy Dog's eyeballs bulged out of his head at the sight of a pretty female canine, or Porky Pig's hand ballooned to the size of Vermont when mistakenly struck by a hammer, one of these gag men or directors had been at work, sketching the initial image, timing it, then seeing it take shape on the animation table.
When words did appear on the pages, they would feature unique terms like "Daffy antics up and out of frame" or, yes, "zips O.S." (Isn't that what starships Enterprise, Andromeda or Firefly do in almost every episode? Zip off-stage?)
Cartoons gave creators freedom. "Let's do a Stone-Age version of The Honeymooners and call it The Flintstones". "Let's do a futuristic version of The Flintstones and call it The Jetsons." (Sometimes this freedom was abused: "Let's do a sci-fi version of that girls' show and call it Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space." Yikes.)
The process of creating cartoons is different now, but, then, so is the rest of the world. Scripts for animated productions look like those from live-action projects—and why not? With the increased use of CGI, the line between live action and animation has been blurred to non-existence. Storyboards have been standard tools for "pure" live-action directors for at least 25 years.
Nevertheless, those original sci-fi and fantasy cartoons are immortal. Right now, some alien being on Gamma Fornax or maybe Alpha Centauri III is looking at intercepted broadcasts from a distant yellow star, and scratching one of its three heads at these representations of a world of talking animals, people that fly, humans that evolved from Stone Age to Space Age in less than a decade!
All of it the world of a group of wonderful men and women who looked around their sunny suburban neighborhood and said, "What if—?"
Michael Cassutt has written scripts for such series as Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (airing the week of November 25) and Showtime's Odyssey 5 as well as short stories, novels and non-fiction. More recently he went out for coffee in his showbizzy neighborhood.
