TheLittleSongbird
I have been a lifelong fan of the Looney Tunes/Warner Brothers cartoons, but the late-60s output(the dark age I've heard it being called) has been largely disappointing. There are a few good ones though, and Norman Normal is one of the better ones. The animation has been more fluid and detailed before Norman Normal, but it's still colourful and nice to look at, much better-looking than the Daffy/Speedy output in particular. The music is memorable, more than listenable and fits well with the humour, one of Bill Lava's- his scoring I have been mixed on- better late-60s WB efforts. The theme song is very catchy. The writing is very satirical and it is suitably witty and the best of it makes your sides split from laughing. The visual gags and sound effects are clever and imaginative too, the modern atmosphere is very nicely depicted, done in a way that never jars, and there are effective scenes like Norman refusing to laugh at the minority group joke. The characters are fun and Norman is a likable protagonist. The voice acting is solid too, though you do miss Mel Blanc. All in all, under-appreciated and highly effective cartoon, not WB at their absolute best or in their heyday but considering we're talking about their dark era here Norman Normal is one of their better ones by quite some considerable margin. 9/10 Bethany Cox
slymusic
"Norman Normal" is a Warner Bros./Seven Arts one-shot cartoon that is very strange. But then, it's the sixties! Our hero, the title character, is a businessman who apparently gets to choose the path of his life via a series of doors. The animation is nothing really special, but the results are, shall we say, interesting.My two favorite scenes in this cartoon: First, Norman and his boss decrease in age and height as they argue together. And second, one of Norman's inebriated buddies regales him with a joke about a traveling salesman and an Eskimo ("That was no walrus. That was your wife!").There's not much else I can write about "Norman Normal"; you'll just have to see it for yourself. It somehow got tacked onto the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6 Disc 4, even though it is not a Looney Tune.
tavm
Just watched this extremely rare Warner Bros. cartoon on the Misce-Looney-ous Blog. With a story, voices, and title song sung by Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, the title character of Norman Normal (voice of Paul Dixon) is a young ad executive who's told by his boss to get his latest client drunk in order to sign a contract, tries to talk to his father about right and wrong but only gets stories of the Depression from him and gets told to "fit in", and encounters at a cocktail party a lampshade wearing guy who keeps saying "approval", another drunk guy who tells a racist joke about Eskimos, and a bartender who says, "You don't want your real personality to show, do you?" when Norman refuses a drink. Directed by Alex Lovy, this supposed pilot for a possible TV series showed some promise when Norman and his boss are talking and they literally turn into a bully and a shy kid while discussing their client as if the whole thing is something that brings Norman bad memories of his childhood but the subsequent stuff with the father (who literally floats in the air when discussing his past) and the cocktail party fell flat with me. Still, this one-shot from the near end of the Warner Bros. cartoon factory in the late '60s is worth a look for anyone with a taste for the unique. And dig the rock band that appears in the beginning and end!
Hotoil
There are no falling rocks, speedy animals, clumsy hunters, Sinatra impersonations, mafia gags, or violent rabbits here. But this under-appreciated classic animated short came from the same studios that brought us Bugs Bunny, Road Runner & Tweety Bird.Not only that, it came out of the studio's worst era, which consisted of mostly bad Daffy Duck & Speedy Gonzalez shorts. Most of the animated pieces to come out of Warner Bros. in the sixties were predictable of Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett & Tex Avery classics, and they didn't fair well in theatres as the pre-film cartoon was just about extinct.But for some reason, an undeniably smart and subtly hilarious social satire rose from the ashes of the dying genre. I am of course speaking of "Norman Normal". I had heard decent things about it but when I saw the actual cartoon, I was on the floor laughing. The closest thing I could relate it to would not be any other WB cartoon but rather the Simpsons at their best.This may have been a nice series, but perhaps best left in it's own right as a singular sensation. Of course it didn't make much of a splash in it's time and thus will probably never see the light of TV, but hopefully the Cartoon Network will dig it from it's vaults and let a whole new audience appreciate it's short but sweet alternative comedy stylings.
AD
