With the early depictions of Mickey Mouse falling out of copyright protection in January, it reminded me of that other great animation studio: Barfing. In this treatise, I explore its birth, rise, and eventual fall from grace and why we remember the Mouseketeers but not Barfonauts.
Dick Barfing founded the animation studio in 1927 at the age of only twenty-three when he realised he couldn’t do anything else. He briefly tried his hand at plumbing but managed to drain a reservoir when replacing a washer on a tap four states away. His forays into the world of education were explored in detail in Brian Cant’s Barfing biography: “The Whitehaven Incident”, and M. Night Shyalamalan has optioned the film rights.
Barfing’s first great character was Cackling Clive the Mongoose. Unfortunately, Barfing didn’t know what a mongoose was and was under the impression that it was some form of French wading bird.
Barfing’s first feature film, a brave reworking of Anna Karenin aimed at five to nine year-olds where Anna is an animated chipmunk and Count Alexei is a bright, purple hippo in a boater, was a hit at cinemas. It garnered him his first Oscar and one for former President Herbert Hoover who voiced Diego the Spanish Penguin – a role specially created for the film (though a Spanish escapologist is referenced somewhere in Tolstoy’s notes).
During the ‘30s and his initial filmic triumph, Barfing was still furiously working on a bank of cartoon characters that could rival Mickey, Donald and Goofy though with mixed success. “Is that tax deductible?” Who can forget this classic catchphrase of Waldo Winterbaum, Barfing’s riotously funny accountant character and constant thorn in the side of Randy Raccoon? Most people it seemed, and Waldo and Randy lasted barely half a dozen shorts before disappearing. Oscar the Gender-Fluid Octopus was decades ahead of its time, and led to picketing in forty-three states. ‘The Elk and Whelk Show’ featuring Eddie Elk and Winston Whelk had the attractive feature of the title rhyming, but the writers found it difficult to develop scenarios that could involve both a large deer and a sea-bound bivalve.
Barfing, however, had great success with Danny Dugong, though not initially when he was created in the ‘40s. The Danny Dugong vehicle ‘Gallipolli Gag Show’ was considered in poor taste and banned in Vermont. But the character did have something of a renaissance in the 1970s as Barfing tried to tap into the changing youth culture, with him becoming Danny the Disco Dugong sporting flared trousers on his fluked tail, large shades, gold medallion, and a tattoo saying ‘Momma Manatee’. He was used heavily by Post to advertise their Bran Flakes with the catchphrase ‘Get me some flakes, I’m feeling funky!’ Outside of North America this role was performed by Walter Matthau.
The 1940s proved a busy time for Barfing and his animation studio. “Dick wasn’t sure which way the war was going to go so decided to hedge his bets and produce propaganda films for both sides,” explains lead animator for Barfing Studios in the ‘40s, Garth Stickleback. “His character, Papa Gander, the octogenarian goose who doesn’t like ‘those folks’ was probably his least tasteful creation. The song, ‘I’m Bonkers for Benito; I’m mad for Mussolini’ was catchy but led to sixty per cent of the workforce resigning. I think it was a bad decision.”
In order to save face with the American government, when the McCarthy Un-American trials took place, Barfing couldn’t name people fast enough. He was vociferous in claiming, amongst many other names he put forward, that Walt Disney, Groucho and Chico Marx (but not Harpo interestingly), two of his own aunts who had never given him more than two dollars on his birthdays as a child, his postman’s nephew, the Bishop of New Orleans, Marilyn Monroe’s horse, Eddie, Maurice Chevalier, and Howdy Doody were all fully paid up members of the Communist Party. Barfing’s actions really polarised his audience with some claiming he was a true patriot and others trying to ram cream cheese through his letterbox.
Barfing’s controversial sponsorship deal with Laramie cigarettes was even frowned upon in tobacco-crazy 1950’s America, and the mid-feature “let’s pause for a smoke” breaks added into every ‘Bonnie Baby’ cartoon were considered in poor taste, though not banned by America’s Classification Board as they were awfully fond of the nicotine buck.
Being a tremendous fan of Cecil B. Demille Biblical epics, Barfing brought the Old Testament book of Numbers to the screen in cartoon form in 1957 with two animated rabbits as Moses and Aaron, and featuring Jerry Lewis as the voice of God reading out all the statistics – his first solo job after splitting with long-time partner, Dean Martin. The picture was a flop and Barfing, a misanthrope at the best of times, made himself increasingly isolated.
“The thing about Dick,” said Yam Kipping, Head of Barfing Animation Studios from 1947 to 1965, “was that he hated people. Couldn’t stand them. If he could have spent all his days in a box, he would have. In fact, for the whole of 1959 he locked himself in the stationary cupboard and would slip drawings underneath the door out to us. Most of them were obscene, but a handful we were able to use and eventually turned into the Oscar-winning ‘Sodom All’.” The film put the studio back on track, and the box office receipts bankrolled the company for the next decade and allowed Barfing to embark on more experimental projects in the sixties.
Trying to break into the world of TV which was becoming so lucrative in the 1960s thanks to shows such as ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’, ‘Bewitched’ and ‘The Addams Family’, Barfing developed a show called ‘The Miso Genie’ in which Larry Hagman co-habits with a two thousand year old Djinn who can grant him any wish he wants as long as its soup-related or focused on demeaning women.
Barfing briefly forayed into the world of superheroes with the rise of Marvel in the ‘60s and the new wave of DC titles. “He felt,” said Yam Kipping, “that with Disney titting about with Mary Poppins and singing bears, we could corner the market in superhero animation films.” Barfing’s first attempt, 1965’s ‘The Adventures of Crabman and the Langoustine Lad’ was described by Siskel & Ebert as ‘intolerably awful’ and that ‘xeroxing your own heinie and drawing a moustache on it would have greater artistic worth.”
The ‘70s saw Barfing return to animation. Having outlived Walt Disney, an achievement he was very proud of and had painted onto a hat he insisted on wearing all the time, Barfing felt empowered to finally hit the heights of Disney. He failed. When Disney Animation brought out ‘Robin Hood’ in ’73, Barfing tried to match it with his own take on an outlaw from English history and had his studio animate Jack the Ripper as a cheeky talking honey badger. The strategy backfired, partly because of the inappropriate decision of turning a serial killer into the whimsical focus of a children’s film, but mainly because the outcry it caused in choosing a native American species instead of the European badger. “One thing we do know about Jack the Ripper,” wrote Roger Bannister (the first man to run the four minute mile) in the Daily Telegraph, “is that he was BRITISH! This American fetish for cultural appropriation has got to stop. What is wrong with good ol’ Tommy Brock?! Can he not assault and maim?! This proud Englisher says of course he can, and SHOULD!”
Such a torrent of critical abuse and poor results at the box office finally did for Dick Barfing, and having released one final animated short in 1975 about the Hindenburg Disaster starring Danny Dugong called ‘Oh the Huge Manatee!’, Barfing retired before passing away in the winter of ’78 at the age of seventy-four. The Barfing Animation Studio was bought out by GlaxoSmithKline, and with it America’s second greatest animation company came to an end, though Cackling Clive does still feature on tubes of their psoriasis cream.
Treatises of Gloria 