Sally Cruikshank - Biography - "Quasi at The Quackadero"

"Quasi At The Quackadero"

While editing "Chow Fun" at San Francisco's Snazelle Films, a commercial-film company that also rented out space and film equipment, Cruikshank, at an employee's suggestion, showed her work to company president E. E. Gregg Snazelle, who gave her a job a week later "to experiment in animation and do TV commercials when there was work." By the end of summer 1972, Cruikshank was head animator there. In 2009, she recalled of her time with Snazelle,

The job was to experiment with animation, and do commercials for him when the jobs came in. He also hoped I'd figure out how to solve 3-d without glasses. Needless to say I didn't solve 3-d. I didn't even do very many commercials over ten years, but I showed up at 8:30, took an hour off for lunch and worked till 5:30. I was paid $350 a month, and I could live on that then. He encouraged me generously without ever paying much attention to me. These days if an opportunity like that even existed, you'd be forced to sign all kinds of rights statements for characters and content created, but this was before Star Wars and he just seemed to be happy to have me around. We were never particularly close. It spoiled me for any job after that. I made all my 'Quasi' films while I was working at Snazelle.

At Snazelle, Cruikshank began developing her best-known work, "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975), working titles of which included "I Walked with a Duck", "Hold That Quasi", and "Quasi Quacks Up." The 10-minute, 35mm short, with 100 watercolor backgrounds and approximately 5,000 cels, took two years for Cruikshank to draw, followed by four months for photography and post-production. Cruikshank independently financed the $6,000 budget, which went primarily for cel painting, sound recording and lab and camera work. Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, then Cruikshank's boyfriend, did much of the inking, using dip pen and rapidograph, with Kathryn Lenihan doing most of the cel painting. The short starred Quasi, voiced by Deitch; Anita, which one writer described as "Betty Boop with a New Wave wardrobe" and whose Mae West-like voice was supplied by Cruikshank; and robot Rollo. They progress through the Quackadero, a Coney Island-esque sideshow with such attractions as the Hall of Time Mirrors, which depict the viewer as he or she will look in "old age" or "100 years from now", and the Time Holes, in which one can lean on a railing and see a live slice of three million years B.C. unfold. The music, by the Berkeley, California band the Cheap Suit Serenaders, used slide flute, xylophone, ukelele, duck call, boat whistle and bagpipe to create what Cruikshank called the "strange, gallopy feeling" of 1920s/1930s dance-band music, of which she is a devotee.

"Quasi at the Quackadero" won awards and was shown at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, and made its first theatrical booking at the Northside Theater in Berkeley, not far from Cruikshank's home at the time at 1890 Arch Street in that city.