Hey Good Lookin'

Hey Good Lookin' (1982)

Ralph Bakshi, creator of "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic" brings you the outrageous '50s the way they really were.

In 1953 Brooklyn, charismatic hood and The Stompers leader Vinnie Genzianna, his friend and second-in-command Crazy Shapiro, and their respective girlfriends Roz and Eva get wrapped up in an escalating conflict with the rival Black gang, The Chaplains, lead by Boogaloo Jones.

Date of release
1982-10-01
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (44)
Runtime
1h 17m
Genres
Animation, Comedy, Drama
Director
Ralph Bakshi

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $1.5M

Hey Good Lookin' is a 1982 American adult animated comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Ralph Bakshi. The film takes place in Brooklyn during the 1950s and focuses on Vinnie, the leader of a gang named the Stompers, his friend Crazy Shapiro, and their respective girlfriends Roz and Eva. The film stars the voices of Richard Romanus, David Proval, Tina Bowman, and Jesse Welles.

Production

After production concluded on Coonskin, Bakshi wanted to distinguish himself artistically by producing a film in which live action and animated characters would interact. Bakshi began writing the screenplay for Hey Good Lookin' while editing Coonskin and storyboarding a proposed series for ABC. The characters of Vinnie and Crazy Shapiro were based upon Bakshi's high school friends, Norman Darrer and Allen Schechterman. Warner Bros.

Principal photography began in 1974. The budget was $1.5 million. Pre-production lasted one week, including casting. Grittier sequences were shot on the streets of New York City, while less serious locations were shot on Warner Bros.' sound stages in Los Angeles. According to Bakshi, "What I would do is dress guys up, live-action guys. Very strange dudes! The weirdest guys I could find.

Bakshi had selected a number of songs from his own record collection for the film's soundtrack, which were not used in the film due to the high costs of licensing the songs. The film was initially scored by singer Dan Hicks, who became involved with the production of the film in 1974. Because of the delay of the film's release, Hicks' label released the material from these sessions under the title It Happened One Bite.

Much of the film was shot at night, because Bakshi felt that the daylight made the scenes less believable. Bakshi recounts that during the first day of shooting, the actors were unable to play their roles naturally, but began casually talking and acting the way he wanted their characters to act when the cameras were off, including flirting with an actress.

During the post-production of the film, Bakshi found that the cost of the optical effect required to complete live-action scenes with animated characters was larger than the film's budget. In order to complete these scenes cost effectively, Bakshi and his camera man Ted C. Bemiller purchased a 35-millimetre camera to project the footage onto the glass under the animation camera, which was reflected onto where the animation was shot.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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