Fantastic Tales of Terror

by Eugene Johnson

  I learned to pretend to be all right.

  It made my life considerably easier.

  In fact, over the years, there were times pretending to be all right that I had to wonder if I actually was all right.

  The day Walt hired me, I had a friend.

  ***

  January 4, 1937

  Walt led us into the screening room. It was hot and cramped. We were outgrowing the Hyperion Studio (in 1940 we moved to Burbank).

  Today the screening room mood was tense because Walt was “getting desperate,” is what he had said. He said he was “feeling pressured.” He said he was getting “fucking pissed off.”

  Of course, all of us were desperate and feeling pressured. But if we were “pissed off,” it was at ourselves: We were not getting the job done.

  Walt, dead center, first row, cigarette screwed into his mouth.

  On the screen, no soundtrack: Woodland scene.

  Great depth, a sense of moving into and being enveloped by the setting. That was the multiplane camera. Better than the real world. It was what the real world should have been, not the usual view through a glass darkly. You intuited forest life that you did not see. Humming bees. Sassy chipmunks. Chattering squirrels.

  Magic.

  Enter fluffy little rabbit, so damned cute someone had named him “Diabetes Bunny.”

  Bunny wrinkles nose.

  Aw . . .

  Good. Damned good.

  We had nailed it. Animals had to be as expressive as people.

  Enter bluebird.

  Gentle ripple of feathers. Flutter of the heart.

  Cut to:

  Medium close-up on crying Snow White.

  Boo-hooing.

  Oh, boo.

  Oh, hoo.

  Boo hoo fuck!

  Bad. Very bad.

  Film click-ticks on sprocketed black and lights come up.

  An awful reverential moment.

  Walt calmly rises and like a high school geography teacher instructing none-too-bright sophomores says, “Well, what do we—heh-heh-heh—think of that?” The heh-heh-heh was the clue.

  Bill Cottrell says, “Backgrounds couldn’t be better. Lush. The dolly to the tree trunk is amazing.”

  Art Babbitt says, “That bluebird . . . I worked on that and I don’t believe it came out so well.”

  Johnny Cannon, “Love the bunny.”

  Walt claps his hands and laughs. “Wunderbar! We’ve got a background and a bluebird and a bunny.”

  Then he looked at Roy like he was taking aim. “Roy, do you have an opinion?”

  Getting to his feet, you half expected Roy to lift his arms in a defensive posture. He said flatly, “It was pretty good.”

  Walt nodded. “Agreed. I totally agree . . . ” Walt’s voice trailed off. And then he started screaming. “It was pretty good, if you like total shit. If you like shit soufflé, shit on your shoes, shuffled shit, stirred shit, shit through a tin horn, and comin’ round Kilkerry fucking Mountain, shit!

  “Snow fucking White,” Walt raged, “moves like she’s made out of nothing but arthritic elbows. She’s got the winsome charm of leprosy. She dances like Vitus is her patron saint. She klumps around with the subtle grace of a concrete mixer. She bows to her woodland chums like she’s getting a barbed wire enema while being electrocuted. And that face”—Walt actually shuddered—“only a mother could love that, a mother barracuda.”

  It was all aimed at Roy, and there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t grateful then not to be Roy Oliver Disney.

  “ . . . of course you like shit. That’s because you’re an asshole! That is why you just stick to the financial side, Brother Asshole, because you can con and screw over the other assholes who do money and you won’t fuck that up . . . ”

  Roy did not slink. He walked out.

  Walt said quietly, “Guys, let’s take a break.”

  We were getting up, thinking about earning a living designing corset ads for the Los Angeles Times or maybe using a three-inch brush dipped in orange paint for butcher signs, when Walt said, “Bish, come to my office, please.”

  When we were seated he took the Cutty Sark from the third desk drawer. We used paper cups.

  We are friends, I said to myself.

  “I really lambasted Roy,” he said.

  I said, “Yes.”

  Walt lit a cigarette.

  I said, “I am surprised Roy did not punch your nose, Walt. People do that sometimes when they are insulted, don’t they?”

  “Roy and I, we’re okay.” Walt shook his head. “My father, he was the one did the hitting. Bastard always had plenty for both Roy and me. We promised we’d never hit one another. And my kid, Diane, I will never, never ever strike her.” Walt looked at the cup in his left hand, the cigarette in his right. “My old man, tight assed sonofabitch, hated smoking and drinking.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that is why you smoke and drink.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” Walt said. “And I make art. That’s something else Daddy said ‘no’ to. So, fuck him.”

  Then he looked at me in a way that I truly understood meant help me. “Bish, what can we do?”

  “I do not know.”

  “We have to, Bish. We’re in hock up to Roy’s ass and my ears. Snow White premieres in December of this year and it takes off or I’m drawing puppies and rainbows for Hallmark Cards and Lillian’s selling ribbons at Woolworth’s.

  “Iwerks could have done it,” Walt said. “Ub Iwerks is the total animator. The cartoons he’s doing nowadays, Flip the Frog . . . Ub could not tell a story if you gave him the beginning, the end, and filled in the parts between, but Flip the Frog . . . Fucking frog is more real than any pond frog, bullfrog, or Florida Everglades frog that ever zapped a fly.”

  Walt sighed. “Snow White has to be real like that. The dwarfs have to be real like that.”

  “What can we do?” I said.

  Walt said, “Rotoscope.”

  I said, “As soon as you see rotoscope, you know. It does not look created, it looks copied. It’s just tracing. It’s fake. A copy can never be real.”

  Walt said. “That is why we will not use real people.”

  “What will we use?” I asked.

  Walt said, “Toodies.”

  ***

  December 1, 1996: A Reminiscence Filtered through Hindsight

  What I tell you will be no noteworthy revelation for many. Perhaps you have seen the 1988 box office smash Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or, less likely, the 1992 box office floppola, Cool World. Though it was never bandied about all that much, both movies cast Toodies in leading and lesser roles. Framed’s Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman, Benny the Taxicab, and World’s Nails the Spider, Chico the Bouncer, and sexy Holli Would were Toodies, though called respectively Toons and Noids.

  They all come from a domain known as 2D, pronounced . . . That is correct. We here on Planet Earth, are referred to by Toodies as . . . Threedies!

  How did 2D come into existence?

  Given the irrational ways of most of its inhabitants, Unintelligent Design is an answer not without merit. The more philosophical might speculate about the Collective Unconsciousness manifesting itself physically.

  Whatever, 2D is real. That is that.

  In 2D, you can find Popeye the Sailor, the Yellow Kid, Smoky Stover, Barney Google, Snuffy Smith, Little Orphan Annie, Blondie, Mutt and Jeff, Felix the Cat, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Mary Worth, and Little Iodine, etc. They look pretty much as they have been presented to us in comic strips and books, single panel cartoons, and animated films. It would not be wrong to refer to Toodies as Archetypes. Like all types, thus, they are limited in function and intellect. Their behaviors are prescribed and repetitive: Popeye, seemingly vanquished, eats his spinach and knocks hell out of Bluto—again and again. Tubby pranks Little Lulu Moppet and she counter-pranks with greater and more comic success.

  Final point of interest: You will not know it from their representations in the Sunday Funnies or Looney T
unes, but Toodies are approximately half the size of 3D homo sapiens. In the 2D realm, Superman stands a perfectly proportioned three feet and an inch tall. Similar in many respects, but small, that’s 2D.

  From the time of Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, 1897, Hearst’s New York Journal, to Calvin and Hobbes, from the earliest animations of Krazy Kat to today’s Simpsons, certain artists have seemed to know of 2D, perhaps psychically, and some discovered a way to journey there.

  If you ask Cool World’s Ralph Bakshi or Roger Rabbit’s chronicler Gary K. Wolf about their crossing from 3D to 2D and back again, you might get a wink and a knowing smile or a dismissive “I imagine you believe in leprechauns, too.”

  In 1937, in Hollywood, if you wished to, let us say, utilize Toodies, you needed a mover, a shaker, all around grifter and connection man, and the one Walt Disney engaged was a certified sleaze merchant named Powell Benjamin. Powell Benjamin wore a sports coat with lapels wide enough to accommodate drippings of his last 12 meals, had a pencil thin mustache, and eyes that made a hyena’s glare remind you of Lassie.

  I never learned how Walt came to know Powell Benjamin.

  I never asked.

  Roy somehow secured another loan.

  Three hundred thousand dollars was paid to Powell Benjamin for three months—usage—of eight Toodies.

  Walt’s carefully selected small crew—our crew, for I was Walt’s Majordomo—sign an oath of secrecy in India ink.

  We believe in our mission.

  We believe in Art.

  We believe in Walt Disney.

  Late one night, Powell Benjamin drove to Hyperion Studio in a panel truck and unloaded them.

  We had Seven Dwarfs.

  We had Snow White.

  With their size, we needed only a few props and limited, minimized sets.

  Once they were dressed, we were in business.

  We began rotoscoping.

  What did they look like? Please, unless you are a Survivalist-Fundamentalist Mormon living with your ridiculously extended family in a desert cave, you have seen the movie. Bashful looked like Bashful, Doc looked like Doc, Sleepy looked like staggering narcolepsy and Grumpy looked like a crabby old bastard, etc.

  And Snow White? She looked like a cool 31 inches of sweetness, goodness, and light, inadvertently inaugurating the line of what would become Disney Princesses.

  Except for Sleepy, the dwarfs did not sleep; they did not need to. Once a day, for perhaps 15 minutes, there was a meal of soup served by a singing Snow White. They appeared to be eating, although one was never sure. They did not require exercise. They did not even need bathroom breaks, in that they lacked the requisite plumbing.

  Powell Benjamin became our director in everything but screen credit. While the Toodies seemed to listen to Walt or me, we apparently confused them. When Powell Benjamin said, “Here’s what you do,” they did it, toot sweet. Pratfall? Plop-bop. March of the dwarfs, lips puckered in a whistle, and it’s off to work we go. Do a triple back flip and land in a two finger handstand while wiggling your ears? No problem. Shed flowing tears big as Oldsmobile headlights, it’s the Seven Sobbers Ensemble.

  We rotoscoped hell out of them. No need to rotoscope Nasty Queen/Ugly Witch. Traditional free hand art proved more effective; cartoony exaggeration a perfect fit for a hag/bitch. The Prince? Use a Hollywood chorus boy as a model and he gets his 37 seconds on screen. Who’s looking at him, anyhow?

  Working only at night, everyone else gone, shooting in a shed that looked like it had been constructed by the Little Rascals, it took just under three months to get the necessary Toodies footage. Powell Benjamin loaded up the cast, or so I thought, and adios. Into the “rendering” stage, with splashes of hand painted primary color and fuzz focus to make Snow White and the dwarfs just a tad more cartoon-like—then, the voice actors, and . . .

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, followed by a nationwide release on February 4, 1938. It was a critical and commercial smash: $8 million earnings before distribution plans were drawn up for a return engagement.

  By March of 1938, we had Dumbo underway, so I thought we’d be discussing that when, one night, Walt asked me to return to Hyperion after dinner. He had something to show me.

  And what that was apparently required him to fortify himself before the unveiling; he reeked of alcohol as he led me to what had been a small storeroom for Bristol board pads, cellulose acetate cells, pens, brushes, and other art supplies but was now a dimly lit, sparsely furnished room. It was small: about half scale. There was a proportional table, chairs, and sofa. There was a painted half-sized window that showed a distant verdant hill beneath a sunny sky. And on a half-sized armchair by that phony window sat the Toody Snow White.

  She looked at us. She smiled a perfunctory smile, reflecting neither thought nor emotion.

  “I kept her,” Walt said. “I paid Benjamin. I bought her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  Walt said, “She’s mine.”

  Then he said to the Toody, “Snow White, please stand up and remove your clothes.”

  She did. Undressed, she stood before us, her head tipped slightly to the left. I cannot say she was naked. I cannot say she was nude.

  She had no nipples. She had a navel or at least an indentation. She had nothing of those other physical characteristics we associate with the female gender—the human female.

  Walt whispered, “Not a mole, a bleb, a pimple or a birthmark. She is just what she should be. There will never be a trace of wrinkle at the edges of her eyes. No root canal, no sinus infection, no pneumonia, no . . . ”

  Walt gripped my upper arm. “Bish, do you see? She is perfect.”

  I said, “Walt, she is not human. She is not alive.”

  Snow White waved to me. She smiled.

  Walt said, “She is perfect and she is mine.”

  “Walt,” I said, “it’s not right.”

  “It’s right for me,” Walt said. “I love her.”

  ***

  For many years, I did not see the Toody Snow White. Walt and I did not speak of her. She was the unspoken obstruction in our friendship and we dealt with it by not speaking of her.

  But when Walt lay dying, all that mattered was he was my friend.

  Yes, I would take care of her, the Toody Snow White.

  I did.

  I have.

  But now, I am 86 years old. Next week, I will go to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center for cardiovascular surgery which is expected to take seven to nine hours. It is possible I will survive but not expected.

  I have taken care of most everything. I have no family, so charities and casual friends (I had only one close friend) will be the beneficiaries of the Bishop Leffords’s estate.

  There is one item which I have not seen to.

  I have time before my scheduled surgery.

  I trust I will think of something.

  ***

  Snow White waits in darkness.

  On some days she sings, “Someday my prince will come.”

  LONE WOLVES

  PAUL MOORE

  “The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation. It is still found scattered thinly throughout all the wilder portions of the United States, but has everywhere retreated from the advance of civilization.”

  Theodore Roosevelt, 1902

  December 13th, 1886

  49 miles northwest of Medora, Dakota Territories

  12:42 AM

  Roosevelt winced as he rolled onto his side. This close to Montana, the ground was always rough and the particularly harsh winter had frozen it hard. He peeled back the sheepskin sleeping bag as he glanced over at the remains of the campfire.

  It was little more than ash and fading embers. A thin wisp of smoke spiraled upward as it disappeared into the clear night sky.

  Beautiful night, he thought. Been awhile since I’ve seen one of those.

  The sight of the cloudl
ess sky lifted Roosevelt’s spirits. He and his companions had been scouring the plains for three miserable days. Heavy winter storms filled with snow, ice and all the frigid fury Mother Nature could muster had slowed their progress significantly. However, Roosevelt had insisted that they stay the course. They were closer to the pack than they had ever been, and he was not about to relinquish the hunt when they were so near.

  Roosevelt sat upright and glanced over at the other men. Both Jake Cutler and Avonaco continued to slumber inside their tightly wrapped sheepskin cocoons. He could barely make out their misting breath across the waning coals. As if sensing his restlessness, one of the horses snorted in the dark recesses beyond the camp.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Roosevelt muttered to himself as he stood and approached the remains of the fire. He reached into the ring of stones and pulled a tin kettle from the ashes. The handle was still warm, and Roosevelt silently thanked the Maker for small favors.

  The coffee was, at best, tepid, but compared to the biting winds that rose and fell across the plains, the dark liquid felt almost volcanic. Roosevelt poured himself a cup and gulped a mouthful. It had little effect on him these days. His time in Cuba had altered his perception on many things.

  Something about finding comfort in a hot cup of Jamoke while his wounded men wailed through the night had left a sour taste in his mouth. The heat had been oppressive, the jungle dense and unforgiving, and too much blood had been spilled on both sides. Roosevelt had a stomach for combat and the fortitude for victory, but he took no pleasure in taking another man’s life.

  Wolves, on the other hand, were a completely different story.

  As far as Roosevelt was concerned, wolves were ravenous agents of unbridled destruction. They were little more than forces of pure id who continued to kill long after they had satiated their gluttonous appetites. Roosevelt could cite many instances where wolves had not killed for food, defense or survival. Instead, they had hunted and killed purely for pleasure. As far as he knew, there was only one other animal on Earth that behaved in a similar manner.