Cat on a hot thin groove HC
As creative director at UPA studios, whose bold, abstract style (e.g., in the Mr. Magoo cartoons) influenced all movie cartooning, and at Terrytoons, where he created Tom Terrific, Deitch was a leading figure in 1950s film animation. Just before then (1945-50), he contributed prolifically toThe Record Changer, a jazz magazine, drawing dozens of graphically bold issue covers as well as gag cartoons in his midcentury-modern style (think Virgil Partch meets Gerald McBoing-Boing). The cartoons feature "the Cat," a hardcore record collector and jazz purist based on Deitch himself. In them, the bald, bespectacled jazz lover chases down rare platters, argues the superiority of traditional jazz to bebop, and otherwise airs his obsession (in one cartoon, he turns to horticulture because cactus needles were thought to cause less wear than metal ones on shellac 78s). Deitch's breezy annotations bolster the cartoons' evocation of the postwar jazz scene, and this oversize volume, containing all of the Cat and the covers as well as other drawings, is a hipster's delight nonpareil.Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved