#2163

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2163^rd Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3611, October 26, 2006.
Golden State Colonial Convalescent Hospital, 10830 Oxnard Street, North Hollywood, California 91606-5098.
Telephone: hospital(818) 763-8247; personal (818) 506-3159 * eMail:fredpatten@earthlink.net

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Last Tuesday, the 17th, my sister Sherrill took me to see the exhibit of Disney animation drawings at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive in Burbank. Michael Burlake joined us there. These are key animation pencil drawings from Disney's Alice cartoons of the 1920s to about the time Disney stopped using pencil drawings to paint cels over after Sleeping Beauty. Artists identified include Art Babbitt, Ub Iwerks, Freddie Moore, Grim Natwick, Les Clark, Vladimir Tytla, Ward Kimball, Marc Davis, Preston Blair, Norm Ferguson, Milt Kahl, and all of Disney's greatest artists from the '20s through the '50s. They aren't in color, just pencil outline cartoons, but all are perfectly centered showing the stars of their cartoons in the key poses that were often used for all the full-color publicity art for those characters ever since. Pinocchio. Maleficent. Mickey Mouse. The Country Cousin mouse. Snow White. Pegleg/Black Pete. The boy tree from Flowers and Trees. The Bald Mountain devil and a centaurette from Fantasia. The exhibit is there (2114 West Burbank Blvd.; look for the "hidden doorway") through the end of November, free on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the permanent exhibits there are also well worth seeing, especially the one on the creation of Betty Boop (including a caricature of other Fleischer animators not being able to draw her as sexily as Grim Natwick could). While we were there, a couple of animators doing research on 1930s black-&-white cartoons showed us a couple of them; Bob Clampett's We, the Animals Squeak and a rare Popeye, A Clean Shaven Man, with a cameo appearance by George G. Geezil (who is anything but clean-shaven). Afterwards the three of us went to the Pinocchio Italian restaurant in Burbank for dinner.

On Wednesday, Lee Gold sent me a weblink to L'Encyclopedie Francophone de la SF, with enlargeable cover illustrations and tables of contents of all American, British, French, and Italian s-f magazines up to the 1960s or 1970s, depending upon the magazine (the site is still adding newer issues to the present), plus the covers of s-f reference books like James Gunn's Alternate Worlds; The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, Dave Kyle's A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, and Alva Rogers' A Requiem for Astounding. She hoped it would enable me to identify my Gaughan s-f covers, and it did. Besides the two that I found at the Eaton Collection the previous week, the third is the cover of Worlds of If, May-June 1972. This site is a wonderful visual encyclopedia, and I will probably spend hours looking at the covers of Astounding from January 1930 through 1975, Galaxy from October 1950 to 1970, F&SF from Autumn 1949 through 1974, Weird Tales all issues, and plenty more including British and French s-f magazines that I have never seen before. Close-up enlargements of covers by Hannes Bok, Kelly Freas, Ed Emsh, Jack Gaughan, Hubert Rogers, Frank R Paul, Robert Gibson Jones, Vincent DiFate, Earle Bergey, Howard V. Brown, Graves Gladney, Edd Cartier, Mel Hunter, Chesley Bonestell, Margaret Brundage, Richard Powers, John Schoenherr, Rick Sternbach, H. W. Wessolowski, Lee Brown Coye, J. Allen St. John, Alex Schomburg, Boris Dolgov, H. W. McCauley plus dozens more; not to mention the British magazines with covers by Gerard Quinn and Brian Lewis, and the French and Italian magazines with covers by artists I never heard of except for Karel Thole. Yep; hours of viewing pleasure here. Thank you very much, Lee.

On Thursday, Len & June Moffatt came to the Golden State Hospital in the early evening to interview me for the fan guest-of-honor writeup in the Loscon Program Book. Michael Burlake brought me to the LASFS meeting. This may have been memorable to most attendees for the program on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and Dymaxion automobile (the early 1930s newsreel footage of the Dymaxion car was fascinating; the videos of Fuller explaining his geodesics was boring), but to me this was one of the most important meetings in years for another reason. Bob Null had gotten some early club records from the 1930s & '40s from Forry Ackerman that club members had assured me for decades were lost before I joined the LASFS in 1960, and we were finally able to pin down exactly when the club began meeting every Thursday. The club met very irregularly during 1935. Forry Ackerman was responsible for its reorganization at the beginning of February 1936, meeting on the first and third Thursdays of every month. Sometime later, the L.A. fans began meeting informally in Hollywood on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. These were combined on January 5, 1939 into regular LASFS meetings on the first four Thursdays of the month. However, if there was a fifth Thursday, the LASFS skipped that week. We did not begin meeting every single Thursday until the beginning of July 1942. I have updated the LASFS history for the Loscon Program Book to include this information. So now we know!

On Saturday, Sherry brought me to the October Cartoon/Fantasy Organization meeting. The club's usual anime program was set aside for a "Trick or Treat special" of Coyote Ragtime Show #1, Black Lagoon #13, Black Blood Brothers #1, D. Gray-man #1 and #2, Death Note #1, Hell Girl #1 and #2, and the first four episodes of Hundred Stories (a.k.a. Natsuhiko Kyougoku's Worldly Horror Stories, a.k.a. Requiem from the Darkness) for a feature. The last five titles were appropriately vampire or horror-themed, but the first two were hard-boiled crime shoot-'em-ups with maximum violence. Not that anyone complained.

Anthro #8, the November-December 2006 issue, will be online next week. Editor Cubist has just e.mailed its regular writers some statistics on the Furry magazine's growth:

ANTHRO's readership has grown, perhaps not *steadily*, but certainly in a *continual* manner. Looking at the number of pages served up to websurfers for the second month of each issue's two-month 'cover date' (because that way, we avoid any statistical distortion from the "first day spike"), here's the traffic figures for each issue:

#1 (Oct '05), 2732
#2 (Dec '05), 7430
#3 (Feb '06), 8659
#4 (Apr '06), 12758
#5 (Jun '06), 17991
#6 (Aug '06), 34743
#7 (Oct '06), 53988

The Oct '06 figure may be questionable, since I took the existing number for Oct 1-20 and multiplied it by 31/20. Likewise, the nearly-100% jump between #5 and #6 reflects a significant change in the zine's format *as well as* any change in readership, so the figure for Aug '06, also, is questionable.

Even so, it looks like ANTHRO's readership is growing exponentially, at more-or-less 40% per issue.

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Another Last-Second Zine - (Cantor) Judging by the discussions so far, it looks like there is general approval for a new award for long-time service to fandom, but a division as to whether it should be called the Mason Award or the Pelz Award, and some question as to whether it should be for fandom in general or for LASFS members only. The discussion has mostly been silent on whether the award should be voted upon by the membership or selected by the Board of Directors (or a special committee of the Board). How does this get brought up for a final decision by anyone? Also, considering the recent comments at meetings as to whether the LASFS is operating at a deficit currently, there should probably be discussion as to how a new award might financially affect the club. ## You would probably not be interested in who the hell Alan Moore really is, even though his s-f is all words on paper (but with lots of pictures added by illustrators). He has denounced all the movies based on his s-f works like V for Vendetta, by the way. I have mentioned before in Apa L, but may not have identified Moore as the author, the scene in Top Ten where a team of police in the futuristic/alternate Earth city of Neopolis, including the robot cop Joe Pi, is wondering how to get at a criminal in an impregnable building. Joe Pi asks the others if they have ever heard of the Three Laws of robotics. "No; what's that?" "Oh, never mind," says Joe Pi, who obviously does not have a positronic brain and has figured out a way of getting at the criminal which will be fatal to him. (Another great chapter was the one where the cops conduct an NYPD-style interrogation of the Norse gods while investigating who killed Baldur. Naturally, my favorite character was the talking Doberman in a humanoid exoskeleton precinct desk sergeant, Kemlo Caesar, who wore a T-shirt off-duty that said, "What Part of 'Arf' Don't You Understand?" I highly recommend Top Ten, available on Amazon.com.)

Toony Loons #17 - (Zeff) I will have to watch Duck Soup again (no problem; it is worth watching often) to try to spot Charles Middleton in additional scenes. ## Are 800 parrots more of an infestation than that park would get from other birds if the parrots were not there?

Godzilla Verses #110 - (DeChancie) "But have I been looking at Friz all these years and seeing Fritz, or has his name been repeatedly misspelled?" Probably both. His name has certainly been often misspelled as Fritz, so often that people have been misled into thinking that it is misspelled when it has appeared correctly as Friz. Somebody recently reported that a Google search has shown more misspellings of "Spiderman" than of the official Marvel spelling of Spider-Man. ## Do you need to get authorization from a celebrity's estate to use him or her as the protagonist in a novel or series of novels? I think that Ron Goulart is up to his fourth or fifth novel with Groucho Marx solving murders, and June Moffatt has been loaning me Peter J. Heck's novels featuring Mark Twain doing the same (Death on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court, Tom's Lawyer, etc.) I understand that some celebrities or their estates (Bela Lugosi, The Three Stooges) have trademarked their names so they can sue if anyone uses those names without paying royalties first.

De Jueves #1501 - (Moffatt) I imagine a Mason Award as only for living fans, but I am not sure that should be a formal restriction, just like the Forry award has always been voted to living authors but the LASFS is not prevented from giving it to a deceased author if the voters so vote. H. G. Wells has been a nominee at least one year. But I think that the name of the award should be that of a deceased club member that we want to honor, rather than calling it the Moffatt Award or the Trimble Award or suchlike. ## I have read that ants supposedly evolved from wasps or hornets that lost their wings. I have not read how winged wasps and hornets supposedly evolved. ## Is the weight/bulk of half-dollars why that coin is no longer popular? Half-dollars were as common as any other coin during my youth; I do not remember them as disappearing until after the U.S. stopped making silver coins in the 1960s.

I Varnish Mushrooms - (Gold) It's too bad that neither of the attempts to give England a real King Arthur (in the 13th & 16th centuries) worked. Queen Victoria reportedly wanted her eldest son to become King Albert I (Albert Edward; "Prince Bertie"), but he chose the name Edward VII.