The Fox and The Crow

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The Fox and The Crow (also: The Fox & the Crow , dt. The Fox and the Crow ) is the title of one in the 1940s on behalf of Columbia Pictures produced series of animated -Kurzfilmen, and several based on these cartoons comic series .

Cartoons

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The first film is about the attempts of a rather stupid fox ( The Fox ) to get hold of some grapes, whereby a nasty crow ( The Crow ) throws a spanner in the works by using nasty tricks to get the desired fruit hinders.

Production and publication

The first cartoon for The Fox & the Crow was produced in 1941 under the direction of Frank Tashlin . Responsible for this first film in the series, which was titled The Fox & the Grapes , was The Screen Gems Studio , a studio belonging to Columbia Pictures which specialized in the production of animated films. The film was released on December 5, 1941 in US cinemas . A second film followed six months later, around two dozen films in total were produced and over time The Fox and the Crow became Screen Gems Studios' greatest success.

After Tashlin left, who moved to Warner Brothers after the first film, where he worked on series such as Piggy Dick and Daffy Duck , Bob Wickersham took over the artistic direction of the production of " The Fox and the Crow " cartoons. In terms of content, Wickersham chose a completely different approach than Tashlin: The fox became a loner with him who only wanted his peace and quiet, which the intrusive and awkward crow did not want to grant him.

In 1948 the production of "The Fox & Crow" cartoons was transferred to the independent production company UPA, headed by Steven Bosustow . Columbia was prompted to take this action after chronic difficulties arose in maintaining sufficient workforce in the company's cartoon studios. The cartoons produced by Bosustow ( Robin Hoodlum , 1948 and The Magic Fluke , 1949), directed by John Hubley , were designed in an avant-garde new style of drawing that initially met with dissatisfaction among those in charge at Columbia, but which evaporated after both Films have been nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Cartoon. As a result, The Screen Gems Studio was closed and henceforth produced as Columbia cartoons by UPA.

However, since UPA showed no inclination to continue the bankruptcy estate of a "failed studio" and instead preferred to concentrate on its own creations such as Mister Magoo , only a single The Fox and the Crow cartoon ( Punchy de Leon ) was made, the 1950 came into theaters. This film, again directed by Hubley, was the last ever The Fox and the Crow film.

comics

In 1945, the US publisher DC Comics licensed Columbia Pictures to publish a comic book adaptation of The Fox and The Crow .

Authors

The most important author of the comic book stories for The Fox and The Crow , which appeared over a period of more than 20 years (1945–1968), was the American Jim Davis, who was often confused with the creator of the famous cartoon cat Garfield due to the similarity of his name. Davis was supported by the authors Hubie Karp and Cecil Beard.

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The comic version of The Fox and the Crow is closely based on the cartoons produced by Wickersham. The starting point of every story is the explosive neighborhood of Crawford Crow, a charming but somewhat seedy Hallodri who lives in a multi-storey hollowed-out tree and the bourgeois, occasionally overly smug, Fauntleroy Fox, whose home is a pretty, large house near Crows tree .

publication

At the height of their popularity (1951–1954), three stately series of stories about The Fox and The Crow ( Comic Cavalcade , Real Screen Comics and the eponymous series The Fox and The Crow ) appeared each month .

DC published stories about TFaTC initially in the series Real Screen Comics , which was restarted in 1945 , in which the series played a dominant role over the other series printed there. While the backup features Tito & His Burrito and Flippity & Flop each had one story per issue, The Fox and The Crow were devoted to two to four stories in each new issue. Real Screen was renamed TV Screen Cartoons in 1959 and finally discontinued in 1961.

In 1948, The Fox and the Crow were finally incorporated as a feature in the former superhero series Comic Cavalcade , which was being turned into a humor series at that time. Since the main theme of the series was "funny animals", features such as Nusty Squirrel and The Dodo and the Frog were found in it in addition to the fox and the crow . Stories related to The Fox and the Crow appeared on the series until it was discontinued in 1954.

In 1951, barely a year after the last cartoon about The Fox and The Crow hit theaters, the comics were put into the focus of a separate series that continued until 1968. A long-standing backup feature within the series was The Hounds & the Hare series, which was retained until 1965. After Hound and Hare was discontinued due to dwindling popularity, DC experimented with constantly changing back-up series, until 1967 with issue # 95 Stanley and His Monster was finally established as a new permanent backup series. Unusually, the backup series got the prominent front part of the magazine, while the actual main series was relegated to the back pages. This tendency continued, as Stanley and his monster were noted first small and then larger and larger as subtitles on the title pages of The Fox and The Crow , while conversely the lettering that referred to the real heroes of the series became smaller and smaller from issue to issue . In May 1968 issue # 109, the title was officially changed to Stanley & His Monster , while The Fox & the Crow disappeared from the series.

A German-language edition of the comics appeared from 1972 to 1974 as Fox and Flax with 25 issues in the Bildschriftverlag .

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