Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2011 April 13

= April 13 =

Down by Law
In Down by Law, when Bob is abandoned on the riverbank he babbles to himself in Italian; what is he talking about? (I have some Italian but got nothing out of this.) —Tamfang (talk) 07:22, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

On the accuracy of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in Tom and Jerry.
So, I finally have children who are of the right age to appreciate the wit and sophistication of Tom and Jerry. Right now, they are watching "The Cat Concerto", and I noticed (for the first time, since I haven't seen it since I was a kid) that Tom (playing the above piece of music) seems to actually be playing the piece of music on the piano. In most cartoons where a character is playing an instrument, no effort is made to make sure that the animated hands of the character play the piece correctly. You just see some random movement, sometimes the animators make a halfassed effort to make the hands move in time with the music, but its all pretty random usually. However, in this cartoon, he seems to be hitting all the correct notes. Does anyone know (or can anyone point me to any analysis thereof) if the cartoon cat is actually playing the correct notes, or am I imagining it? -- Jayron  32  19:05, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * According to the Big Cartoon Database, the animation was "based on the animators studying the fingers of great cartoon composer Scott Bradley playing Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2". ---Sluzzelin talk  19:22, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gerry Renert (talk • contribs) 19:49, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Awesome. Thanks for finding that.  Anyone know how accurate the attempt was?  That is, can any piano players confirm that he's doing a really good job?  -- Jayron  32  20:07, 13 April 2011 (UTC)


 * It would be interesting to find out if the playing in Rhapsody Rabbit was in the same neighborhood of accuracy. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:38, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll check that out some other time, if no one else does before me. I did watch The Cat Concerto and checked with the sheet music. The beginning is certainly accurate. There are some passages where accuracy makes way for comic effect, like the glissandi produced by Jerry's frantic running under the white keys, which obviously aren't played on white keys only. In other cases, out of considerations of visual composition, I assume, the registers aren't always accurate. The espressivo part Tom plays between knocking Jerry out with a tuning hammer and having Jerry slam the piano lid on his fingers, for example, is depicted an octave too low, as far as I can tell. But all in all, it looks quite accurate, and certainly appears as though a lot of pianistic thought went into the animation. ---Sluzzelin talk  21:06, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * As for Bugs ..., you got some serious practicing to do! I merely checked the beginning, and Bugs Bunny plays rising intervals when they sound descending. No match in that department, I'm afraid. ---Sluzzelin talk  22:16, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Good enough for confirmation. Bugsy's playing for laughs rather than accuracy. There's also the question of why the cartoon is introduced by a segment of the Siegfried Funeral March, but that's another story. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:34, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The "other story" is that it's not Siegfried's Funeral March at all, but Prelude No. 24 in D minor from Frédéric Chopin's 24 Preludes, Op. 28. It was written for piano solo, as was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, but someone has orchestrated them for the cartoon.  (Liszt and Doppler did arrange 6 of the Hungarian Rhapsodies for orchestra, including No. 2, but I've never heard any of them played as a concerto for piano and orchestra, except No. 14, which was given the new title Hungarian Fantasy in that guise.)  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  10:19, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I assume you're talking about the intro to "Cat Concerto". I was talking about the intro to "Rhapsody Rabbit", whose intro is taken from this segment at about 4:35 from Siegfried. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:32, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Right on. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  10:39, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * How does Tom manage to play accurately, with just three fingers (plus thumb) on each hand? — Michael J  22:31, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Or Bugsy, for that matter. See for yourself: (sorry about the foreign stuff) Then try to figure out which one is funnier... who plagiarized from who... and just what exactly Bugsy is saying to himself at the end of his cartoon. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:52, 13 April 2011 (UTC)


 * 1,338 IMDb users gave The Cat Concerto an average rating of 8.2. Merely 343 users rated Rhapsody Rabbit, and they gave it a 7.8. Anyway, they're both hilarious, as far as I'm concerned. But, as a former teenage amateur stop motion clay-figure animator, I can say that love for detail is have half the fun and ambition, and I never liked Vicky the Viking because of its crappy and unimaginative animation. Bugs's animation is superb, of course, and it's ok that they didn't care about keyboard-plausibility. Obvious performance inaccuracies do bother me in otherwise more realistic films (for example the actors' gamba playing in Tous les matins du monde), but not in cartoons. It is still fun to note this particular distinction between these two rival films. As for the four fingers, of course the accuracy, where it exists, isn't 1:1, I was judging more in terms of visibly hit keys, correspondence of direction (left = down, right = up), where Bugs failed, as mentioned. ---Sluzzelin  talk  08:50, 14 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Watching both I'm impressed by how much effort was made to look fairly accurate--way more than most such things (I think of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and the "Going to War" song, especially when all four brothers are "playing" the banjo but none remotely fretting the same (which doesn't make Duck Soup any less the funniest movie ever made)). Yes, I suppose The Cat Concerto is somewhat more "realistic" than Rhapsody Rabbit (especially the bits when Bugs runs up and down the keys and the pitches go down and up instead; and Bugs also plays some chords with all three/four fingers playing neighboring keys--hardly a "chord"), but then again, both are remarkably in the vicinity of "accurate", with much leeway for comic effects (and the Bugs uses rather wilder "alternate techniques" on the piano, making "accuracy" beside the point at times). I never saw either before, so thanks for the links. I wonder, they are so similar--even the Bugs one has a pesky mouse battling the pianist--was the Bugs one inspired by the Tom and Jerry one? It seems that the Tom and Jerry one came out slightly earlier, but in the same year. Did they really crank out these things so fast they could copy one another within months? Pfly (talk) 09:39, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The article on Rhapsody Rabbit has a section discussing the question of who-stole-from-who, and the only certainty is that Rhapsody Rabbit was registered prior to Cat Concerto. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:12, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Regarding the speed at which they "cranked them out", yes, they really did produce a LOT of episodes. In its heydey, short subject animation was very popular film format; remember that for the time period when most of these shorts were produced, TV either didn't exist, or had not yet caught on as a popular media.  It really wasn't until color TV arrived in wide release in the 1960s that the Golden Age of the animated short died out completely.  A look at List of Tom and Jerry cartoons shows that, during their height, Tom and Jerry was averaging 8-10 films per year during the period 1947-1957, when TV likely put a major hurt on theatre-going.  However, remember this was only one franchise from one studio (MGM) which was probably the third most prolific cartoon studio of the day; if you look at the Warner Brothers studio output, see Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies filmography, you'll see that during the same decade, Warner Brothers was averaging 30 shorts per year, or better than one every other week.  The Walt Disney Studio was averaging 15-20 film shorts per year until about 1954, when they switched a large part of their effort to Television with the premier of the first Walt Disney anthology television series.  Since neither MGM nor Warner had a significant presence on TV at the time, that explains why they kept their production higher for longer.  -- Jayron  32  18:02, 14 April 2011 (UTC)


 * (I'm pretty sure that the Marx Brothers were doing that intentionally for comedic effect. That whole number was performed in a ridiculous over-the-top parody of more serious musicals.) APL (talk) 13:33, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * At the very least, Groucho and Harpo knew how to play stringed instruments, so your guess on that point is probably on the mark(s). ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:55, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Heh, yes, that number is definitely ridiculous over-the-top...just thinking about it makes me laugh. Jayron, thanks for that overview. Must have been intense to work in that business back then. Pfly (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2011 (UTC)


 * @Michael J - in Rabbit of Seville, Bugs was given an extra digit so he could play a short piece on Elmer Fudd's head using the proper motions (there was no keyboard involved there, though, just poor Elmer's scalp.) Matt Deres (talk) 18:19, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Amazing! I've seen that many times and never noticed it. I just watched it — there are indeed four fingers in the wide shots, but five in the close-ups. Wow! — Michael J  22:10, 15 April 2011 (UTC)