Hey Good Lookin'

Hey Good Lookin’ is an animated gem from 1982 that Ralph Bakshi, a damned genius behind such animated treasures as Fritz the Cat, Wizards, American Pop, The Lord of the Rings (1978), and Fire and Ice, brought to life. He also brought "Mighty Mouse" to Saturday-morning screens in the 1980s, and his manifold attempts to bring “cartoons” into the realm of serious adult cinema—and lend them artistic legitimacy—were light-years ahead of their time.

Here, he presents us with a film that was originally conceived, much like his Cool World, as a blend of live action and animation. However, the studio, 20th Century Fox, not being overwhelmingly delighted with the results, refused to release the film, and it sat in limbo for many years.

Seven years later, Bakshi, using whatever money he could scrape together, released the film as totally animated, with almost all of the live-action material cut. The result? A darkly chaotic deep dive into a cartoon alternate universe of the 1950s, with NYC grotesques, underworld hoods, and gangbangers of the era all vying for a violent piece of the pie. Or maybe?

The film doesn’t seem to have a solid center but instead flies by in the darkened murk of its grotesque coterie of characters—from a talking trash can, to smoothed-out gangsters and whores, made men bathing at a beach with their wives, to patently stereotyped Black, Jewish, Italian, and Latino figures. There’s a lot to offend here if you have a lily liver and a woke consciousness. But 1982 was a long time ago, and Ralph Bakshi was operating on a whole different level than one might first assume.

HGL, one of Bakshi’s “street films,” is the story of Vinnie (Richard Romanus), a cartoonishly tall and imposing mook with a heavy, broad build and a dapper exterior. Tall, slick, and thuggish, he loves the buxom Jewish girl Rozzie (Tina Bowman), whose insane, stereotyped caricature of a father whisks her away and chains her—quite literally—to the bed (his parenting skills are really something to take exception to, we observe).

Rozzie, who seems as if she were recycled from the faerie in Bakshi’s Wizards, is an animated sex object that brings the film from R to NC-17 pretty quickly, with a rather large bust and a propensity to fall out of her clothing. (Do they still use those classifications?)

Vinnie’s friend, Crazy (David Proval), is another Jewish caricature, but this one straight from the “psycho buddy the protagonist has a mysterious, unexplained obligation toward” trope, which appears in films as disparate as Mean Streets and Summer of Sam. Ironically—or appropriately—the film utilizes the voice talents (and, in the case of Vinnie, the caricatured image) of actors Romanus and Proval, both of whom actually appeared in Mean Streets.

Crazy is a hyper-violent, exaggerated mess of cartoon movements and visual gags. This is animation that blends the gritty, real-world stories of the Naked City with the old-fashioned feel of a Warner Bros. romp, circa 1942. The only thing off here is the 1982 soundtrack, which is annoying New Wave pop that does little to put one in the mind of the 1950s; it’s actually a distracting underscore for action that demanded a completely different set of tunes—none of which, seemingly, surface here.

Solly (Angelo Grisanti) is Crazy’s gun-toting, obsessive cop father, who is apparently on the prowl to kill his meshuga son. With family backgrounds such as these, it is little wonder the characters here lead such desperate, crazy, full-speed-ahead violent lives. Rozzie and her fat friend Eva (Jesse Welles Nathan) get fast food while on the make with Vinnie and Crazy, and at some point in the evening, very unwoke stereotypical Black gang members (one named “Boogaloo”), the Chaplins, foment a rumble with Vinnie’s gang, the Stompers. The rest of the flick rotates around Vinnie’s inability to get his fellow Stompers to participate in what becomes a violent, hallucinatory killing spree.

The film is a wraparound, letting us in on the last stages in the lives of these besotted characters, examining how time breeds contempt for the young—and even the good lookin’.

Bakshi was and is one of the all-time geniuses of animation. He may not like this particular film (according to sources, he disowned it), but it’s a jewel nonetheless—although, despite the title, the booger-eating bloofers of this particular inked-over dreamscape are not good to look at. In most cases, in fact, anything but.

But they are as real as he could draw them—warts, crust, Brylcreem, leather jacket, and all.

Ralph Bakshi's Hey Good Lookin' (1982) Full Length (Note: NSFW)

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