MORE BIO: THE PREMIERE of COOL WORLD! (For Paid Members Only!)

THE PREMIERE

Sorry...I haven't seen the movie since that one time, so my memories get vague.

The audience was abuzz, primed for frank, raunchy entertainment; boisterous screams and revelry through the stark white-on-black titles.

We sat through the live action establishment. It's okay...the fun's coming; we're just learning why.

Cartoon/live begins. By now, audience is more subdued, as if calmly bewildered; are we having fun yet? There was some cautious laughter at the sight of the random Toby the Pup skipping cycle, traced from one of the ancient cartoons. If only more like it would come. It was arbitrarily placed on a very artificial set, a bar, a bedroom, I don't remember. Or I couldn't tell. The millions of dollar budget was nowhere to be seen...and the audience was being lost.

The film seemed lost, as if looking for a place to set.

Holly the dancer, Center space in a circle of admirers. Bakshi had played it safe. Holly was not a cartoon through and through. She was Saturday morning sexy. Louise Zingarelli's design had been more stylized. Upon seeing this animation, she lamented, “I gave her a RUMP!!”, shaping a voluptuous rump with her palms. Comparing it to Jessica Rabbit's entrance would be pointless and sad.

My scenes came in like spasms. Nonsensical loonies plastered on, like putting a Hanna Barbera cel on a PINOCCHIO background. It wasn't what I'd do. On my skin, I could feel my work being understood again.

So on and so forth. I was going to give a play by play, but why? The picture had unraveled. The Bakshi-isms were there for their own sake. Never funny, just frenetic. Even the long awaited sex scene was a big bunch of nothing. Ralph had hopped around about exactly what kind of audience this was for, and we got a sex scene no hotter than a sequence from John Jakes' THE BASTARD. No. Colder. Holly, fully clothed, mauling herself against a barely visible Jac...k.

What can I say? Ralph loves Vegas, so we have Kim Basinger humping Frank Sinatra, Jr. onstage, and running into walls turning into a cartoon clown. The ending, with flashy animation of a flamboyant Superman that none of us had been privy to, did not save the day as Ralph had probably hoped.

After the show, some of us were gathering to have a group mourning session, but the girl I had come with had the car, and something or other she didn't like had gone on, and she wanted to leave suddenly. It wasn't the only time it happened with her.

COOL WORLD laid a notorious weekend egg, and I heard that you wouldn't get another job if you mentioned it after the interview. Without malice toward me, people gloated over its failure. Even years later a computer teacher asked me, “Milton, why was COOL WORLD so bad??” Don't ask me. I'm a cartoonist, not a psychiatrist.

Ralph asked Mike Kazaleh the next morning, “Everyone hates me, right?”

I wasn't bowled over with shock and disappointment. It was obvious right through COOL WORLD was going to be incoherent, but we just didn't know what shape it would take. I had learned not to expect anything written by someone else to satisfy me. My Hollywood career was not helped by the film, but by a coworker.

Since 30 years have passed, I encounter a number of younger people who openly love the picture. It's the way the game plays sometimes. COOL WORLD and ADVENTURES OF SONIC THE HEDGEHOG become classics, while REN AND STIMPY “dates badly”.