Reid Mitenbuler

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Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, An Epic Journey, A Lost Age by Reid Mitenbuler is a biography of Peter Freuchen, a Danish adventurer, author, actor, and game show winner. Mr. Mitenbuler is a published author and writer from Los Angeles.

Peter Freuchen looks and sounds like someone made him up. He was 6.5’ feet tall, one legged, with wild hair and beard. An explorer obsessed with he arctic, who married an Inuit woman, established a trading post, and a chronicler of the Arctic culture. His adventures took him from the loneliness of the ice deserts, to rubbing shoulders with the glittery crowds of New York City, Hollywood, and even Presidents.

In all my reading, I either never heard, or missed the name Peter Freuchen. I’m guess it’s the latter, because as it’s pointed out in Wanderlust by Reid Mitenbuler, Peter Freuchen was a household name for several decades.

This is an interesting book about a remarkable life, led by a swashbuckling man. However, with all his accomplishments it seemed to me that Freuchen was always the sidekick to others. He never led, or produced, or directed, or organized anything of note. He surely was in the right place, at the right time, with the right people to lead a life many would envy.

Freuchen married Navarana, a 13 year old Inuit (which was socially acceptable), who gave him two children and died 10 years later of the flu. His left foot was amputated and left him with a peg leg, upon returning to Denmark he remarried, wrote books, bought a farm and joined the World War II Danish resistance. And then he moved to Hollywood, fall in love with a magazine illustrator, and won the $64,000 Question game show. Even Freuchen’s death is seemed out of a story book, giving in to a heart attack on his way to Alaska .

The moves very fast, sometimes almost too fast. The hectic life of the Peter Freuchen are interesting by themselves, but I felt I needed more to know who Freuchen is, not just what he did.… (meer)

I enjoyed this book. A history of the wild ride of animation from the late 1880's to around 1970. It's the story of the artists and the promotors and the constantly changing technology, of cartoon characters and their creators, of risk takers, of great successes and great failures. And mixed in with all of this is the politics....exploitation of the workers, unionism, union bashing, Mcarthyism, the rise and fall of great studios ..of Disney and Warner Bros, of Max Fleisher (Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailorman) and a whole host of others. Clearly it was a tough industry in which to survive. Yet it gave us masterpieces such as Snow White and Fantasia....and characters such as Mr Magoo and Bugs Bunny.
Here's a few extracts from the book that I found especially notable:
This book is about animation's origins and rise, the first fifty years, wild decades spanning the early twentieth century to the 1960s.
The cartoons created then were often little hand grenades of social and political satire: bawdy yet clever, thoughtful even if they were rude. Some Betty Boop cartoons contained brief glimpses of nudity. Popeye cartoons were often loaded with sly messages about the injustices of unchecked capitalism. The teaming of animators with jazz musicians like Cab Calloway was, in the 1920s and '30s, just as subversive as hip-hop would be in the 1980s and '90s. The old Warner Bros. cartoons-Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and more—occasionally offered some of the most perceptive social commentary of their era. Much of this colour was censored when these old cartoons were repackaged for new formats and audiences, particularly television and young children. Much of their original spirit was reimagined, if not forgotten.

He [Winsor McCay] would animate only a handful of cartoons during his lifetime, but they were wildly influential, inspiring many other cartoonists- early greats such as Max Fleischer, Otto Messmer, and Walt Disney to do something similar. His influence was profound, but Winsor McCay's impact on animation was all but forgotten by the time of his death, in 1934. Some two decades later, his name would fade from public memory, even though many of his protégés, such as Walt Disney, would become famous.

On December 21, 1937, Snow White premiered at Los Angeles’s Carthay Circle Theater, the 1,500-seat movie palace where Disney's masterpiece short, The Skeleton Dance, had premiered in 1929..... When the final credits rolled, the applause was deafening, everyone shouting praises over the din. It was more than just a good movie; it was a cultural moment. The newspaper coverage of what followed —ecstatic reviews, from popular broadsheets to obscure literary journals-was monumental. "It is a classic, as important cinematically as The Birth of a Nation," said the New York Times.

Nobody looked at it as a "kids' movie." British censors actually banned children under sixteen from seeing it without an adult. By May 1939, eighteen months after it debuted, Snow White had film receipts of $6.7 million, making it the highest-grossing American film ever.

The Fleischer staff had it even worse than that, hounded by supervisors timing their breaks with a stopwatch. An in-betweener at Fleischer who took too long in the bathroom would come back to his or her desk and find Edith Vernick, head of the department, standing there, tapping her toe...... On May 7, 1937, a strike broke out at the Fleischer studio. It was two years after Dan Glass's death; the time in between had been filled by countless hours of negotiations between management and the workers' new union representatives...... The strikers were met with more violence and intimi-dation. Men gripping lead pipes would sometimes creep up behind them as they entered their apartments. At other times, the phone would ring but the only sound at the other end was heavy breathing.
There was speculation that these tactics weren't ordered by Fleischer but had come from anti-union executives at Paramount..... One thing that did unify the staff was that most were immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, transplanted from cultures with their own prickly labour problems.

The big test would come in a few days, after Gulliver's Travels premiered in New York. On December 22, 1939, the film played at the Paramount Theatre in New York. By three in the afternoon, it shattered the movie palace's attendance record: nearly 14,000 people. Galloping through its two-week run, it then moved to the Roxy, where it continued to smash records........ Paramount immediately green-lighted another feature and the Fleischer storymen began working up ideas. Their early favourite was a cartoon about Mount Olympus and the gods. Dave Fleischer, who wasn't a theologian, casually told a colleague that the story of Mount Olympus was "all in the Old Testament."

As with Snow White, Disney wanted to adapt a dark European tale into something more cheerful. Collodi's Pinocchio was a miscreant and thug, but Disney wanted to convert him into a helpless innocent who lands in trouble after inadvertently getting swept up by a bad crowd. This was a story that good-hearted Americans could sympathize with; as with the wolf in Three Little Pigs, it allowed for the possibility of redemption .

After Stokowski walked him through The Rite of Spring, Disney purchased its rights for $6,000. Then he invited Igor Stravinsky, who was originally from Russia but now lived in America, to the studio in December 1939. Stokowski urged Disney not to worry about what a classical music snob might think of their work. He and Disney were not preservationists, he reiterated, but creators.

Geisel [Dr Seuss] eventually earned a Legion of Merit for "exceptionally meritorious service in planning and producing films, particularly those utilizing animated cartoons, for training, informing, and enhancing the morale of troops." While this was a high honour, those wartime films would later become controversial, known for painting their subjects with a broad, ugly brush. They sometimes blamed other countries' problems on race rather than on flawed political and economic institutions. The Japanese were often depicted as rats, sending a message they were a nonhuman species that could be killed without regret. Germans were sometimes depicted as a lost cause, a people permanently anchored to a wrong way of thinking, incapable of change.

In 1940, Bugs Bunny appeared in what most film historians consider his "official" debut, titled A Wild Hare..... A Wild Hare was the first time Bugs Bunny's character exhibited "what you might call controlled insanity, as opposed to wild insanity," according to Chuck Jones. Bugs started as a surrogate for Daffy, but he was now the opposite of the duck. Whereas Daffy would fly into a dither for no reason at all, Bugs would always maintain perfect control, even when staring down the barrel of Elmer Fudd's shotgun. The Warner Bros. artists eventually decided to emphasize this aspect of his personality by adjusting his appearance.

Warner Bros. director Bob Clampett remembered: "Just as America whistled the tune from Disney's Three Little Pigs, 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?' in the dark days of the Depression ... so, Bugs Bunny was a symbol of America's resistance to Hitler and the fascist powers." Within a week of Pearl Harbour, Walt Disney received a phone call from Washington, D.C. The Treasury Department wanted him to fly there to meet with Secretary Henry Morgenthau and discuss the prospect of producing a public-service film about the importance of paying taxes........ Disney had actually lost money on the film. After hastily signing a contract with the U.S. govermment, he had paid $6,000 in additional production expenses from his own pocket and lost another $50,000 in forfeited bookings of other shorts. But Disney's film, by convincing people not to evade taxes, probably helped generate far more in tax revenue than his films had cost to make. According to a Gallup poll, 32 million Americans saw The New Spirit, and more than a third of them said the film made them more willing to contribute.

Several UPA artists had, at one point or another, belonged to the Communist Party. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover learned about the animators' links to Communism, he advised his military contacts of the Bureau's findings. UPA had only one military contract at the time—for a Navy training film called Marginal Weather Accidents-but the studio's hope of similar future contracts was all but ruined..... It was the age of the Red Menace: investigations, hearings, political attacks, Joseph McCarthy snarling at the cameras. In the wake of World War II, Republicans were desperate to return from the political exile they had been in ever since Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Seeking an issue to rally around, they chose Communism...... The strategy, widely compared to witch hunts, was engineered to generate publicity. It involved numerous attacks on Hollywood because celebrities guaranteed flashy headlines.

But these were show trials, focused on political revenge. The HUAC's "friendly witnesses" were often provided by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group founded in 1944 by Sam Wood, a director who had resented the city's elite ever since they denied him an Oscar for Goodbye, Mr. Chips in 1939. Inside his pocket he carried a little black book filled with the names of enemies he hoped to purge from the city...... His organization was stacked with prominent Hollywood figures whose politics leaned right: Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Ayn Rand, Barbara Stanwyck, and Cecil B. DeMille, among others. At the top of the MPA's leadership structure, serving as its vice president, was Walt Disney...... Not only had Disney's politics changed since the strike; his personal look had changed as well, from a carefree style into something more sober....... This is how he dressed on October 24, 1947, when he appeared as a friendly witness before the HUAC to talk about Communist infiltration of the animation industry.

In September 1949, Warner Bros. released the first Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furryous. Jones and Maltese envisioned it as a onetime short, not a series.After seeing the favourable reviews, however, they started developing more..... The only words would be Road Runner's "beep, beep," which Jones borrowed from background painter Paul Julian, who would shout, "Beep, beep" whenever he was carrying a large painting down the hall.
Barely three months after Pepé's debut in For Scent-imental Rea-sons, the film won Jones his first Academy Award (he would direct nearly a dozen more Pepé Le Pew cartoons by 1962). But Eddie Selzer accepted the statue at the ceremony, since he was technically credited as the producer, even though he originally hated the idea and had contributed nothing creatively to the series.

Walt Disney's Disneyland premiered on October 27, 1954. Most television programs of the era were still so bad that the show couldn't fail to become a gargantuan hit, attracting more than 50 percent of television audiences during its time slot. The New York Times wrote that the rest of the industry should just give up and "suspend operations between 7:30 and 8:30 Wednesday nights." Even the repeat airings beat all other shows, save I Love Lucy. Disneyland accounted for half of ABC's billings and put the network on the map, giving it an identity....... Disney always hosted the show wearing a dark suit, his hair neatly combed. He resembled some kind of national uncle....... Film critic Richard Schickel claimed that none of Disney's admirers seemed to notice that their "loved object was less a man than an illusion created by a vast machinery."

Ground was broken for Disneyland, the park, on July 12, 1954, During construction, Disney resembled how he had been during the happy years leading up to Snow White. He even dressed as he had back then losing the gray suits for loud shirts and floppy hats...... The park would reflect Disney's persona and outlook the same way his movies did, as well as the suspension of reality. At the end of Main Street sat Sleeping Beauty Castle; radiating out from it were "lands" offering guests different options —fantasy, adventure, the frontier, the future—"so that a trip through the park became a metaphor for possibility."....... Park staff was trained at "Disney University." There were no old circus carnies here; employees were carefully chosen. "We don't hire for jobs here," the training program's director told a reporter from the New Yorker, "so much as we cast for parts."

In the late 1940s and the 50s, three catalysts forever changed animated cartoons: the studio system's fall, television's rise, and demographic changes spurred by the postwar baby boom.....In 1948, the Supreme Courted decided a landmark case, The United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which broke up the studio system. It was one of the biggest antitrust decisions in U.S. history, forever changing the movie business....... Between 1950 and 1955, the number of TV sets in U.S. households increased from 3.9 million to 30.7 million..... The third factor affecting the nature of animation was a dramatic shift in audience demographics. Between 1944 and 1961, more than 65 million children were born in the United States....... and by the mid-1960s four out of every ten Americans were under the age of twenty.

Limited animation was the norm for television, where characters often resembled cardboard cutouts floating across a screen, as they had in Crusader Rabbit. While the aesthetic might not have been as visually appealing as before, it enabled far greater output.

Jack Warner had apparently admitted to colleagues that he didn't even know where his cartoon division was located. "The only thing I know," he said. "Is that we make Mickey Mouse." After somebody leaned over and informed him that no, they didn't make Mickey Mouse....... Warner shut down the cartoon unit to make space for what he saw as the next great cinematic revolution: 3-D movies.

When Walt Disney died, his Career was still on an upward trajectory.
Even though animation – the art form he revolutionised – was in the doldrums, he escaped the malaise to become a true American icon. The same can't be said for other animators working during animation's golden age. Most of them were now of struggling in the coal mines of television. They were the last of the ancients who had once thrown lightning bolts, now resigned to doodling toothpaste commercials. The past, not the future, would be the high point of their careers. Walt's death sent shock waves through the industry, a final curtain on a special era.
Disney's death [in 1966] came at a symbolic time— that same year, all three of the major television networks fully converted their Saturday morning programming to cartoons with a juvenile bent. It was also the year preceding Paramount's shutdown of the cartoon studio once owned by Disney's most prominent rival, Max Fleischer.
I learned a lot from the book and I'm happy to give it five stars.… (meer)

The biography of amazing Peter Freuchen, an arctic explorer in the first half of the twentieth century. From Denmark, he first explored Greenland to run a fur trading post and while there he studied the native Inuit culture. Eventually he learned from the people and married an Inuit woman, with whom he had two children. Later he explored arctic Canada, Alaska (before it was a State), and Siberia. After a terrible accident in which he froze his beard to a sled ski and nearly died, he lost his left foot to frostbite and turned to writing. Freuchen published several memoirs of his time in the arctic and also used his experiences to write novels featuring the native people. One of these was adapted into the film Eskimo (1933). He went to Hollywood to be a screen writer, and later New York City with his third wife. During World War II he worked with the Danish resistance to smuggle Jews and other people out of Germany, using his island farm as a safe house. An almost unbelievable story, but all of it true.… (meer)

Dane Peter Freuchen lived quite the enchanted life. At a young age he decided to join the list of arctic explorers forging new paths and discovery at the North Pole. After suffering from frostbite and loosing part of his leg, he continued to speak write books and tell his exotic stories. During WWII, he defied Hitler by hiding Jews and providing them with money to escape. Afterwards, he caught the attention of Hollywood, and wrote screenplays and advised on adventure movies.

This book was absolutely fascinating. I can't believe I've never heard of Freuchen before. His life, filled with many twists and turns, is one of legends. I also enjoyed reading about the Inuit lifestyle, one I've heard of, but knew almost nothing about. The book itself was well paced and well written. I found myself reading long into the night. I can't wait to read more from this author! Overall, 5 out of 5 stars.… (meer)