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The Beatles Had A Few Good Tunes

This column is by my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos about his years teaching illustration.

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


Over the years, I have taught at many art schools including Parsons, Syracuse, Hartford, School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute in New York, Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia School of the Arts and others. My longest sustained teaching was at Parsons in New York for 8 years.

The one common thread I noticed among students was that they didn’t know much of anything about our profession which they were supposedly interested in pursuing. They hadn’t looked at much illustration or cartooning and they didn’t know the names of the star practitioners of those fields. I always have found that to be peculiar. I’m sure that students of say, ballet, know the superstars of ballet; or students of music probably know the major musicians in the part of the field they are studying. I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past Norman Rockwell, they don’t know any of the stars unless they have just had a visiting lecture from one of them. When you teach illustration or cartooning, you start at ground zero; there are no reference points, just a blank slate. I once opened a class at Syracuse with, “Good morning, I’m Milton Glaser.” I didn’t raise an eyebrow.

In my 8 years at Parsons, I generally taught two classes a week. It took Murray Tinkelman, the head of illustration at that time, five years to talk me into teaching. I kept saying,” I’ve only been in the business 10 years, how can I know enough to be able to be a teacher?” But, he wore me down and he had created a special course at that time called “Sequential Illustration” which I was to teach along with a “Conceptual Illustration” course. The conceptual course dealt with the “concepts” or ideas part of the process rather than drawing or perspective or design. At that point in time, illustration was a conceptual business rather than in previous times when it was a narrative, story telling process. We were in the era of illustrating abstract ideas for the business magazines like Business Week, Time, Fortune etc., rather than illustrating Indians attacking a wagon train for The Saturday Evening Post. We were illustrating articles on the falling stock market or the rise in childhood diseases or the latest fad in cooking.

The “Sequential Illustration” course was to be taught by three teachers, each teaching for a third of the semester. The course focused on illustration that was realized in multiple images such as in children’s books, animation, comic strips etc. I dealt with book illustration and multiple- picture magazine or newspaper illustrations in my third of the semester. Dick Giordano (Batman etc.) handled the comics part of the program and noted animator, Howard Beckerman handled the animation part. A little later on they created a third course that I was a part of which was just an animation course wherein Howard and I split the year in half. I did the first part dealing with designing and storyboarding and Howard did the last part and took the students through actually animating and filming animation sequences.

Clip from Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

Sometimes I would bring into my classes, actual assignments that I had worked on myself so that students had the real thing to deal with concept-wise. One time, I received an assignment from Emergency Medicine magazine just before going to class so I gave them the same assignment with the same time frame I had to do it in. I told them that I would bring in my finished illustration a week later and they were to bring in theirs. One student said, “What if our illustration is better than yours will you take ours to the client instead of yours?” I, of course replied, “Your illustration isn’t going to be better than mine!” So… even though this particular illustration wasn’t paying very much, I spent all week doing an elaborate, detailed picture just to show the students what they should aim for. Another thing that I did was to bring in some of my art directors from time to time. I tried to give the students a real taste of the business.

Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but it actually happened. I told the students one day that most of the realist illustrators traced photographs. I made the mistake of mentioning Norman Rockwell in that group. One of my students was so horrified that his idol traced photographs that he went over to the window, climbed out on the ledge and threatened to jump. I calmed him down by explaining that Rockwell was a splendid draftsman who had worked from live models for years before resorting to working from photographs due to the pressures of deadlines. I told him that those pictures could never come out as well if he didn’t know how to draw like a master.

Many of my students went on to stellar careers in illustration such as Victor Juhasz (caricaturist, war correspondent, Rolling Stone illustrator etc.) and Peter de Seve (New Yorker covers, children’s books, character designer for Bug’s Life, Robots, 4 Ice Age films and many others).

I remember one assignment I gave my animation class and that was to design and storyboard an opening for a TV special. I wanted to pick a subject that would be fairly easy for them to research. I picked the Beatles. I figured they’d have no problem finding info, photos and ideas for a project like this. One boy in class said, “You know we don’t know very much about the Beatles, it’s kind of before our time!” Another kid said, “Oh, I know the Beatles, I heard of them; they had a few good tunes!” at which point, I screamed “A FEW GOOD TUNES? A FEW GOOD TUNES?”

A few weeks ago, my son told me that his friend, a guitar teacher, had a student who was shocked to find out that Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE Wings.

When I would finish my class at Parsons, I often would go across the street and have dinner with a fellow teacher, Burne Hogarth of Tarzan fame. One time, I reminded him of an incident told to me by a friend who had been one of his students way back at the School of Visual Arts before it was called the School of Visual Arts and was called “The Cartoonists and Illustrators School”. One of his students asked him one day why Tarzan was always pointing his finger. Hogarth had this characteristic pose that he would often use of Tarzan with his right arm extended out and his finger pointing. Hogarth answered, “He’s pointing at my critics and saying, can you draw as well?”

I’ll end on this note … A FEW GOOD TUNES???

Email Randy Enos   Visit Randy’s archive


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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Brought to You in Living Black and White

Here’s a memory about NBC television, from our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos.

Over a span of 12 years (late 1960’s through the 1970’s), I worked heavily for NBC. I had left Pablo Ferro Films because his business went sour and rather than go to work at another film house, I decide to hit the streets and just freelance. Our secretary at Pablo’s had a husband who art directed at NBC so she sent me there where I met 9 art directors who gathered around and looked at my portfolio. One of them followed me out to the elevator as I left and said that he had 15 illustrations he needed right away. So, began my years with the Peacock. The art directors were a United Nations of nationalities. There was a Ukrainian, a Russian, Chinese, Arab, English, Irish, a couple of Jewish fellows and so forth. I ended up working for all of them. Some did the national advertising (New York Times, etc.) and others did affiliate station work which included even bumper sticker art while others did on air spot advertising, station breaker slides and film animation.

One memorable film animation job I did for them concerned their airing of the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night.

NBC was fiercely proud of their status as THE color network. They were still fairly new at this color thing when I came into their pantheon, but they had developed the system to be compatible with all the black and white sets across the nation which CBS had failed to do at that time. They tried to do as many color shows as they could. When a Movie of the Week was aired it was always a color movie –until A Hard Day’s Night came along. Imagine their embarrassment at having to air a black and white movie. The intro to their color presentations was always “NBC is proud to present the following program in living color”. The color logo of the peacock would appear on the screen and some rippled, burbly music would accompany the unfolding of the logo’s red, orange, yellow, blue and purple feathers.

SO, they came to me and asked if I could figure a way out of this dilemma. They wanted me to design an opening for the movie. An opening that would be for just that one night. They wanted something that could soften the blow of this being a black and white movie on the COLOR network.

Using the off-beat, quirky mind that Pablo Ferro had implanted in my brain, I decided to think about replacing our famous peacock with the only black and white bird that came to my mind, a PENGUIN! I figured I could have some fun with him flapping his small penguin wings up and down as our announcer would intone, “NBC is proud to present the following program in living BLACK AND WHITE!” He actually ended up saying “lively black and white”.

I set about drawing the scene in just line art. The penguin waddles out on the screen, takes off his top hat, waves his little arms up and down to the peacock music while the announcer does his thing. Then he unzips his white “tuxedo” front, it rolls down and emits – THE BEATLES, caricatured by me, tumbling out onto the ground where they quickly compose themselves and start playing. Then girls voices are heard screaming off camera. The Beatles run off to the right and we dissolve right into the opening scene of the movie where a bunch of girls are chasing them down the street.

I told this story on a blog years ago and some guy wrote to me to tell me that it was on YouTube. And here it is:

It’s pretty crude and scratchy and primitive and old looking, ain’t it?

I did quite a few films for NBC in those days but mostly it was caricatures of everybody on the shows even the newsmen, soap actors, etc. along with Flip Wilson, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, all the Laugh-in people, Bill Cosby, Danny Thomas, etc. etc..

But one of the other films I did was also a one-nighter. Carson had been off sick for a while so to commemorate his return to The Tonight Show, I created an opening which started out with a bird’s eye view of New York with an ambulance running through the streets to the NBC building in Rockefeller Plaza where it drives in… into an elevator… elevator opens up on the studio floor and we cut to Ed McMahon saying his, “H-E-E-E-R-R-R-R-E-E-E-E-S-S-S-S, J-O-O-O-O-H-H-N-N-N-NY!”

We had some friends who used to hold an annual “Tin Cannes Film Festival.” They were all film buffs who used to make their own crude little films that they would show. All the attendees would also arrive in costume. One year, I decided that my wife, Leann and I should dress in film. In the editing rooms at NBC, I remembered seeing big wastebaskets full of giant reels of heavy, thick 35mm film. They were just throwing it out so I asked if I could just grab a bunch of it. I took some reels home and we made complete costumes out of it.

Here’s the weird part. ALL of the film I had brought home were films I had made for NBC.

Email Randy Enos
 


Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society