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.

Rated R for Language,Violence and Some Nudity. Quebec Rating:13+ Canadian Home Video Rating:14AHey Good Lookin is one of the four Ralph Bakshi films I have seen.The other Bakshi films I have seen are Fritz The Cat(his best movie),Coonskin(good but not as good as fritz or this) and Cool World(which wasn't very good...but not bad).Not many people seem to have seen this film(as of August 28 2007, it has 97 votes).Hey Good Lookin is a film about the 1950's.A mysterious man tells a girl a story.The story follows Vinnie, who is the leader of the gang "The Stompers".Him and his friend Crazy Shapiro have fun smoking,drinking and trying to pick up girls.One day, Vinnie accidentally goes on the rival black gang's turf.The leader of the gang asks Vinnie to rumble with him.He agrees.The rest of the film shows gang trouble and Vinnie and Shapiro dating two girls.Vinnie's girl's name is Roz.Also Crazy Shapiro's father is a cop who hates his son and tries to kill him.The rumble at the end of the film is pretty good but weird with Shapiro hallucinating and shooting at garbage cans and street signs.Vinnie ends up getting shot but is okay and Shapiro falls to his death.We then see the film go back to 1982 where we find that the mysterious man is Vinnie and the girl is Roz.The two then reunite.Hey Good Lookin is one of bakshi's better films and if you can find it, I recommend it.Hopefully this will come out on DVD.

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.

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.