What's always been a bit surprising to me is that the conductor Leopold Stokowski had enough 'cultural cachet' that there was some expectation that people watching the cartoon would recognize the reference to him ("Leopold!"):
Not sure that the general public would have any kind of awareness for conductors or anyone in the classical music world today: perhaps Yo-Yo Ma, and some years ago 'The Three Tenors' were a thing.
I'm pretty sure the general cinema-cartoon-watching public would've known who Stokowski was, having likely watched Disney's Fantasia (1940) where he appears prominently.
I could not tell reading the article if Jones et. al. initial inspiration was a "love of opera" or whether it was just an interesting new challenge/storyboard. It sorta read as the latter, but my hope is that the former was the starting point. This story is very on point today as Mamdani is providing tens of thousands the opportunity to go to the Met -- hopefully each and every one would not have had this opp without M. That is going to be interesting.
Interesting anecdotes to follow if you want to continue...
When I worked in Portland late 80s Coffee People was just one store in the NWest district. Went there every morning for a coffee. They played lots of non-opera, non-classical Muzak. I suggested that perhaps they might consider adding an Opera highlights CD (no streaming then) into the mix. Surprisingly one day I go in and Opera was playing. A few weeks later Opera was playing again, and the barristas were silently singing along with the lyrics when a climactic passage was playing. Made me laugh. Then late 90's I again go every morning to an independent coffee shop this time in Corvallis. Told the owner who was the barrista that I would gift her a CD if she would play it occasionally. She agreed, and I gifted her Cecilia Bartoli singing Rossini's Heroines (a favorite). A while later the owner told me she was going to move to Australia. Asked her if the Rossini was going to be left in the shop, and she said it was going with her.
Edit: Just re-watched the original. I literally remember watching this on TV when it debuted. Anyway... did not know then, but do know now that Mel Blanc did all the voices. In this one Mel's singing. What a unique talent. Studios have tried to replace him, but all efforts fall short. A once-in-a-lifetime talent who most folks enjoy, but know nothing about.
In my college daze, Chuck Jones dropped by to give a talk to a packed auditorium. Of course, what he showed was What's Opera Doc. We all loved it, and Chuck enjoyed our enthusiasm.
One of the things I didn't realize until relatively recently was that a lot (or at least some) of the re-used Wagner opus came from Tannhauser rather than the Ring Cycle.
> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)
How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them.
It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.
I had a conversation with an engineering manager a few years ago. He told me his daily job was to visit each engineer report, and ask them what they were working on. Then he'd gently guide them back to what they were supposed to be working on.
A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer.
The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers.
BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
Clashing priorities. Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.) Management wants the business to make money, which is increasingly poorly aligned with the business fulfilling it's ostensible purpose well.
Now, without money, the business stops working. But increasingly - by which I mean, every for-profit business for which I've worked in the last 25 years - what I see is management trading the long-term health of the business for short-term profit, trusting that they won't be the ones to face the consequences.
It's the officers of a ship who are only interest in getting this cargo to its destination (after which they'll move to a different ship or retire) no matter how badly the ship and its relationships are abused in the process vs. the crew, for whom the ship is their life and their home.
One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again).
Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed.
Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.
Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...
I get it, but my incentives are deeply misaligned with the company's in this regard, I prioritize things that annoy _me_ directly or indirectly (through not having to troubleshoot bugs made by other people).
On a ROI and prioritization metrics I put myself first, co-workers second, product third, company bottom-line fourth. Part of putting myself first is delivering things mandated by management (so, you know, I don't get fired) which skews to product and company bottom-line, but things I do of my own volition is definitely not going to the bottom-line/product.
I am lucky I am not time tracked aggressively and that my immediate superior lets us work on things out of our own volition. The fact that some of the stuff I do benefits the company indirectly is secondary to my motivation to do it.
> Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.)
Or workers don't care where they work as long they get a pay cheque. If management wants to do stupid things sometimes it's not worth the fight as long as payroll is made.
Take a look at the long term results in the stock market. It's pretty hard to argue that all those successful companies, growing year after year, are actually choosing short term profit over long term success.
Survivor bias. Unsuccessful companies aren't on the stock market long term. And companies' life on the S&P 500 has been steadily dropping for decades. (Setting aside that the stock market largely is vibes-based greater-fool gambling.)
>The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
This isn't such an unexpected outcome. Junior & senior dev roles rarely prepare staff for the type of meta responsibility that's involved in managerial work, and there's almost no exposure to the majority of your manager's duties. It's typical that the only exposure a non-manager gets to their manager's role is a 20 daily minute standup, some tickets shuffling around a Jira board, and a fortnightly 30-45 minute catch up. Then when your mastery of .NET/python/K8s/whatever is sufficiently well established, the business takes that as evidence that you'll be an adequate manager of humans, and promotes you with little additional training, and you often stop doing hands-on dev work.
Meanwhile, if you're a junior staff member at a supermarket, you're doing managerial-type work daily, and throughout your time, you get exposure to low-stakes managerial responsibility. You work alongside your manager for 9-12 hours/day, and you see pretty much everything they do. Over time, you're given more and more of the meta-managerial work, and when you finally get promoted, it's because both you and the business already have evidence that you can do the managerial work. You then continue stacking shelves 9-12 hours per day, as a manager.
I think there's something the software industry could learn from the supermarket industry's approach. They have a much smoother gradient between non-manager and manager.
You can also get companies sinking because people spend too much time on their pet projects which aren't ultimately of much value. I've generally found things sit somewhere in the middle and the feeling of 'X are idiots' for any given layer X of the organisation correlates more with the quality of communication than most other things.
For pet project folks, I used to think "person who's excited to refactor the entire codebase because they're excited by some new technology they read a post about, but doesn't actually understand the codebase nor the technology" was an exaggeration until I got one as a team lead.
> “What’s Opera, Doc? is one many Europeans adore,” Chuck Jones said in the ‘70s. “They call that my ‘masterpiece,’ which it may or may not be
This farm-raised American kid thought it was, too.
It's one of the core experiences that made me interested in art, and eventually become an artist.
Not to mention its dramatic and comedic elements are so spot on adults and children alike realized their appropriateness. Even for a set of phenomena (opera) I barely understood at the age of 5.
> It’s one of the really famous cartoons. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably watched it yourself.
I've never heard of it and would have appreciated at least a cursory definition. I thought I was going to see an article about an ad for Opera the browser.
They're writing for a newsletter called "Animation Obsessive" - given that, I think they're 100% correct, you're a random driveby :-) That said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJI_gygXsfs has the first three minutes if you want to get the gist (I don't know where to find a full version, but that's an official-looking Warner Bros. channel, not a bootleg.)
What's always been a bit surprising to me is that the conductor Leopold Stokowski had enough 'cultural cachet' that there was some expectation that people watching the cartoon would recognize the reference to him ("Leopold!"):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski#Hollywood_Bo...
Not sure that the general public would have any kind of awareness for conductors or anyone in the classical music world today: perhaps Yo-Yo Ma, and some years ago 'The Three Tenors' were a thing.
I'm pretty sure the general cinema-cartoon-watching public would've known who Stokowski was, having likely watched Disney's Fantasia (1940) where he appears prominently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oWuvfBP8so
I've been known to mumble "Leopold!" at inappropriate times.
There was a NHL player named Jordan Leopold who played my favorite team.
My brain would go there every time he was mentioned in a broadcast.
I could not tell reading the article if Jones et. al. initial inspiration was a "love of opera" or whether it was just an interesting new challenge/storyboard. It sorta read as the latter, but my hope is that the former was the starting point. This story is very on point today as Mamdani is providing tens of thousands the opportunity to go to the Met -- hopefully each and every one would not have had this opp without M. That is going to be interesting.
Interesting anecdotes to follow if you want to continue...
When I worked in Portland late 80s Coffee People was just one store in the NWest district. Went there every morning for a coffee. They played lots of non-opera, non-classical Muzak. I suggested that perhaps they might consider adding an Opera highlights CD (no streaming then) into the mix. Surprisingly one day I go in and Opera was playing. A few weeks later Opera was playing again, and the barristas were silently singing along with the lyrics when a climactic passage was playing. Made me laugh. Then late 90's I again go every morning to an independent coffee shop this time in Corvallis. Told the owner who was the barrista that I would gift her a CD if she would play it occasionally. She agreed, and I gifted her Cecilia Bartoli singing Rossini's Heroines (a favorite). A while later the owner told me she was going to move to Australia. Asked her if the Rossini was going to be left in the shop, and she said it was going with her.
Edit: Just re-watched the original. I literally remember watching this on TV when it debuted. Anyway... did not know then, but do know now that Mel Blanc did all the voices. In this one Mel's singing. What a unique talent. Studios have tried to replace him, but all efforts fall short. A once-in-a-lifetime talent who most folks enjoy, but know nothing about.
I can't hear "Ride of the Valkyries" without hearing "Kill the Wabbit" in my head. Also "Spear and magic helmet" :-)
Oh, what a great cartoon that is!
In my college daze, Chuck Jones dropped by to give a talk to a packed auditorium. Of course, what he showed was What's Opera Doc. We all loved it, and Chuck enjoyed our enthusiasm.
There's a reason why this is #1 in "The 50 Greatest Cartoons" (1994)
https://looneytunes.fandom.com/wiki/The_50_Greatest_Cartoons
(I don't link THE wiki because it doesn't have the full lists)
One of the things I didn't realize until relatively recently was that a lot (or at least some) of the re-used Wagner opus came from Tannhauser rather than the Ring Cycle.
> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)
How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them.
It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.
I had a conversation with an engineering manager a few years ago. He told me his daily job was to visit each engineer report, and ask them what they were working on. Then he'd gently guide them back to what they were supposed to be working on.
A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer.
The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers.
BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
Clashing priorities. Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.) Management wants the business to make money, which is increasingly poorly aligned with the business fulfilling it's ostensible purpose well.
Now, without money, the business stops working. But increasingly - by which I mean, every for-profit business for which I've worked in the last 25 years - what I see is management trading the long-term health of the business for short-term profit, trusting that they won't be the ones to face the consequences.
It's the officers of a ship who are only interest in getting this cargo to its destination (after which they'll move to a different ship or retire) no matter how badly the ship and its relationships are abused in the process vs. the crew, for whom the ship is their life and their home.
One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again).
Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed.
Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.
Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...
I get it, but my incentives are deeply misaligned with the company's in this regard, I prioritize things that annoy _me_ directly or indirectly (through not having to troubleshoot bugs made by other people).
On a ROI and prioritization metrics I put myself first, co-workers second, product third, company bottom-line fourth. Part of putting myself first is delivering things mandated by management (so, you know, I don't get fired) which skews to product and company bottom-line, but things I do of my own volition is definitely not going to the bottom-line/product.
I am lucky I am not time tracked aggressively and that my immediate superior lets us work on things out of our own volition. The fact that some of the stuff I do benefits the company indirectly is secondary to my motivation to do it.
> Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.)
Or workers don't care where they work as long they get a pay cheque. If management wants to do stupid things sometimes it's not worth the fight as long as payroll is made.
Ah yes, the short term profit thing again.
Take a look at the long term results in the stock market. It's pretty hard to argue that all those successful companies, growing year after year, are actually choosing short term profit over long term success.
Survivor bias. Unsuccessful companies aren't on the stock market long term. And companies' life on the S&P 500 has been steadily dropping for decades. (Setting aside that the stock market largely is vibes-based greater-fool gambling.)
>The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
This isn't such an unexpected outcome. Junior & senior dev roles rarely prepare staff for the type of meta responsibility that's involved in managerial work, and there's almost no exposure to the majority of your manager's duties. It's typical that the only exposure a non-manager gets to their manager's role is a 20 daily minute standup, some tickets shuffling around a Jira board, and a fortnightly 30-45 minute catch up. Then when your mastery of .NET/python/K8s/whatever is sufficiently well established, the business takes that as evidence that you'll be an adequate manager of humans, and promotes you with little additional training, and you often stop doing hands-on dev work.
Meanwhile, if you're a junior staff member at a supermarket, you're doing managerial-type work daily, and throughout your time, you get exposure to low-stakes managerial responsibility. You work alongside your manager for 9-12 hours/day, and you see pretty much everything they do. Over time, you're given more and more of the meta-managerial work, and when you finally get promoted, it's because both you and the business already have evidence that you can do the managerial work. You then continue stacking shelves 9-12 hours per day, as a manager.
I think there's something the software industry could learn from the supermarket industry's approach. They have a much smoother gradient between non-manager and manager.
> The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Stop fixing the tech debt, add more adds instead for virtual promotion points. And remove the old working products. The organization be agonizing.
Sure, but this is an animation studio. How very HN bro response.
You can also get companies sinking because people spend too much time on their pet projects which aren't ultimately of much value. I've generally found things sit somewhere in the middle and the feeling of 'X are idiots' for any given layer X of the organisation correlates more with the quality of communication than most other things.
For pet project folks, I used to think "person who's excited to refactor the entire codebase because they're excited by some new technology they read a post about, but doesn't actually understand the codebase nor the technology" was an exaggeration until I got one as a team lead.
> “What’s Opera, Doc? is one many Europeans adore,” Chuck Jones said in the ‘70s. “They call that my ‘masterpiece,’ which it may or may not be
This farm-raised American kid thought it was, too.
It's one of the core experiences that made me interested in art, and eventually become an artist.
Not to mention its dramatic and comedic elements are so spot on adults and children alike realized their appropriateness. Even for a set of phenomena (opera) I barely understood at the age of 5.
> It’s one of the really famous cartoons. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably watched it yourself.
I've never heard of it and would have appreciated at least a cursory definition. I thought I was going to see an article about an ad for Opera the browser.
https://dn600305.us.archive.org/0/items/the-1000-looney-tune...
They're writing for a newsletter called "Animation Obsessive" - given that, I think they're 100% correct, you're a random driveby :-) That said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJI_gygXsfs has the first three minutes if you want to get the gist (I don't know where to find a full version, but that's an official-looking Warner Bros. channel, not a bootleg.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/looneytunes/comments/1d0oqsr/whats_... (currently) has the full version (close to 7 minutes)