Ralph Bakshi Brownsville, NY Roots

If you haven't yet had a chance to read UNFILTERED ,    

by Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnell Foreword by Quentin Tarantino published by Rizzoli and Universe Publishing you may be missing out on some historical gems. Jon and Chris may be the only creators who truly retrieved and documented the true Ralph Bakshi through so many layers of research and time spent with him. Here are some excerpts of Bakshi's early years - growing up in Brownsville, New York. Where did Bakshi come from and what began to shape his view on the world... this is where you will find it.

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(excerpt from UNFILTERED)

.....“Brownsville could teach you a lot if you knew where to look,” he says, filtering through all the lies and exaggerations found in over 40 yearsof press that pegged Ralph as a boy born of ghetto pain, an artist who survived the agony of an impoverished cesspool. He came up fighting, the rags said — a common thug that learned to draw. It’s all nonsense — but it makes for a hell of a headline. “Ghettos for other people are prisons, places to be embarrassed of, places to escape from — but that wasn’t it for me. There were so many beautiful things in Brownsville. It was how you looked at it — the freedom of the streets.The fact that no one knew what the fuck you were doin’ or cared. How ’bout walkin’ down streets with thousands of pushcarts with guys hawking their wares? How ’bout walkin’ into a kosher deli where butchers are killing chickens and women are pluckin’ them — the feathers floating in the air? It was a wonderful, wonderful bazaar.”

Bakshi (holding rifle) and friends messing around on Brownsville Rooftop)

Excerpt from UNFILTERED

".....Summers were spent hunting stray cats in vacant lots, palming through weeds twice his height, sometimes taking a break to light up a cig. Winters would mean running through underground alleyways, playing hide ’n‘ seek behind trash cans and discarded crates. There were no swing sets, no monkey bars; his sandbox was full of gravel and broken glass. On the rare occasion he ventured out of his Brooklyn neighborhood with his family, the sights continued to awe — from the freakshow paintings plastered around Coney Island to the pounding sound of waves breaking against the boardwalk at night, he loved things that were grandiose and grim. The characters Ralph writes, draws, and paints aren’t stereotypes — they’re the unapologetically raw, honest byproducts of the place that raised him.

“One night when I was eight, I was sleeping at a friend’s house. There was a loud thud really late,” he says. “We heard the clotheslines breaking, then a crunch. One of my friends gets up and says, ‘Somebody jumped off the roof!’ We didn’t believe him. The next morning, we went out and cops were there. Some soldier had committed suicide because he had killed his wife who was fuckin’ around on him while he was at war. I cried.”

Ralph was realizing that life wasn’t perfect — hell, it stung at times. It’s all in how you carry yourself through it. Brownsville had more than its fair share of brutality and bigotry — stuff like Murder, Inc., the gang that sent the homicide rate skyrocketing on behalf of the Mafia, and ignorance that came with the onset of segregation — but Ralph never got into those games. He learned respect. “People are both wonderful and terrible — all races, all creeds, all colors,” Ralph says. “My parents never had a bad word to say about anyone unless they were bad — but never because the color of their skin or the slant of their eyes or their religion. My family taught me that — that’s how I grew up. You teach your kid how to treat other people.”

"......The principal told Ralph, flat-out, that he was worthless — just another talentless loser that’ll get locked up or worse. Ralph noticed that the walls of his office were adorned with a handful of drawings by the senior class art students, prettied with different colored award ribbons. Ralph was jealous — he’d never won anything before — but he knew he could do better. Having only just started on his artistic path, he blurted, “But I can draw!”

The principal smirked; he was eager to suggest Manhattan’s School of Industrial Arts, a vocational academy to dump the no-goods that couldn’t give a lick about being a scholar. Cut forward a few more days — Ralph is planted in an auditorium with thirty other ninth graders, sketching a live model in various poses. He’d never been to the City before, not once. This was the entrance exam — new environment, total strangers. Ralph was Gary Cooper — and this was his High Noon.

Ten kids passed.

Ralph was one of them."

Excerpt from UNFILTERED -

"....By 15, Ralph had a big, fat catalog of experiences locked away in his head, but he didn’t have a clue what to do with them. The local public library ended up being his ticket. One day while cruising the shelves, he stumbled upon Gene Byrnes’ Complete Guide to Cartooning. It was the who’s who of “how to’s” — Milt Caniff, Al Capp, Jim Flora, Al Hirschfeld, Chic Young, Jim Tyer, and over a hundred more artists spilling their secrets. Ralph was frothing.“I always loved comics — I’d dig through the trash and cut my hand on broken glass to get ’em — but it never crossed my mind that guys did it for a living. Or how they did it,” he says.