So my friend Sherry texted me a Cher question a week or so ago. Sherry is a writer and editor for tech and finance research firms in the New York City area. She is also one of the writers I met at Sarah Lawrence back in the 1990s and she published a great book of poetry, The Palace of Ashes and is also an enthusiast of the great American Southwest landscapes and Indian Nation jewelry and I’ve gotten to know her better during her yearly trips out to that area.

Anyway, her question led me down a rabbit hole (hours and hours of tunnels in fact). So here’s here question:

“I can remember watching at least two animated cartoon music videos on network TV shows when I was a kid. One was for “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” the other for “Sweet Gypsy Rose.” The question is did I see them both on the Sonny & Cher Show? Or just one and the other on the Tony Orlando & Dawn show? Our family watched both. Since music videos on TV weren’t a thing, these were memorable. And I was a kid, so CARTOONS!”

So the “Sweet Gypsy Rose” (a Tony Orlando and Dawn hit) part was extremely frustrating research because I could clearly remember seeing the Wilson animation as sung  by Sonny’s solo but the clip was nowhere to be found by itself on YouTube, nor could I find it in any online episode guides or even my own episode guides! Finally I found the clip on IMDB.com with a credit to John Wilson and Sonny so I knew it existed.

It felt like, once again, the Internet was gaslighting me.

I finally found the video buried in a John Wilson compilation (more on that below). But the mystery is still outstanding, which Comedy Hour show did this video appear on?

In any case, during this deep dive into John Wilson cartoons. I learned a few things:

  1. In some cases, like for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Coven’s “One Tin Soldier,” the original animation were created for the original artist and Sonny and Cher simply repurposed them or sang over them for their first variety show.
  2. British artist John Wilson wasn’t always the animator for these videos but sometimes he was. But he was always the brand of the animations (which also sometimes fell under the umbrella of his company Fine Arts Films). Sometimes he was just the director and/or producer. And he’s sometimes billed as John David Wilson. His ex-wife Angele is sometimes credited as ink and painter or colorist on early videos.
  3. There were at least 10 “John Wilson” animations that appeared on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, Sonny and Cher’s first variety series. Then there is the mystery “Sweet Gypsy Rose” cartoon sung by Sonny, which total 11 Wilson cartoons associated with them.
  4. And finally, John Wilson was involved in many other famous animations including both Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) and The Lady and the Tramp (1955), the opening credits for the movie Grease (1978), the old Mr. Magoo cartoons (1953) and an animation for Bob Dylan’s 1983 song “You Gotta Serve Somebody” which is hard to find and see.

The first ten Comedy Hour animations are included on Cher Lunar’s The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour Animated Videos (Full Compilation)

  1. Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” from episode #2 – animated by John Sparey from 1971.
  2. Coven’s “One Tin Soldier” from episode #7 – the title card is hard to read but it looks like animation done by Bill Carney or Parney.
  3. Melanie’s “Brand New Key” from episode #12– no credits.
  4. Sonny & Cher’s own “A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done” from episode #23 (one of my favorite ones) – animation by Rudi Cataldi.

  5. Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory‘s “The Candy Man” from episode 24 – animation by Rudi Cataldi.
  6. Three Dog Night’s “Black and White” from episode #32 (this is my favorite one and a precursor to the Cloud Cult drawing video “When You Reach the End).”
  7. Randy Newman’s “Love Story” from episode #36 – no credits.
  8. Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” from episode #44 – animated by Fred Madison.
  9. Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” from episode #57– animated by Fred Madison (look for the little pre-MTV video image in there and the nod at the very end to the current political leadership the animation addresses).

  10. Cher’s own “Dark Lady” from episode #64 – no credits.

He also did the bumpers and opening credits for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour 1971-1973 and 1974.

Another John Wilson compilation capture’s “Sweet Gypsy Rose,” a roll-up called John Wilson’s Mini-Musicals. The video can be seen at 21:12 (animation by Fred Madison). For a minute I thought maybe it was from The Sonny Comedy Review, Sonny’s short-lived solo 1974 show. But then the wife can be seen washing laundry with a box of “CHER” (a play on the detergent Cheer) and the wife scowls while doing dishes (clearly not happy about her return to domestic life) while the husband relaxes in a chair watching a television playing The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Wilson also famously animated those cartoon faces which also appear on the Comedy Hour set’s orange light globes.

This collection has many more animations, including the original Joni Mitchell and Coven versions of “Big Yellow Taxi” and “One Tin Soldier” at the beginning and also “Both Sides Now” by Mitchell (animated by Wilson and labeled as “a computer image film”) and songs by Helen Reddy (“Angie Baby”) animated by John Wilson, “Ray Davies/The Kinks “Demon Alcohol” (animated by Wilson and sung by W. Carpenter), “Reachin'” by Bob Moline (no animation credit, just “a film by John David Wilson, color by Angele Wilson” from 1971. There are also some other notable Wilson films in this reel, the animation to jazz artist Stan Kenton’s “Conga Valiente” by John Wilson and Tony Pabian and the 1956 animation to Igor Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” which was made by 10 animators, none of them being John Wilson.

And the videos often include the credits cards (see above).

Anyway, when I asked Sherry if I could discuss her question here,  she continued about the song “Sweet Gypsy Rose.”

“I am amazed I can remember something I saw when I was about 9 or 10 years old. The “Gypsy” one was deflating. Housewife runs away (we all would from the cartoon depiction of housework), gets glamourous in a seedy way admittedly, then gets yanked back to housework by husband and is supposed to look happy. That stuck with me. Male viewpoint song. I wish I could see it again to see if it was kind of subversive once she was home again. I would expect that from the S&C gender skirmishes.”

There’s yet another rollup called “John Wilson’s Animation Wonderland VHS.” These are all animated poems and short stories, including Ernest L. Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat” narrated by Paul Frees (1976). Many of them are children’s stories and folk tales and are without any credits (although some of the actors sound very familiar), like Alvin Tresselt’s “The Smallest Elephant in the World,” Peter Hughes’ “The Emperor’s Oblong Pancake” (narrated by Edward Everett Horton, whom I love in the classic movie Holiday), Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (narrated by Vincent Price), the American folk tale “Johnny Appleseed,” the Japanese folk tale “The Stone Cutter” (narrated by Swedish comedian Harry Stewart), “The Chocolate Princess” (author unknown, narrated by Bill Cosby, and I hate to say it but this seems like a very good story and its easy to pretend Bill Cosby isn’t reading it), the Norwegian folk tale “The Salty Sea” (“Why the Sea is Salty”), Greek mythology’s “King Midas,” Mary O’Neill’s “Hailstones and Halibut Bones,” the original story of “The Early Birds” (narrated by Jonathan Winters and voice actress Joan Gerber), Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinder Box,” the American legend “The Fish and the Burning Stones,” John Townsend Trowbridge’s “Darius Green and His Flying Machine,”  a historical retelling of “The Battle of Bunker Hill,” William Shakespeare’s “Jacque’s Speech” from the play As You Like It and “Two Songs” from “Love’s Labor Lost,” and Cyrano de Bergerac’s “A Voyage to the Moon.”

But back to Leroy Brown and Gypsy Rose, Sherry said,

“Thank you for allowing me back into my childhood. I must have seen those on repeat because they were both so familiar.”

I brought up the coded language in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and Sherry astutely noted the glorious depictions of the pimp’s regalia and how this was “Blacksploitation in cartoon form.”

These animations were unforgettable to anyone who saw them as a kid in the 1970s, along with Schoolhouse Rock’s educational animations. They contain some of best examples of 1970s music shorts and undoubtedly influenced the plethora of videos to come in the 1980s, which then turned around to influence Cher’s own 80s and early 90s music videos in a crazy remediation circle.

Some obituaries for John Wilson from: