Fred Flintstone Owns a Farm, Two Miles Up
the Road
The guy with throat pressed in chin walks
like Fred Flintstone walks
if he'd crapped his pants,
arms tight, extended, Wranglers proudly
worn;
then those sections post-elbow swing and
dangle like cuckoo clocks on wobbling ships in what us romantics called the high
seas;
I saw the high seas, green like
the lungs and skin he carries below his stiffened marble chin,
boat floating on an ocean of 1996 county
finals,
cattle marts and broken noses,
next thing he'll ascend to rightful throne
of 4 wheel drive, pull out, not indicating, the only thing I missed are his
stumpy feet moving this cow-shit mobile along, underneath
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera met at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's animation division in 1939. Their 1st collaboration was the Academy Award-nominated "Puss Gets the Boot" (1940), which evolved into the "Tom and Jerry" series which they directed for 2 decades. In 1955 they took charge of the entire MGM animation output. But with the rise of television, in 1957 MGM decided to stop making new cartoons, in the belief that the studio had a suitable backlog of shorts to re-release. Two months after the animation studio closed Hanna and Barbera formed their own studio, which became the 1st to produce cartoons exclusively for TV. But while MGM spent about $35,000 per 7-minute "Tom and Jerry" short, Hanna-Barbera had to make 5-minute "Ruff and Reddy" episodes for $3,000 apiece, forcing the studio to revolutionize the animation process. They simplified character designs and regularly re-purposed backgrounds and animation cycles (such as walks or runs. Characters were broken up into a a small number of levels so that only the parts of the body that needed to be moved at a given time would be animated and the rest of the figure would remain on a held animation cel. Music, dialogue, and sound effects were emphasized over action. Story formulas and characterizations were repeated instead of introducing new ones. Thus a typical 5-minute short could be made with just 6,000 drawings instead of the usual 13,000. Rival cartoonist Chuck Jones called the Hanna-Barbera output "illustrated radio." At 8:30 PM on 30 September 1960 they introduced the 1st prime-time animated series, which the show-business daily "Variety" called "a pen and ink disaster." Nevertheless, "The Flintstones" ran until 1 April 1966, became the 1st animated series to be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, and spawned many cartoon and live-action sequels into the next century, as well as computer games, comic books, theme parks, and children's vitamins. Alan Reed played Fred Flintstone, while Barney Rubble was voiced by Mel Blanc (who created the voices of Woody Woodpecker and all of Chuck Jones' male characters at Warner Bros., including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and the Tasmanian Devil).
ReplyDeleteIn 1897 C. C. hudson started earning 25 cents a day sewing buttons on overalls in a textile factory in Greeensboro, North Carolina. When the company he worked for went out of business in 1904 he bought some of its sewing machines, leased space above a downtown grocery store, and incorporated as the Hudson Overall Company, which became the Blue Bell Overall Co. in 1919. It acquired the Casey Jones Work-Clothes Co. in 1943 and thus gained the rights to Wrangler, a rarely-used Casey Jones brand name. It then
ReplyDeletehired Bernard "Rodeo Ben" Lichtenstein, a Polish tailor from Łódź, to design jeans suitable for rodeo use. After designing and testing 13 pairs of prototype jeans, the 13MWZ style was introduced in 1947 as lot number 11MWZ and is still available worldwide though it was renamed 13MWZ in 1952 to conform to the 13 ounce/yard denim weight it used to manufacture the style. Wrangler Jeans featured several innovations such as felled outseams and inseams, rear pockets positioned for comfort in the saddle, "no scratch" rivet pocket reinforcement, a zipper fly, and a strong tack in the crotch instead of a metal rivet. In 1986 Blue Bell merged with the VF Corporation, established in 1899 as Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing Co. in Pennsylvania by John Barbey; in 1919 it began making lingerie and changed its name to Vanity Fair Mills. In 1969 Vanity Fair acquired the H. D. Lee Co., which had been making dungarees and denim jackets since 1899, and renamed itself as VF. The 1986 merger made VF the world's largest publicly held clothing maker.
of Pennsylvania, preparing the ground for the global success of the Wrangler brand.