Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend-1921-Winsor McCay-Bug Vaudeville,The Flying House,The Pet-Cartoons

• published: 09 May 2015
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The videoclip incudes ALL “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend “ (Winsor McCay, 1921) episodes : “Bug Vaudeville”,”The Flying House” and “The Pet”. 1. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: Bug Vaudeville-1921-Winsor McCay- Creative, Detailed, & Enjoyable-Silent cartoon “Winsor McCay's 1921 cartoon 'Bug Vaudeville' has almost precisely the same plot and premise as Karel Capek's stage satire 'The Insect Play', which was first produced in Czechoslovakia in 1922. I wonder if Capek saw McCay's cartoon. We have here a series of variety turns by various species of insects and arachnids. In several cases, McCay amusingly matches a particular vaudeville act to an appropriate species: a daddy-long-legs does an eccentric dance, while two tumble-bugs perform as acrobats. Some of the other pairings of species and performance seem more arbitrary: the potato bugs stage a boxing match, while a cockroach is a bicyclist. McCay uses a framing device to include 'Bug Vaudeville' in his sporadic series of 'Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend' cartoons: a tramp has cadged some cheese from a housewife, and the bugs' antics are apparently his cheese-induced nightmare. In Capek's play, the tramp's slumber is induced by alcohol, and the antics of the various insects are parodic reflections of various forms of human behaviour. McCay, a major newspaper cartoonist in his day, made very few animations because his toons were so labour-intensive: McCay executed all the drawings himself, without the use of 'in-betweeners'. In his early toons, he drew on paper rather than acetate cels, forcing McCay to re-draw background art even when the background didn't change. “ (Author: F Gwynplaine MacIntyre from Minffordd, North Wales) 2. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House -1921-Winsor McCay- The most lirical silent cartoon This movie is definitely the most impressive looking one out of the 'Dream of the Rarebit Fiend' animated movies, by Winsor McCay. It's also the longest one and overall it's just far more detailed and stylized looking. “The Flying House” (an instalment in McCay's 'Rarebit' series) is the most lyrical of his cartoons, and only slightly nightmarish. A woman joins her husband Bert in bed after eating a rarebit. But she awakens to discover that Bert has gone up to the attic to tinker with some odd machinery. It develops that Bert has changed the house into an aeroplane, which he takes into the stratosphere, and then to outer space. McCay's visuals are impressive, the more so since he drew them all himself without the help of 'in-betweeners'. During the outer-space climax, I was intrigued that he drew Earth from an oblique angle ... rather than the usual cliché of putting it 'right-side up' with the Antarctic lowermost. The flight of the house is lyrical, rapturous, and -- unlike McCay's other 'Rarebit' adventures -- not remotely nightmarish ... until the very ending, when the house explodes and the husband and wife plummet to Earth 3. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Pet -1921-Winsor McCay- A wild imagination- Silent cartoon “The Pet” is another entry in Winsor McCay's animated series “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend”. In this one, a man has just eaten a rarebit of the title. His wife has warned him about having bad dreams for doing so to no avail. As he dreams, we see outside of the house a small animal that's hard to identify but-according to the word put on screen-says, "Meow." The woman picks him up and decides to keep him. She gives him a bath and feeds him milk on a saucer a little bigger than him. After he's done, however, he becomes a little bigger than the bowl which turns over on his entire body as he leans his head forward. He later eats a cat under the table and then an electric lamp on it (and doesn't even get electrocuted!). The husband then goes to the store to get a barrel of rat poison in order to kill this "pet". After the pet eats it, he develops some splotches on his body but they disappear quickly as he keeps growing. He eventually grows as tall as the tallest building in the city as more than dozens and dozens of planes appear and shoot him to pieces as the man finally wakes up...As always, McCay gives great detail in backgrounds that make you almost forget you're watching animation. Many humorous touches throughout as when the "pet" swallows a hose before spewing water through a neighbor's window at a neighbor! And that final sequence with all those pieces of the "pet" falling down. Wow! As with anything that McCay has done, The Pet is certainly essential viewing for animation fans. Released date: Sept 1921 Production Co: Rialto Productions Ressources: Wikipedia.org, imdb.com Soundtrack and dubbing: HandyCinema Music by by Kevin MacLeod (http://www.incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ ), licensed under CC BY 3.0 licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. No changes were made to the original music.