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 .