First animated dinosaur 1914 / FRI 5-5-23 / Impish fruit artist 1943 / 1983 Herbie Hancock funk classic / Leeward island where Alexander Hamilton was born / Joint chief of staff?

Constructor: Jacob McDermott

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GERTIE the Dinosaur (7D: First animated dinosaur (1914)) —

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), after producing about a minute of footage.

Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had earlier made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier; Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films".  Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney.  John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original.  Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films—some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments—and has been preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" since 1991. (wikipedia)

There were a few enjoyable moments in this one, but on the whole it was pretty unpleasant. Creaky olden fill and clunky cutesy clues at seemingly every turn. And the repetitions. I don't know whose idea of "funny" the TATTOO + TATOOINE pairing in the NW is, but I both shook my head and rolled my eyes at that one. But that was nowhere near as bad ONE SOCK / BOOK ONE repetition, which made me literally exclaim "Nooooo!" It was a disbelieving "no" at first, but it turned into an angry refusal mid-"no." I guess it's possible that if the grid had had more winners, if it had been genuinely delightful, I might've missed that duplication (unlikely) or forgiven it (slightly more likely), but as it was, it felt insulting. This puzzle wasn't giving me much of anything, and then it gave me a second helping of ... ONE? Again, no, I say. I also said "oh come on" and "really?" many times. The reanimated corpse of HANSARP (1D: "Impish Fruit" artist, 1943) definitely had me wondering if we were gonna be heading into some old-school crosswordese territory, and then AESIR and (especially!) AKELA really confirmed it. And that clue on EENIE, ugh, just a groaner (13A: Indecisive child's first word, perhaps). First, you have to give the clue the *most generous* reading for it to be even slightly plausible. "First word" obviously Cannot mean "first word the child ever spoke" (which is what the phrase "child's first word"normally implies) so it has to mean "first word ... in a phrase that a child might use when deciding" (!?). A badly written clue for what is already Terrible Fill. Why are you doing this? The cluing was clunky like this throughout.