Month: July 2019

Melissa Mason specialized in extreme high kicking. She could appear to swing her leg in 360 degrees like it was her shoulder. Her foot positioning sometimes appears unnatural, and I think that adds to the crazy effect. Consider how the direction of your character’s feet impacts the pose. Maybe they don’t have to follow what looks “right.”

She focuses on her legs a lot, and sometimes her arms hang loosely and have a wiggly motion which I kind of like. Her arms also get put into use for some cool poses, if you watch closely.

After the big leg swing, she strikes a pose of looking up to the sky. It adds punctuation to the motion.

Here is a gif of that leg swing. You can see that pose of looking up to the sky.

Here is a different version one of the clips with more recent music.

Jack Coogan was a vaudeville dancer and the father of Jackie Coogan, the little boy who played “The Kid” in Charlie Chaplin’s film of the same title. Here is fun clip of him in a Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton short film. It’s a little unusual as his dance isn’t a solo bit, but is used to motivate other physical comedy.

Hal LeRoy is another great eccentric dancer for animators to study.

HERE IS A LINK to a blog post from Filmstruck about him.

This next one has a unique camera angle from below a glass floor. You can get a great sense of how rotated his feet are.

I chose this next one for the staging. So many old Hollywood dance routines are on stages. Here is something a bit different. The trolley driver who dances on his station, then the platform, then dances through the car. Imagine the possibilities for places to dance.

This next one features something I can’t say I have seen before. Dancing on stilts. This is from a short film, “Rythmitis” which has the gimmick of pills that turn the user into an energetic dancer. It appears that this is another dancer in a Hal LeRoy film, but I’m not sure of his name.

Often, it’s fun to see an eccentric dance routine put to contemporary music. Enjoy Jack Stanford dancing to Uptown Funk.

In this video, you can also hear him sing.

James “Stump” Cross and Eddie “Stumpy” Hartman were a comedy dance duo popular on stage and film from the mid-30s to the 50s. In addition to excellent dancing, the two also were a classic comedy duo with contrasting heights. The taller “Stump” made funny faces and shifted his hat and jacket around for comical effect, while the shorter “Stumpy” simply smiled and danced. Cross would also shift into a much slower motion, which also contrasted with Hartman’s continued speed.