Postby Steve Massa » Sat Apr 23, 2011 6:18 pm
I know this is a symptom of my obssessive nature, but here's a Lantz quote from Joe Adamson's book THE WALTER LANTZ STORY (pages 66 & 67) about the Sennett feature THE GOOD-BYE KISS ('28):
"Mack Sennett was doing this feature, a World War I story, where they had soldiers in trenches and they were scratching, from the cooties in their shirts. Sennett wanted to show this huge cootie going across the battlefield, and when the soldiers saw this they would all drop their guns and run out of the trenches.
"The Old Man asked me if I could do this shot. I said "Yeah. Just give me the film of the scared soldiers, and on cue have then throwing up their rifles and running off into the distance." Looking at me dubiously, he said okay.
"So they gave me the shot and I animated this cootie, which was just about a black dot with six legs walking across the screen. It took me about fifty drawings and one afternoon to make this silly little scene. But I couldn't just do a cootie walking acrosss the screen, it was nothing. I had a captain look at the scene through his binoculars, and I showed the cootie in the binoculars going around the binocular frame - going up one side, sliding down the other.
"Then in their optical department they superimposed this cootie over the shot of the soldiers. By the time I did it and they processed it, it was about a week's work. I ran the film for the gagmen, and they all okayed it."
