User Reviews

I don't know if I'm a fan of Ralph Bakshi or not but I do like a lot of his movies, including "Hey Good Lookin' ". "Hey Good Lookin' " might not be his best film but it's up there. This movie moves well and is never boring. There is always something crazy going on. Maybe it doesn't make sense all of the time but that's not unusual for a Bakshi movie. "Hey Good Lookin' " might not be the first Bakshi movie that I would recommend to a novice but it would probably be the second. Honorable mention: a wildly dreamy Roz. I'd love to meet Bakshi's inspiration for her.

This film is complete garbage.  None of the characters are interesting, the dialogue cannot be understood, and the storyline is so weak.  The main character, Vinny is a bit of a tool and I've noticed similarities between him and Danny Zuko from Grease.  This could mean that Hey Good Lookin' supposedly ripped off Grease, that would explain why many people hate this film.

Vinny, now that I've compared him to Danny Vuto, that led me thinking about how John Travolta played Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction.  Yep, and Vincent could be Vincent's real name, but everyone in the film refers to him as "Vinny."  Despite that Pulp Fiction was released 12 years later than Hey Good Lookin', Vinny is more like Danny Vuto, due to the fact that he picks up chicks, has a cocky personality, and is portrayed as a greaser, as well as Grease being released prior to Hey Good Lookin'.

The dialogue is somehow entertaining in certain parts of the film, but mostly involves lots of yelling, cheering and reactions to things.  We see typical conversations in this film, but they're about random things that don't really pertain to what's going on in the film.  After watching the first ten minutes of the film, the dialogue gets boring and loud, sounding like a Looney Tunes cartoon.  And did I mention that Warner Bros. distributed this film?

Despite that this film is considered terrible by many, we come across another positive aspect of this film.  How this film began production.  The slippery slope of how the producers dealt with marketing this film started when Ralph Bakshi started writing the script for this film, after producing Coonskin.  This resulted in Warner Bros. trying to cash in on the film. Many black animators were informed about this becoming a film, so they joined Ralph Bakshi's studio and contributed on this film.  Once they realized how the black characters in the film were given mainstream African American stereotypes, the black animators left the studio; supposedly as a response to how Bakshi avoided giving blacks stereotypes in Coonskin, but exploiting the stereotypes negatively and crossing the line in Hey Good Lookin'.

The film contains live action footage that blended the animated characters with the backgrounds used for the film.  In one scene, the black characters break dance, despite the fact that break dancing wasn't popular to the release of this film.  This film perfected the dance style and this dance became popular among African Americans in hip hop culture.

Since Bakshi wanted the break dancing scenes in the film, a lot of the live action footage was deleted and reshot.  Bakshi was capable of rotoscoping the break dancing scenes, but couldn't on some of the scenes that were reshot due to budget issues.  The film was then shelved until the release of American Pop, and despite that Warner Bros. wanted this film to be a success, it didn't do too well.

If the film is so bad, then yes, the music is also horrible and is rare to find.  This film only became a film because Warner Bros. was fascinated with Bakshi's script, yet I personally find it uninteresting.  The music is cheesy, and pretty much exploits the lifestyle the characters live in.  The music attempts to be 50s music but sounds more like 80s music, the type of music this film has is like the 80s version of Nickelback.  It only gets negative reviews.  

The character Crazy has the stupidest name in the film.  Naming him Kangaroo would've been better, because it isn't too obvious that his personality is like a kangaroo's.  Crazy is clearly really clumsy and goofy and the fact that his name is Crazy makes us know that the film will be boring.

The animation is good, and is supposed to be a representation of Coney Island.  However, there's this one scene where Vinny feels something in the sand and digs up a disturbing skull that petrifies the women at the beach.  And what was their reaction to it?  Well, I don't care, because this is frankly an unwatchable film.

I became a Bashki film from the first time I saw American Pop. It was the most amazing cartoon I'd ever seen and since then, I'd been on the look out for more Bashki cartoons.

Hey Good Lookin' is my second round of Bashki. And, though I didn't like it as much as American Pop, I did like it. It was a darkish cartoon look at rumble life of a couple of 1950s hoods. But, unlike American Pop, which also had the bazaar stlyistic drawings of dark alley life, Hey Good Lookin' has a lot of cartoonish humor like a guy being caught up in a basketball game and chucked in a basketball hoop. I liked it all except for the ending, which got me a little confused, getting wrapped up in Crazy's hypnotic dreaming sequence dancing around and shooting antennea's and stuff. I wasn't sure when it ended. But nonetheless, I did like this movie, and I'd definitely check out more Bashki films.

I sort of want to like this movie but it just doesn't have the panache of Bakshi's other work.

I like the nostalghia for the 50s but unlike Fritz it isn't laced with cynicism or cultural commentary and is more of a personal drama.

The jolty movements can get frustrating and the plot doesn't move very swiftly. The strange moments can even some quite incongruous.

But I still find some ineffable charm to it. It's not the power house of emotion it thinks it is but as it usually the case with Bakshi, you won't forget it in a hurry.

This movie has some of the best dialogue I've seen in an animated movie in a long time. It feels very natural and the terrible mic quality actually adds a special feel to the movie. Both the main two voice actors do such a good job at voicing a couple friends that I am convinced they shot their lines together in a studio

The animation and tone of the film is very dirty, like most 70s/80s adult animated films so that's to be expected. But this really works on the darker aspects of the grease style film. There are many aspects of Italian/black gang life strewn in an the characters that would be associated and I really think it pulled together a lot of the 50s new york scene in an intersecting way

I personally think it does a great job at romanticizing and vilifying the era.

Man alive -- this movie, aside from being in poor taste and unfunny (the poor taste would be fine if it were funny -- but its not), just doesn't go anywhere. I mean its shocking how parts don't even seem to make sense. The scene progression is just sloppy -- and the characters are just miserable and annoying.

When "Coonskin/Streetfight" caused a load of controversy and the technical specs caused difficulty, this one sat on a shelf for WAY too long.

And it may be Bakshi's best.

This was like "Heavy Traffic" but two decades earlier. Take away the 70's lingo and bring in the greasers. Ralph seems to be exorcising a rough past with his father here. Not for the first time either.

The best part of this film is the wrecking of the 50's myth. It wasn't all great economy and capitalism. The poor existed. Gangs ran rampant. And the races were at odds. This film points that out. And points again...

The autobiographical angle shows too. Both this and "Traffic" have the struggling artist character getting heat from all around him.

This was like a JD flick but VERY serious. Getting lost in that shuffle was the worst thing that could happen to it.

Go see it.

You either love, loathe or simply don't understand Bakshi's films. I personally fall into the first category and this was the film that started it all for me at the tender age of 12. It still remains my favourite 15 years later. Me and a friend of mine were obsessed with it and would quote it to each other (and others who must have wondered what the hell we were on about) constantly.

I love Bakshi's animation, it maybe rough and sketchy at times but this is part of the appeal. It's far more organic than some pristine computer generated Disney schmaltz or his rotoscoped films. He has a wonderfully unique way of capturing characters in his art. 98% of people in his world are ugly. Though usually with a couple of exceptions. The love interest Rozzie, for example may well be the very ideal of a red blooded males fantasy, forget Jessica Rabbit! The dialogue (as in all his earlier pics) is wonderfully un-coached and at times sounds very improvised. It's drops a lot of the psycadelic and pseudo 60's philosophy that inhabited "Fritz the cat" and "Heavy traffic". There is also less of his trademark mixing of animation over live action backgrounds although it's still present to good effect in certain scenes. In a sense, it's perhaps more streamlined and consequently more accessible to new comers to the world of Bakshi than his previous works. What really makes the film for me though is Ric Sandlers superb soundtrack which (probably due to the films lack of anything beyond extreme cult success) has never been released. I implore those of you who feel the same to email him and tell so because I personally know (from experience) this music does still exist. And with enough interest it could see a release.

Playin' To Win

9 Out of 10

My review was written in August 1982 after a Times Square screening.

Ralph Bakshi's "Hey, Good Lookin'" is an adult-themed animated feature that successfully demonstrates the ability of the cartoon format to handle subjects generally thought of as live-action material, in this case a slice-of-life humorous character study of young people in Brooklyn, circa 1953. Shelved by Warner Bros. In 1975 while nearly completed, the final product (finished in the interim) evidences its stop-and-start history with awkward transitions and variable sound quality, but is well worth a platformed release at this time to tap the young adult audience that supports uninhibited comedy-drama.

While echoing Bakshi's own successful "Heavy Traffic", "Good Lookin'" really takes as its point of departure another WB picture, Martin Scorsese's 1973 "Mean Streets". The filmmaker even uses two of "Mean Streets"'s leading players, Richard Romanus and David Proval, to voice his main animated characters, Vinnie and Crazy, whose adventures in womanizing and gang brawling form the core of this period piece.

Bookended by an awkward flashback structure (which makes for an anticlimactic coda to the film), "Good Lookin'" succeeds in counteracting the ongoing nostalgia craze by portraying the good old days of the 1950s in New York as a violent, generally ugly time. The familiar Bakshi style uses painted backgrounds which emphasize a trash-laden, tenement look to the metropolis. In the foreground are beautifully animated grotesque characters, lampooning assorted ethnic and youth stereotypes, to the beat of unobtrusive "doo-wop" music written in the style of the early 1950s.

What makes this different from other Bakshi films (and other animated pictures as well) is the absence of fantasy or anthropomorphic animals: a down-to-earth story told strictly via animation. Though he reportedly had some live-action featured early on in the project (a la "Heavy Traffic" and "Coonskin") final version of film is strictly animated. The only fantasy segments involve (typically), garbage cans coming to life and Crazy's strange nightmare of being devoured by giant, distorted women.

What Bakshi uses his animation for is to exaggerate, giving the odd personages and their antics (familiar from subsequent vulgar exercises such as the recent hit "Porky's"), an appropriate absurity not possible in live-action. Also, the sex and profanity, abundant enough to earn an R rating, avoid the documentary representation problems (i.e., exploitative nudity in teen pics) by virtue of being animated.

Funny most of the way, "Good Lookin'" is hurt by a segue into melodrama in the later reels. Crazy lives up to his name by going nuts and shooting several members of the Black Chaplains gang. Audiences hooked up until this point will have to swallow an abrupt change of tone, but given the film's abbreviated running time this is not a fatal flaw.

Four lead characters are wonderfully etched. Vinnie, the definitive greaser, his nutty Jewish pal Crazy, the buxom neighborhood sex symbol Roz and her endlessly knoshing girlfriend Eva. The actors' vocal performances are solid, as is a pleasant musical score highlighted by the title cut. Other than some variable sound recording of the voice tracks, tech credits are good.

It's really not a surprise that Hey Good Lookin' is a return to the mean of what Ralph Bakshi was making before Wizards since it was sort of made pre-Wizards as a live-action film combined with animation ala Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. However, Warner Bros. Got cold feet on the idea, nearly sued Bakshi, and Bakshi used his directing fees over the next few years to fund an animated version himself, releasing the completed film in 1982 after the more mature attempts at storytelling that were The Lord of the Rings and American Pop. Hey Good Lookin' feels much more at home alongside Coonskin, Fritz the Cat, and Heavy Traffic than the output he'd had over the previous few years. It's about of that quality as well.

Vinnie (Richard Romanus) is a greaser hood in charge of a gang in 1950s New York. He becomes attracted to the girl in the neighborhood Rozzie (Tina Bowman) while his best friend Crazy Shapiro (David Proval) begins to date Roz's fried Eva (Jesse Welles), a heavyset girl with a penchant for sandwiches. One night, Vinnie and Shapiro fall asleep on the beach to wake up to find themselves under the boardwalk where they can see a group of old Italian toughs waiting for their wives to get into their bathing suits, which the pair can also see. It's the same kind of mixture of grotesque caricature and perfectly rounded breasts that Bakshi had been using since Fritz the Cat but had completely dropped through The Lord of the Rings and American Pop in favor of more realistic looks at the human body.

These designs aren't the only things to return, sitting alongside the puerile and juvenile sense of comedy that never sat comfortably with the effort of making an adult cartoon about adult things but was also zany and silly that Bakshi seemed to think worked so well. I mean, this is a story that, when you peel away all of the distractions, is about bravery and cowardice in the face of a self-instigated race war in 1950s New York. However, to get to that point, you have to get around a lot (A LOT) of tonally incoherent stuff that are attempts at comedy. There's Roz's father refusing to let her out of the house to meet up with Vinnie by literally handcuffing her to the bed, but she drags the whole bed out of the house, down the street, and almost meets Vinnie right before he and Shapiro head off for a while night on the town. The image of Roz cuffed to the bed in the middle of the street gesticulating as she tries to attract Vinnie's attention is obviously meant to be funny (humor is subjective, and all, but yeesh). However, it really clashes with all the effort to tear the lid off of the violence of the 50s.

The race war stuff seems to start with Vinnie and Shapiro running into a gang on the beach, but nothing really comes of it. There are some minor threats back and forth, but I think it's mainly supposed to just introduce Chaplin (Philip Michael Thomas), the leader of the gang, even though the film does a poor job of it. Apparently, Shapiro kills all of the Italians, but it's never mentioned again. They just wander around for a while more, never really being anything more than a poorly animated, low-rent version of American Graffiti, until Shapiro chases down a couple of black kids in the wrong neighborhood and shoots them both. This supposedly is the spark that starts the race war later, but the connective tissue from that event to the actual conflict is so obfuscated by nonsense, like Shapiro's dad Solly (Angelo Grisanti) who is a cop who likes to terrorize his son for reasons who approaches Chaplin with the news of the death of the two kids with the hope of tracking down the presumably black suspects so that he can kill them himself. There's a really nasty undertone to pretty much this entire film which is what really interacts poorly with the weirdly violent and puerile sense of comedy throughout. I think that's what Bakshi never realized in the films he wrote himself, that his comedy and his thematic points clashed.

The actual conflict ends up being really weird because it's first an excuse to include the little bit of rotoscoping in the film with Bakshi bringing the live-action footage he shot of some street dancers to the screen, so it ends up being a dance fight before it is supposed to become an actual fight? I guess. Anyway, Vinnie runs away while Shapiro gets cornered on a roof and thrown from it. It's...a mess, at best. There's also a wraparound narrative about Vinnie coming back to New York thirty years later and meeting Roz to become the man he was supposed to be, but, again, it's punctuated by comedy that both doesn't work and clashes with the intended tone of the scene and even goes back and forth on its point.

This is a return to form for Bakshi, returning to the incoherent, ugly, tonal messes he was specializing in before The Lord of the Rings. The common factor is that Bakshi himself wrote everything he made except The Lord of the Rings and American Pop where another writer imposed a sense of narrative discipline on him that largely removed his unappealing sense of comedy.

In terms of the animation itself, this is also a return to form. The ugly designs are matched with his inability to make motion really work now that he's largely abandoned rotoscoping for purely hand-drawn animation again (the interaction of the little rotoscoping that is there with the hand-drawn animation in the same shot, which happens a couple of times, is jarring to say the least), and the images are, again, largely flat and look like the sorts of things you'd see on Saturday morning cartoon shows. Rotoscoping gave him a technique that elevated his animation (though he still never hired an artist to do shadows or shading), and the return to the hand-drawn stuff at his direction is disappointing because he obviously stopped evolving as a visual artist right around the time he was animating Mighty Mouse. But there are finally some shadows. It's on the older Vinnie in a couple of shots near the beginning because he's supposed to be mysterious, and it looks awful because Bakshi had no idea what he was doing, but at least there were finally some shadows.

This movie is trash. It's not the incoherent and dull nadir that was Wizards, but it's close.

The first time I saw this film was at 3am after returning home from a bar. I had only caught the end at the time but was greatly impressed. In fact the movie had left such an impression on me that I spent a month trying to locate a copy on video cassette. This video is now among one of my most prized tapes.

The story is based around two good friends, Crazy Shapiro and Vinnie. Vinnie is the leader of a gang known as the 'Stompers'. Vinnie isn't much of a leader, and Crazy is a loose canon. The story takes us on a journey of how Vinnie dealt with his cowardly ways and how Crazy took a leap to insanity.

One of the reasons this movie has made it into my all time favorites is due to how the movie ends.

This movie like most Psychedelic cartoons is not for everybody. You will either love it or hate it.

You remember Mean Streets- Scorsese's rough and raw and unpredictable tip of the hat to Little Italy (and, consequently, episodic though with a little plot), which was about as personal as movies could get. With Hey Good Lookin', warts and all, Bakshi has his Mean Streets. It's about two guys, Vinny and Crazy (Shapiro), who go lookin' for girls, start up a possible rumble, and just act like cool and wacky 50s Brooklynites. But to say that this is simply what it's about is nonsense; it's about mood and time, if that doesn't sound too pretentious, and about an abstract sensibility (or, if you will, an impression) of what life was like in Brooklyn hopped up with lots of rock and roll and attitude. It is, indeed, none other than a Bakshi film.

But what does this mean for those who've only seen his work from Fritz the Cat and Lord of the Rings (or, on the lower end of the spectrum though more recent, Cool World)? What may seem like chaos in a Ralph Bakshi film isn't a fault but the actual style of the piece. Everything and anything can happen in a scene, and like an early Scorsese or Cassavetes it's extremely improvisational. This might seem weird since it's animation (and sometimes folks it really is). Baskhi, however, is a delightfully unbalanced force in animation. His characters are ugly and crude and physical and filled with such puffed up cliché or (yes) stereotype via ethnicity or race or (especially) sex, that it's easy to see why some would be turned off in a second.

Hey Good Lookin' doesn't want the most amount of viewers like a Disney flick. Bakshi has a crazy means to his vision, but for those tuned in it's a deranged kind of bliss. His film is alive and wild in not just the style of drawing but in little set-ups (where else will you get a raucous sex scene in a pile of hamburgers, or a car busting through a music hall and killing the band). Sometimes the comic set-ups merely bring up some chuckles, and others are total riots. While this time Bakshi might not have the best musical accompaniment- the songs range from being slightly catchy 50s throwbacks to crappy would-be-50s-really-80's tunes- and the chaos in the storyline or specific scenes might backfire once or twice into total "what the hell is this" territory, mostly it's all good.

This is a true wildman pulling off a personal vision of a time and place with an eye for character, a knack for casting true to the setting as opposed to higher-scale talent (David Proval, also of Mean Streets, incredibly plays Crazy Shapiro), and if it's not one of his very best, it's close.

Having first seen "Hey Good Lookin'" at the movies in 1982, the year I was seventeen, I have always considered this a film that connects me directly to my past. I was involved with my first "real" girlfriend at the time, and this is one of the first films that we saw together. That aside, having seen this movie countless times since then I have been struck by it's completeness, and excellence as a film. Bakshi's only film that featured a completely original, and brilliant, musical soundtrack, "Hey Good Lookin'" gives a good look into what it meant to be a guy growing up in 1950's Brooklyn and the role you needed to play in order to get respect, get along with your friends, and what was necessary to get the girl. From the leather motorcycle jackets, the slicked back DA's and the rumbles, Ralph Bakshi gives us a window into which we might look into a past where male / female roles were clearly defined, and a man could still be a man. Oh yeah... and the animation is PHENOMENAL as well. This is one of Bakshi's best!

Though I usually watch family-oriented animated films, I suppose I am wholesome vs. Taboo. I first encountered Ralph Bakshi's films when I was a teenager; I don't know how old I was. I started with "The Lord of the Rings," then "Wizards," which became my favourite Bakshi film. And then I watched on YouTube: "Fire & Ice," "Cool World" (live action/animation), "Heavy Traffic," and this film, "Hey Good Lookin'."

Well, anyway, this film takes a gritty, outrageous look at Brooklyn, New York, in the 1950s. But the film's story is about the gang leader Vinnie, his gang called the Stompers, his relationship with his sexy girlfriend Roz, and his "friend," "Crazy" Shapiro. Also, near the end of the film, there is an all-out brawl with the black rival gang known as the Chaplins.

I love the scene where we first meet Roz; it has a great homage to Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" cartoons. I also like how Vinny screamed at the corpse buried in the sand and all the Sicillians who dog-piled and beat up Shapiro; that guy is too much!

This full-length animated feature takes an amusing and often outrageous look at life during the '50s. Everything from street gangs to young love is given a satirical once-over. If you liked this you will love FRITZ THE CAT.

I am not the biggest Ralph Bakshi fan, but I have liked quite a number of his films(Cool World was the only one really that I disliked). Presently my top 4 are American Pop, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin and this, Hey Good Lookin'. The animation could be seen as crude by some, that I can understand, I find his most visually beautiful films to be American Pop and Wizards(the latter though I had mixed feelings on), but I find the rough-around-the-edges animation to be part of Hey Good Lookin''s charm. The soundtrack is the very definition of awesomeness as well, the story is gritty and often outrageous but also quite affectionate and somewhat daring, and the satirical edge is smart and biting. The characters are characters you do learn to warm to, and the voice work is solid. Overall, one of Bakshi's best. 9/10 Bethany Cox

O.K. I am a big fan of cartoon movies. with live footage. This one gets goofy in some spots but very watchable.. get it on video, and give it a good chance.

Hey, Goodlooking is an intelligent, dark, and satirical look on the American youth culture of the 50's. Look beyond the poor standard of animation to a story of friendship, love and betrayal. And, of course, there are some great tunes. This film is truly a case of substance over style, which is unfairly dismissed by most people. If you can get past the early-80's, cheap techniques, as in Bakshi's LOTR, you'll discover a great film that works on many different levels.