WhatвЂ™s most needed in such situations is thoughtful examination of what has in fact survived.

ThereвЂ™s no need to invoke names like Shakespeare and Dickens in such a discussion, not when thereвЂ™s a live bonfire raging over the literary remains of the recently deceased novelist Philip Roth. Or maybe there is documentation, but not enough to settle conclusively some of the most interesting questions about the people involved. Think of all the biographies whose subjects have been dead for decades if not for centuries, and about whose lives there are great gaps in documentation. ThereвЂ™s nothing automatically disqualifying about such limitations. He cites documents in collections at other institutions, but often those citations appear to be second hand. MitenbulerвЂ™s in-person archival research may have been limited to the John Canemaker Collection at New York University. Archival research was more problematic, too, particularly since the doors of the Walt Disney Archives, the most important resource, have been closed to outside researchers for many years.

Needless to say, research of the latter kind was not possible for Mitenbuler, since almost all the people who could have been valuable interview subjects for him were long gone when he started work.

In doing that, IвЂ™ve relied on the very extensive files I assembled in work on the original edition, including the transcripts of the hundreds of interviews that Milt Gray and I recorded with cartoon people. Oxford University Press has asked me to prepare a new and enlarged edition of Hollywood Cartoons, and IвЂ™ve been accumulating corrections and second thoughts in anticipation of reworking that book. As often as possible, I correct such mistakes in subsequent printings or new editions. YouвЂ™ll find lists of my errors on the pages on this site devoted to each of my books. Wild Minds self-destructs most embarrassingly in its note on sources, where Mitenbuler says, вЂњIn a handful of places, I extended the details of a scene slightly beyond spoken and written accounts of it, drawing reasonable conclusions from the available information.вЂќ Outside rarefied publishing circles, that is known as makinвЂ™ stuff up, and no good historian does it.ДЄbout errors: every writer of serious nonfiction makes mistakes. Yes, of course, IвЂ™m envious, especially since I have no doubt that mine is much the better book.) (If memory serves, Hollywood Cartoons got one sentence at the front of that magazine twenty years ago. Its abundant errors have been cataloged by properly indignant cartoon buffs (see, for example, Harry McCrackenвЂ™s and Thad KomorowskiвЂ™s posts on the page for the book), but Wild Minds has somehow attracted favorable attention from several eminences among cartoon scholars, and even from The New Yorker, which devoted a feature article by Adam Gopnik to the book. Reid Mitenbuler's Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation (Atlantic Mothly Press) borrows heavily-and often carelessly-from other books, my own Hollywood Cartoons and The Animated Man among them. DonвЂ™t read it if you care about old cartoons and you have blood pressure issues. Breathing life back into my website has seemed too difficult a task until my knee woes are finally under control, but I did decide to have a go at a review of Reid MitenbulerвЂ™s Wild Minds, which I read in the hospital and in rehab. So IвЂ™ll keep at it, even though IвЂ™m sick and tired of being sick and tired as a consequence of my surgeries. ThereвЂ™s also the encouraging success of my first surgery, in April 2019 (same surgeon, same hospital, different knee). ItвЂ™s tempting to say the hell with it and get off, but as the chronic pain and stiffness in my left leg keep reminding me, that would be no solution at all. How long has it been since I got on this merry-go-round? Going on three years, I think, although I am losing track. I am still recuperating, after six months, from my third knee surgery (a вЂњrevisionвЂќ for my left knee to fix what wasnвЂ™t fixed in the two вЂњreplacementsвЂќ that preceded it). The last few months have not been pleasant for me, even taking COVID-19 into acount.

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