BIOGRAPHY: Saskatoon Steerburger
Have you ever heard of the independent animated filmmaker, Saskatoon Steerburger? Saskatoon began his stellar career in the early 1960's as an assistant to Jay Horde (scoring him coffee and danishes, kick-ass marijuana, Tijuana Bibles, and hookers by the dozens).
Desiring much more than being a minimum wage Hop Sing, he saved his money while working for the genius behind Elkhorn J. Caribou and Dingleberry J. Chipmunk.
By the time 1966 rolled around, he gathered his cabbage, and set out from Hollywood, California for the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan (where he was born in 1942), setting up shop in as remote a locale as he could find in the Wapiti Valley town of Gronlid. With his savings he bought an old log cabin, complete with a rather large, roomy quonset hut in the wooded acreage behind the house. While the quonset hut served as his animation studio and home office, the log cabin with its' sturdy rafters served as his love shack, wooing local ski bunnies (most of whom attended the University of Saskatchewan, studying at the Collegeof Kinesiology) to partake in rides on his pleasure swing. He had no trouble luring them, as he was the local boy who made good, following his dream out to California, and returning with lots of stories, and yes, experience, which turned on the young ladies to no end.
When he actually found time for his independent and public service cartoons for the National Film Board of Canada, he judiciously produced pieces constructed in the style reminiscent of Faith Hubley using watercolor backgrounds and found objects as characters so alive in composition, one could swear they were real. One cartoon in particular (the only one denied by NFB/ONF due to its subject matter) was inspired by the short animated film written and narrated by comedian Lenny Bruce titled "Thank You Masked Man" for the lo-fi audio recording. But, instead of the human voice as narration, Sasky used his own recordings of the bumper to bumper traffic he often encountered during his training period in Los Angeles. He also had a collection of stock films and sound effects that he laced into the piece he named, "Wally Cox: A Wrecked Interlude".
© David Alan Goldberg, 2004