"Nobody Remembers the Henchmen"
The Biography of the Toon Patrol, as voiced by Smart-Ass, the boss weasel. Edited by the poster.
Prologue
Excerpts taken from a work by noted toon author Professor Maximillian J. Borington. "The Influence and Principles of Toonkind in Modern Animation". Crazy House Publishing Co, 1959.
From Chapter 1: What is a Toon?
"A toon is any living, sentient character or object from an animated cartoon. Toons themselves have existed primitively since before 1900, in the form of cave paintings. These hunting scenes would move and dance on the cave walls of early humans, and legends have also been told of medieval manuscripts with "living" pictures. There were also the early projectors, such as the Praxinoscope from 1877, which were strips of pictures placed on the inner surface of a rotating cylinder that were projected onto walls, followed by a predecessor of the modern camera, the Théâtre Optique, invented in 1889. But these distorted, projected moving images are not toons; not as we know them today. Historians say that the first cartoon characters to be featured in an animated film, the first true toons, starred in 1908's 'Fantasmagorie', which showed a small stick figure encountering surrealistic morphing objects. These characters were brought to life using layer upon layer of projected images made of ink, paint and paper until they began to move around, on their own power.
It was a mystery up until this point how projecting layer after layer of sketches onto the very air the animators were surrounded by could create an artificial life form, but it was soon found to be the projecting of three-dimensional points onto a two dimensional plane …..combined with the physics of holography….and light rays…. that was the principle reason for the toons' ability to interact with the real world. The modern system of using celluloid sheets in animation is based on a system created by John Randolph Bray and Earl Hurd and was invented circa 1912. The celluloid, ink and paint added the depth and perspective to make these characters look and feel as real as humans. What gave them life was and is still a mystery, but the personality depended on the purpose the toon was drawn for (more on this later in the book)…..
Toon creation is not an exact science. Toon destruction, however, we are grasping more of an understanding of. Previously, the only way known to kill a toon was practically suicide; the toon would laugh until he died. Their forms can't sustain such intense emotion, so their physical remains are left behind, while their souls float upwards towards Toon Heaven (complete with harps, wings and haloes). It wasn't until 1942 that a permanent way to kill a toon was discovered: a solution of equal parts turpentine, acetone and benzene, nicknamed "the Dip". Dip, now illegal to produce, is the only way to kill the toon's soul as well as his physical husk. The only way, some theorize, around this rule is to re-draw the toon using the original cel sheet. This is not always a way to "bring them back", because they might not re-gain their original memories from before they were dipped. As this process is highly illegal, there is no way to do any kind of further research on the matter. (And we do not recommend you try this at home. We know several have tried. You know who you are).
From Chapter 2: A Brief Introduction to Cartoon Physics
….Toons were drawn, of course, depending on the situation the writers dreamt up. As color and sound were added, the animators became masters at creating toons with a variety of unique personalities. Each toon was individualized, and given a voice, a personal soundtrack of noises made when coming into contact with the physical world (such as a bonking sound when bumped on the head, or a slide whistle for rising up). This also is a factor of cartoon physics. Often turning the laws of human physics on its side, toon physics are as surreal as many of the characters, enabling toons to have an incredible array of abilities. Noted examples include being able to survive a number of injuries, walking off the edge of a cliff and gravity only taking effect when the character looks down, being flattened, and then inflating himself back into his original shape. Because of the combined efforts of the animator's imaginations, and the elasticity of the toon form, there is almost no limit to what a toon is capable of doing. Toons also have an innate sense of comedic timing, often referred to as the Rule of Funny.
This includes Fourth Wall Breaking, the infamous "shave and a haircut" routine: one toon knocks or taps the first few syllables of "shave and a haircut", and the other replies with the customary "two bits". (This is often used as a method to draw a toon out of a hiding spot, for, the toon can't help but reply "two bits" simply because it's humorous for him to inconvenience himself by making the reply). A list is currently being complied of the official Toon Laws of Physics. Official laws include, but are certainly not limited to, "Any vehicle on a path of travel is at a state of indeterminacy until an object enters a location in the path of travel." (When a wolf or coyote looks both ways down the road, sees nothing, but gets run over by a bus as soon as he tries to cross.) Or "Any solid body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocities) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter" (The silhouette of passage in the shape of the toon passing through it).
To quote Disney animator Art Babbit, "Animation follows the laws of physics—unless it is funnier otherwise." Toons are allowed to bend or break natural laws for the purposes of comedy. Doing this is extremely tricky, so toons have a natural sense of comedic timing, giving them inherently funny properties. This is also discussed by Mr. Walt Disney, in "The Plausible Impossible", a 1956 episode of the Disneyland TV program "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color".
From Chapter 3: The Different Types of Toons
…There is a marked difference between toons who are character actors, and toons who, simply put, are their characters as seen on-screen. Toons who are character actors are different from their on-screen portrayal. A perfect example of this is a toon named Baby Herman, formerly under contract to Maroon Cartoon Studios in Hollywood. In the studios' shorts, he is shown to be an innocent little baby with a high pitched voice, often speaking in baby talk. Off screen, however, he has the voice, personality, and vices of a middle aged man.
Toons who are their character are less versatile. They are produced only for a select few cartoons or movies playing that role over and over again until they are no longer needed. It isn't that they play the role so often that they end up believing that they are the character (though that has been known to happen), rather that they are chosen to BE that character when being animated. Noted examples include Pinocchio, Cinderella, and, most recently, Sleeping Beauty.
A toon who can find himself in a variety of situations (i.e.: Bugs Bunny) is a good example of a toon who IS their character, but is also capable of playing multiple roles, as is dictated by the animators.
Multiple versions of toons sometimes occur when they are presented in different media. This does not apply to a change or update in the style of a toon; these updates are layered over the existing form of a toon like layers of glaze on a piece of pottery. Comic strip characters are also capable of becoming true toons if they are animated and star in a cartoon short (i.e., Superman). In this case, and in many similar ones, that character exists in both comic strip and animated form.*
*Comic strip toons are similar to regular toons in the fact that they are sentient beings made of ink and paint. However, these toons are silent. They, too, work under directors, producing comic strips via multiple series of photographs. The only other difference from their talking cousins is that they are two dimensional, like a paper doll.
Toons, as previously mentioned, are also capable of believing they are their characters. Commonly due to a workplace accident, these unfortunate toons suffer some sort of physical trauma or undergo some form of stress, and this causes a shift in their personalities. The best known example of this was a toon named (The Toon of a Thousand Faces) Baron VonRotten; a freelance toon actor during the early 1940s, specializing in the ability to shift his form to suit almost any role. He was playing the off-camera role of Man in the 1942 Disney film, "Bambi" (citation needed) when he suffered an unexpected head injury that left him no time for him to turn the situation into a gag, and woke up believing he was truly the villain he was playing.
He is also one of six known examples of toons who became physically and emotionally corrupted (the other five being the members of the Los Angeles Toon Patrol, a countywide law enforcement agency designed to work as a liaison between T.P.D and the Toontown City Courts).
A toon becomes a bastardized version of his former self when he suffers emotions close to that of a human, such as intense rage, fear, or jealousy. These toons become "real" evil, as opposed to "toony" evil; it warps the celluloid, curdles the ink and cracks the paint that form them. VonRotten went on to commit a series of crimes with his newfound villainy, most notably, the attempted destruction of Toontown using vast amounts of the Dip as part of the Great Streetcar Scandal (United States v. National City Lines Inc.- 1948), and the murder of Gag King, Marvin Acme.
From Chapter 4: A Home for the Toons
Toons were scattered across the globe, working like human actors for money in short animated films. It wasn't until the early 1920s that a group of Los Angeles animators decided that they needed a place to house these creatures, keeping them on hand for whatever cartoon needed to be filmed. While it was simple to force a few animated cats or mice into being, animating a cartoon town was going to be far more complicated. Nobody had ever animated a town in the same manner in which they animated smaller characters, but it was eventually done by piecing sections of projected, layered celluloid, ink and paint. A location was needed to house this town, and one of the backers for the many of the early animation studios, Marvin Acme, offered the backyard of his property in the Hollywood Hills, near the Griffith Park Observatory as the place to build the town (Acme would later go on to own Toontown itself and build a factory on its border, making movie props, practical joke items, and various cartoon objects both living and nonliving before his murder in August, 1947).
More than a thousand animators worked for seven years to do a section of each building at a time, finishing work on the town in the autumn of 1926. By end of the next decade, the town would experience a population boom, adding section upon section devoted to each generation of characters (toons with synchronized sound, color, etc.) creating almost a timeline showing the progress of animation techniques. By the late 1930s, Toontown was a bustling mini-metropolis with its own legal system, police force, mail service, and was officially made a district of the city of Los Angeles in 1938. The whole environment has an imaginary, fantasy, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Not only do cartoon characters live there but even the buildings, cars, plants, and such are all animated with their own personalities, speech patterns, stylistic movement, and other anthropomorphic traits that are impossible in reality.
Toontown exists as an ever-expanding city in a few acres of property. The size of the property is inadequate for any normal city, but toon physics dictating the rules in this instance, Toontown almost exists in another world, capable of growing, yet not appearing any larger from the outside. Similar to the concept of a tesseract, the combination of "real world" and "toon" physics for this unique town has caused physicists to coin a new term for a surrealistically massive interior with a comparatively small exterior: a "Tooniverse" or "Looniverse", which not only encompasses the town, but Toon Heaven and Toon Hell…."
"Toontown is home to the most unique architecture anywhere on earth. Rivaling the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, Toontown's infrastructure features a wide variety of anthropomorphic buildings (often sentient), rubber-like roads, removable lane markers (which are useful for getting one's enemies off your trail when you peel them off like tape and move them elsewhere so they follow the lines to a dead end), literal drawbridges (one must physically draw the bridge across a gap in the road)…. The buildings and other surroundings range from the bright pastels of the modern district to the eerie, silent black and white flickering structures of Old Toontown, to the menacing buildings, decrepit and angular, of the sad, neutral tones of The Wrong Side of the Tracks. This neighborhood is home to many a ne'er-do-well, part of Toontown's extensive Underworld. Also unique to the town are visual metaphors, such as a large dressmaker's pin falling from the sky in the early hours of the morning when the town is quiet enough to hear a pin drop. As toons are very literal (once again, the Rule of Funny) you'll find little comedic gems such as this sprinkled throughout the town's landscape…"
"Humans are also susceptible to the physics of Toontown, and thus are able to perform feats that contradict the laws of physics in the human world. In addition, anything foreign to it such as objects (and occasionally people) from the real world have also been known to become animated once being exposed to the Toon environment. This makes it remarkably fun, yet also extremely dangerous for humans. For one example, we look back to the murder of private detective Theodore J. Valiant in 1942. He was crushed to death by a grand piano which was dropped 15 stories to the ground below by Baron VonRotten. The piano was a foreign object smuggled in from the human world, and was not able to become animated due to the nature of the situation it was in, therefore rendering it harmful to the human visitor. It is almost as if the town has a sense of when to use the rule of funny, and when not to. Sometimes, one hears background music emanating from the air around them, almost as if the town itself in in a friendly conspiracy to add a bit of drama or humor to your visit, making you feel like you're a character in your very own cartoon…"