The Thayer-Hansen 2025 Holiday Cartoon

DDT-V (revisited)

The DDT-V All-Stars
(Can you spot Doug Dieken?)

Fred kept us honest. Any expression of ego was roundly mocked. We were kids, making a cheap comedy show. 

DDT-V (“Lethal Television”) was created by high school and college students, and broadcast intermittently on our community access channel from 1983 to 1986. It was a collection of sketches, fake news shows, and a lot of commercial parodies.



Fred was the driving force, no matter what any of the rest of us thought. He wrote most of the sketches, did so many of the voice-overs, even appeared in front of the camera a couple times.

After he died from a heart attack two years ago (on my fiftieth birthday, as it happened, thanks, Fred) I came into possession of the archive of our work.

Some of it holds up surprisingly well. And even where the humor is a bit obtuse, at least it has style. We used every square foot of the studio building, went all over Bay Village, hosted an entire episode from a booth in the North Olmsted Denny’s, did a location shot outside Cleveland Municipal Stadium downtown. 

When we held a charity baseball game against the high school faculty to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, our team had a ringer in the recently retired Cleveland Browns offensive tackle Doug Dieken.

Cartoon, The Bay Window
March, 1986

Watching these episodes I am able to track my development from a self-conscious freshman to a cocksure senior, which is a blessing and a curse. The one big regret I have, looking back, is that I never wrote anything for the show. That’s not true, I wrote one sketch that was recorded and aired. It’s not great.

I was intimidated. I didn’t know how it was done. Most significantly, I had nothing, at last, to say. I still believe that, at that age, I actually did not have anything of value to say. Or I did not know if I did. Most of what I did write and put out into the world, in the form of op-eds for the weekly high school paper, took the form of snark and grievance.

My editorial cartoons weren’t bad, however. They improved by the year. I suppose there is a lesson in that, that if I had tried to write, at that time, I would eventually come up with something worth being produced.

I guess that is exactly what I have been doing ever since. 

Wishing you creativity and happiness in 2021!

DDT-V Playlist on YouTube

Simple Gifts (1977)

New York at Night (1979)

R. O. Blechman (born Oscar Robert Blechman, 1930) is an illustrator and animator, you probably recognize his work. He made a name for himself creating sequential editorial cartoons for the Village Voice in the 1970s, later for The New York Times and plentiful covers for The New Yorker.

DID YOU KNOW ..? Like all great men, R. O. Blechman graduated from Oberlin College.

Without actually doing any research on the subject, I imagine the artist he is most closely compared to is Jules Feiffer, because of the shaky line. However, whereas Feiffer's people have detailed faces of angst and giddy nervous energy, Blechman's characters visages are so glyphic they are almost childlike, often succumbed by wonder.

R.O. Blechman (self-portrait)

His most-seen animation is probably something like the Alka-Seltzer commercial (1967) in which a man has an argument with his own stomach. My favorite work, however, was when he produced an hour-long holiday program for PBS called Simple Gifts. Seven animators presented works on the theme of Christmas.


Blechman's own piece, No Room at the Inn, retells the story of the Nativity with social commentary familiar to those who treasure his work. This acknowledgement of economic disparity and the plight of the poor is also reflected in Maurice Sendak's Introduction where a shoeless, miserable boy sacrifices his life to become a tree that brings joy to others.

Artist Chwast gives life to a bizarre tale from the bizarre novel Orlando by the bizarre Virgina Woolf, and there is an silly Toonerville Trolley cartoon. Three pieces, however, are biographical, and summon up Christmases from America in the 1860s (rich future President Teddy Roosevelt's My Christmas) and in the 1910s (poor future playwright Moss Hart's A Memory of Christmas)
and the tale most haunting, that of the "Christmas Truce" of 1914.


The story told in this letter from by Sir Edward Hulse was only one example of soldiers, largely British and Canadian, emerging from their trenches to meet and greet Germans (there are far fewer records of any French participating) in no-man's land. First they arranged to retrieve their dead, which led to the singing of hymns, then carols, the sharing of family photos and stories and finally playing soccer and exchanging of gifts.

The afterward to this animation, that Sir Hulse perished in the trenches, doesn't make the story any more poignant, if you are familiar with the wholesale carnage of the Great War. He died on a godforsaken field in France. Of course he did.

Following this dangerous breach of continual murderous violence, those at the top mandated that strict punishments would be meted out if there were any further peaceful gestures made toward the enemy. And once poison gas was introduced in 1915, most Christian amity was successfully broken.

A commercially produced video for Simple Gifts was last released commercial in 1993, and is currently available on VHS for around $130. It has never been released on DVD.

The Adventures of Tintin

Belgian graphic designer Georges Prosper "Hergé" Remi (22 May 1907 – 3 March 1983) created the young, intrepid reporter Tintin (pronounced tan-tan, thank you) and the series of adventures which bear his name.

You know, there was a period during my childhood when my mother thought it would be a good idea to make family vacations out of my father's occasional international working excursions (he was in foreign exchange for Cleveland Trust) which brought me to England, Paris and Norway in the years 1977, 1978 and 1979. This comfy culture shock exposed me to Tintin, Rupert, Asterix and even the Smurfs years before my American contemporaries.

This explains my cosmopolitan world view, bizarre sense of humor, and my general sense of arrogance.

Did you know Inspector Thompson and Inspector Thomson are not brothers, let alone twins?

Tintin adventures stretched from 1929 to the mid-1960s though for me they always had a pre-war vibe. It makes perfect sense that Spielberg would choose to create a movie based out of this material, because the end-product is like Indiana Jones, only with a lot more reasonably acceptable slapstick. The CGI-effected performances make some of the more extreme physical violence a lot more funny and a lot less "Oh my GOD!"
What was most enjoyable for me was that the film plays like a Tintin novel, beginning with Tintin landing in the middle of a mystery, and progressing with great speed to a ship, to the middle of the ocean, to a desert to a non-specific Middle Eastern emirate ... it just goes and goes, no backstory, no Hollywood time wasted explaining who Tintin is, where he came from, even what paper he even works for. Just go-go-go.

And with the exception of an entire absence of tobacco products of any kind, its pretty damn faithful. Guns, whisky, blood ... and only one female character at all, the venerable Madame Castafiore. Tintin is a "boy's own" story, you want more girl characters, adapt something else.


For Christmas I got some of the new editions of Tintin, which are easier to hold but not to read (they are small) but include introductions to key characters which made leaping into what feels like an extended narrative much easier. Just reading half of Red Rackham's Treasure made my six year-old's idea of attending the movie much less fraught.

However, I will want to pick and choose which volumes to acquire or share with the kids, and not just because of the smoking or winking attitude towards Captain Haddock's obsession with drink. A number of them are pretty damn racist. Hergé famously had a world-view alteration from a Tchang Tchong-jen, a Chinese-born companion, which drove him to recreate most of his early work, especially the hideous Tintin in the Congo.

The City Club

Ray Osrin, The Plain Dealer
April 17, 1976
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) spoke Before the City Club of Cleveland on April 9, 1976. The former Governor of Georgia found it necessary to cancel an earlier scheduled appearance in December, and this later date brought him to Cleveland not as a little-known contender against the likes of George Wallace, Sargent Shriver and Jerry Brown, but as the apparent front-runner for the Democratic nomination for President.

The City Club of Cleveland was founded in 1912 to be a venue for the free and open expression of topical and often controversial subject matter, often in the form of debate, followed by questions from the audience. Over the years this weekly forum has been broadcast on radio and television, and until 1976 they produced the annual Anvil Revue, a satirical take on Cleveland society and politics.

Sources:
Wikipedia
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Cleveland Memory Project

Blackwing Sketchbook

Dare

Blackwing Sketchbook
Jenny Lerew, 2006

Little Swee' Pea (1936)

All Roads Lead to Cleveland

Click on image to enlarge.

Teaching and Learning Cleveland: Walter Hagemann, "All Roads Lead to Cleveland Cartoon, Cleveland Plain Dealer June 21, 1936."

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