The little known history of Rag Mop

[Yakov]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eRXyQn55hM

[Racetrack]

In case there is anyone here who does not already know, Bob Clampett (creator of this "Beany and Cecil" cartoon) played a major role in the creation of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1930's-'40s and then another major role in the emergence of childrens' television in the 1950's-'60s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Clampett

Clampett showed an interest in animation and puppetry from his early teens in Los Angeles. The young Clampett designed the first Mickey Mouse dolls for Walt Disney. As Clampett would later claim in interviews, Disney was impressed with the young artist, and promised him a job. However, a lack of space at Disney's tiny Hyperion studio prevented Clampett from taking the position. Instead, he secured a job in 1931 at the studio of Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising where he worked on the studio's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series. In his first years at the studio, Clampett mostly worked for Friz Freleng, under whose guidance Clampett grew into an able animator. In 1935, he designed the studio's first major star, Porky Pig, who appeared in Freleng's film I Haven't Got a Hat.

... Clampett was promoted to director in late 1937, and he soon entered his personal golden age. His cartoons grew increasingly violent, irreverent, and surreal, not beholden to even the faintest hint of real-world physics, and his characters have been argued to be easily the most rubbery and wacky of all the Warner directors'. It was a plain and simple fact that Clampett was heavily influenced by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, as is most visible in Porky in Wackyland (1938), wherein the entire short takes place within a Dalí-esque landscape complete with melting objects and abstracted forms. Clampett and his work can even be considered part of the surreal movement, as it incorporated film as well as static media.

In 1949, Clampett turned his attentions to television, where he created the famous puppet show Time for Beany. The show, featuring the talents of voice artists Stan Freberg and Daws Butler, would earn Clampett three Emmys and count such celebrities as Groucho Marx and Albert Einstein as fans. In 1952 he created the Thunderbolt the Wondercolt television series, and in 1954 directed Willy the Wolf (the first puppet variety show on television), as well as creating and voicing the lead in the Buffalo Billy television show. In the late 1950s, Clampett was hired by Associated Artists Productions to catalog the pre-August 1948[2] Warner cartoons it had just acquired. In 1959, he created an animated version of the puppet show called Beany and Cecil, which began its run on ABC in 1962 and was on the network for five years.

In his later years, Bob Clampett toured college campuses and animation festivals as a lecturer on the history of animation. In 1975 he was the focus of a documentary entitled Bugs Bunny: Superstar, the first documentary to examine the history of the Warner Bros. cartoons. Clampett, whose collection of drawings, films, and memorabilia from the golden days of Termite Terrace was legendary, provided nearly all of the behind-the-scenes drawings and home-movie footage for the film.

Clampett died of a heart attack on May 4, 1984 in Detroit, Michigan.

I remember watching both the puppet and animated versions of Beany and Cecil. I was a todler when I watched Clampett's sock puppets on our family's first TV set. This may have been the very first children's show on network TV. By the time my family bought the TV it had been on the air for about two years. Around that time Howdy Doody went on the air - the second major network kid's show.

Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street would not hit the small screen for years. The influence of Beany and Cecil (especially the puppet versions) on Sesame Street's Muppet characters is obvious.