"First Gigs"

Chapter 2 from 'UNFILTERED: THE COMPLETE RALPH BAKSHI' by Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnell published by RIZZOLI and Universe

The chapter's first line (in 'UNFILTERED: THE COMPLETE RALPH BAKSHI' ) is genius :

" Ralph was becoming a casualty of coincidence."

I mean... if he wasn't leaning against the school door ( actually, shoving it closed - see Chapter 1 for actual story) while the principal was trying to exit the school... If he hadn't noticed all the sparkly awards on the principal's wall....and on and on. One thing that stands out... he certainly does not shy away from opportunities and fast thinking. Act now - apologize later. In the moment, spontaneous responses seem to be his go-to reaction..and a lot of the time ...it worked. From hilarious antics of desk switching and animation stack adjusting at Terrytoons, to Paramount's Cartoon Studios started as Famous Studios by the Fleischer brothers, to running for the border in Canada with animation under arm.... to falling in love with the person to be his lifelong partner...these were the early years. The beginning pages of Bakshi Animation. - Tia

Excerpts from UNFILTERED:

"Sparky couldn’t believe Ralph would commute four hours a day to wear terrycloth gloves, learn to hold in coughs and sneezes, and carefully polish animation cels. “If you had dirt on your cel, you’d track it onscreen. It’s hard to take dust off of plastic, ’cause you can’t see it. It was an ugly job.” For $60 a week, Ralph didn’t even think about snoozing past that 5:30 A.M. alarm. Within a year, he figured he’d have earned enough to buy a car — and Ralph is a car guy. He was eyeing a ’49 Dodge, two-door coupe. Wide-open, she did 60."

“I liked inking, ’cause I wanted to be a comic strip artist,” he says. “It’s a very important part of doing comic strips. If you’re inking everyday by hand on cels, you’re getting good with a pen.”

Ralph was good. Damn good.

That veteran inking hand caused his after-hours comics to really take flight. On really down days, he parodied his failing marriage in Dum Dum

and Dee Dee, a strip chronicling the exploits of a man determined, with all his might, to get — and keep — the girl. When politics riled him up — the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination — Bonefoot and Fudge and Junktown proved therapeutic. The former parodied idiots with an agenda, “Just like Bush and Cheney — the same bullshit, nothing was going right”; and the latter was about misfit technology and discarded ideals — in other words, Brownsville logic versus the rest of the globe. “Artists need to look at what’s going on in the world,” Ralph says, always reflecting. “It’s all the same stuff: Don’t cross that line, don’t step in the desert! That’s what’s wrong with the human race — smalltime, cheesy. We’re murderers, we’re killers. Our religions kill other people. It’s my god, not your god.

I am Sunni, I am Shiite — I am Motherfucker, I am Giant Prick. I am starving in Africa — we don’t care! I am in Darfur with syphilis — go fuck yourself! Forget it! That’s the human condition — and it sucks. That’s inspiration, kids!”

Ralph was taking cues from life — the happy, the heated, the hurt of the world — without even realizing it.

He was feeling his art.

Early Bakshi Cartoon Strips 'JUNKTOWN' & BONEFOOT AND FUDGE'

"........and Ralph was done sitting down and waiting for some bigshot to point him out from a crowd. He wanted to animate. Needed to. “I wasn’t going to solve any problems

by staying planted on my ass, so one day in ’59, I picked up my desk — a big drafting table — and went downstairs with the animators. I broughtit to an empty spot in the corner, put it down, didn’t tell anyone, and went to the big director at the time, Connie Rasinski, and said, ‘I need a couple of scenes.’ He looked up at me, looked down, looked up at me again, and said, ‘Okay, here’re some layouts.’ He pulled a couple of scenes, opened the folder up, pitched it. It was nothing — one scene with a hat floating onthe water while music played. The other scene was Deputy Dawg running.”

When Sparky caught wind of Ralph’s stunt, he demanded to know who he was animating for. “I said, ‘Connie,’ ” Ralph laughs.

“So Sparky went into Connie’s office and said, ‘Connie, what ya doing?!’ And Connie said, ‘Ralph’s animating!’And Sparky yelled, ‘What do you mean!?’And Connie said, ‘He’s animating! What do you want from me!? He’s doing a good job!’”

"By fluke or intuition, Weiss asked Ralph to help him carry presentation boards down to Manhattan for a make-or-break meeting with CBS bigwigs, including president Fred Silverman. “I set everything up, the execs came in, everyone sat down, and I’m standing against the wall wondering if I should leave,” Ralph recalls. “I figure if something falls down, I might have to pick it up. I didn’t know what to do, so I’m just standing there against the wall quietly and they start. And I’m nervous as hell. I’ve never been to anything like this in my whole life. It was heavy for a kid.”

The pitch meeting was over in a flash of “toos” — Terrytoons’ ideas were too sophisticated, too corny, too old-timey. The studio was finished. “Fred started to rise — almost in slow-motion — and I said, ‘I have an idea!’ ” Ralph remembers. “I had nothing — I just said I have an idea — and Fred sat down and asked, ‘What is it?’”

“Silverman was buying real superheroes from Hanna-Barbera.The 60s were happening and pop art was big. The live-action Batman show was huge. So I said I had a show about five superheroes and they’re all fucked up. Strong Man had all this strength and doesn’t know what to do with it. I described each character as they came to me, having never thought about it before — Tornado Man, Rope Man, Strong Man, Cuckoo Man, Diaper Man. They fought evil wherever they could and the villains were stupider than they were.”

CBS loved it."

"Once the second season of Mighty Heroes kicked in, the ratings were up but Ralph was down. After over ten years at Terrytoons, he’d had it. He figured the best way to really make the cartoons he wanted would be to start his own studio, so in early 1967 he drew up some presentation pieces for a show called Tee-Witt with help from Anzilotti, Johnnie Vago and Bill Foucht, a nugget of which would eventually evolve into his 1977 film, Wizards. In fact, it was that very portfolio that snagged Ralph the love of his life, Elisabeth."

SOME OF BAKSHI'S EARLY SKETCHES FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND TERRY-TOONS ERA THAT EVOLVED INTO HIS LATER 1977 WIZARDS FILM

1968 Ralph & Liz

(Above)Ralph in 1969 at "RALPHS SPOT AGENCY" his Ad Agency with Peter Max.

1969 Ralph drawing 115 East 9th NYC