Back-Tomilakshi
The release on video of Ralph Bakshi's 'American Pop" settles a score.
ROBERT J. HAWKINS
Special to The Jewish News
A
phone call to Ralph Bakshi
solved the mystery of the
whereabouts of his classic
animated feature American
Pop, one of the most requested films
never to have been released on home
video.
Until now
Now, you can buy it
for under $20, thanks to
what Bakshi calls the "new
management" at
Columbia TriStar.
But why the wait? Why
17 years later?
Bakshi, 60 years old
and contentedly living as
far from Hollywood as
possible, has an explana-
tion. Let me summarize it
for you: Hollywood is run
by idiots.
I will elaborate.
When Bakshi made
American Pop, his sweep-
ing saga of popular music
and culture as told
through four generations
of one family of musi-
cians, he filled it with —
what else? — pop music.
Rock stars of the day
thought Bakshi was cool.
He was the creator of
Fritz the Cat, man. He
made animations for
adults. He broke the rules. They dug
that.
They (or their heirs) gave him the
music: Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-
Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice,
It's All Right"; The Doors' "People Are
Strange"; Jimi Hendrix's "Purple
Haze"; Pat Benatar's "Hell Is For
Children"; and Lou Reed's "I'm
Waiting for the Man" among many,
many others — including songs from
Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane,
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sam Cooke and
Herbie Hancock.
Robert J. Hawkins writes for Copley
News Service.
5/22
1998
88
Today, you can't put out a movie
without a pop song soundtrack. It's
some kind of a rule. Today, you have
to name the movie after a pop song.
Back then, Bakshi was just being a
rebel. The studio didn't get it. And
they definitely didn't get it when
Bakshi came to them and said that for
$1,000 per song he could get rights to
all the music for the life of the film.
What? Spend another $30,000 on
top of the measly $4 million they gave
him to create his epic?
The studio bosses — businessmen,
not visionaries — said no.
So American Pop sat on the prover-
bial shelf. Bakshi resisted studio
attempts to strip it of the very music it
celebrates and substitute generic pap
for pop.
Bottom line: To give American Pop
legs today, Columbia TriStar had to
shell out $30 million for music rights.
You can only hope that for that kind
of money, they can put out an
American Pop soundtrack double CD.
Bakshi, of course, is laughing like
mad as he tells this story. For him, it
is a vindication, of sorts.
"Everywhere I turned [in
Hollywood] there was an objection,"
he says. "Now, Homer Simpson drops
his drawers on TV and nothing hap-
pens."
Back then, in the 1970s and '80s,
Bakshi's R-rated animated features
were seen as some kind of personal
Benny, a brilliant musician whose life is
ruined by his gangsterfizthen plays one
last gig before going off to war in
Columbia Pictures' animated tale,
`American Pop."
assault on the good name of Walt
Disney, the only other maker of ani-
mated features at the time.
Bakshi, who was born in Haifa in
1938, the son of Russian Jewish immi-
grants, grew up in Brownsville,
Brooklyn. He was raised in poverty in
a slum neighborhood and attended
Manhattan's High School of Industrial
Arts.
He got his first job in animation in
the early '60s at the Terrytoons
Studio, quickly advanced to the posi-
tion of director on the Mighty Mouse,
James Hound and Mighty Heroes
series, and, at age 24, was named cre-
ative director of the entire studio. He
later went on to head up the cartoon INO
series at Paramount Pictures.
Bakshi left the studio animation
system to write and direct
his first independent ani-
mated feature film, the X-
rated Fritz the Cat (1972).
In addition to being the
first to introduce adult
themes to a largely-Disney
oriented medium, he was 10
a major experimenter in
animation. Long before
there were computers to
do the grunt work, he was
mixing media, rotoscoping
(using film of humans
transformed into anima-
tion), mixing styles,
pulling MTV-like jump
cuts and creating offbeat 1•4
perspectives.
Bakshi subsequently
directed eight more ani-
mated features, including
Heavy Traffic, Coonskin,
Wizards, Lord of the Rings
and American Pop. Four of
his features were honored
by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York
and were inducted into
the museum's personal collection.
Bakshi's characters are multidi-
mensional, complicated, anti-heroes.
Some of the most vivid scenes in
American Pop are the violent ones —
the wars, a Russian pogrom and
Prohibition Era gang battles. Bakshi's
strongly innovative style is also
extremely personal, drawing on his
own rough experiences as a child.
In 1987, Bakshi returned to his
roots, reviving the Terrytoons charac-
ters in "Mighty Mouse: The New
Adventures" for CBS's Saturday morn-
ing lineup. The combination of hip
humor and snappy timing was a crit;-
cal success and the show received an
.