Hey Good Lookin’ (1982) – Nostalgia Central

Ralph Bakshi’s love letter to the 1950s begins with a middle-aged woman encountering a strange man on a Long Island street at night, who shows her the remains of a leather jacket.

He takes her back to Brooklyn in 1953 and tells her about Vinnie Genzianna (voiced by Richard Romanus and based on one of Bakshi’s actual school friends), his greaser gang, the Stompers, his girlfriend Rozzie (inspired by Bakshi’s first wife and voiced by Tina Bowman), his friend Crazy Shapiro (David Proval), and the pivotal confrontation with the rival Black gang, the Chaplains.

The film ends in a bar in the present day, where the mysterious middle-aged man finishes his tale. The woman identifies the mysterious man as Vinnie and reveals herself to be Rozzie.

Hey Good Lookin’ premiered in 1982, but that was just the end of a production history spanning almost a decade.

Production actually began in 1973, when Ralph Bakshi wrote the screenplay and found a producer in Warner Bros. Filming began in April 1974.

Bakshi had envisioned an amalgamation of live-action and animation. The only animated characters were Vinnie, Rozzie, Crazy, and Eva. The rest of the cast consisted of real people filmed on real sets.

When early cuts of this version were shown to Warner Brothers executives, they expressed great enthusiasm.

A week later, however, they informed Bakshi that the idea of ​​showing live-action and animated characters in the same frame wouldn’t work, as it was too unbelievable.

Bakshi was subsequently forced to discard all the live-action footage and reanimate the relevant scenes (and to bear the costs himself).

Hence, it took another five years to complete the film – whenever he had the time alongside other projects and using funds he had earned from his work on other films – before it was finally released in 1982.

Bakshi also had to abandon the music he had envisioned for the movie because the licensing fees would have been too high.

Vinnie Genzianna
Richard Romanus
Crazy Shapiro
David Proval
Eva
Jesse Welles
Roslyn “Rozzie” Featherschneid 
Tina Bowman
Yonkel
Martin Garner
Alice
Terry Haven
Max
Allen Joseph
Old Vinnie
Frank DeKova
Gelsa
Donna Ponterotto
Solly
Angelo Grisanti
Sal
Candy Candido
Boogaloo Jones
Philip Michael Thomas
Chaplain
Shirley Jo Finney
The Stompers
Danny Wells
Larry Bishop
Tabi Cooper
Bernie Massa
Gelsa Palao
Paul Roman
Waitress
Juno Dawson

Director
Ralph Bakshi