Happy new year a little late everyone! Starting the year with mice is only fun if they’re not *real* mice; the cartoon variety is just fine with me. We live out in the country just south of Ann Arbor, as the city and progress continue to encroach. Fortunately, we’re pretty secure now and the mice are only outside.. but it took some work to seal up with 1929 Sears kit house. But, we’ll concentrate on the drawn kind!
First, a little beginning of the year Thunderbean news:
I get a handful of weeks off from the school in December through early January; it’s a great time to organize and get a lot of Thunderbean things moving along. We’ve been working on the ‘1929’ set, getting a batch of special sets finished and dubbed, and working on the Cartoons for Victory Blu-ray as well as the Bunin Alice set, and a handful of other things. The Rainbow Parade 2 set is finally getting to replication as well. The Toby the Pup Fan Club package is finished, finally, and I’m properly dressed for that occasion. We have a new pre-order for the year as well, ‘1930’, available at the Thunderbean Shop for pre-order.
The thing I’m most looking forward to is a project we can’t talk about yet. In the next month or so a whole bunch of reels will start scanning for that project, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Now — onto today’s cartoon: Mischievous Mice (1934)
Harman-Ising’s Cubby Bear
Including this cartoon, the three Harman-Ising Cubby shorts are really more Bosko than they are Cubby. All are pretty enjoyable. One wonders why the design sensibility was altered so much for the same series, and if the goal was for Harman-Ising to take over production from Van Beuren once their contract ended with Warners.
Mischievous Mice is a strange curio. While not as elaborate as the other two shorts made for Van Beuren by Harman-Ising, it’s still well animated and designed. Most of the prints that have shown up have the ‘Radiovision’ end title as this print does. It’s actually a combination of three prints — two that I had, and Mark Kausler’s.
Have a good week all!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
This is a cartoon I seldom come back to. It’s probably my least favourite in the Cubby Bear series, simply because the music was so inexpertly applied after the fact. The opening cue establishes a nice sense of foreboding, but it should have changed mood as soon as the mouse drops the plate and Cuddles notices him. Yet it doesn’t; it continues in the same vein for another minute or so. A half-hearted attempt was made to provide sound effects — the snare drum roll as Cuddles spins around the broomstick, and Cubby around the piano roll, adds a lot with minimal means — but more could have been done along those lines. “Mischievous Mice” only makes me appreciate the talents of Gene Rodemich and Winston Sharples all the more.
The excerpt from “Easy Does It” (composed by Clarence Wheeler) lasts a little over a minute, from just before the cat is electrocuted until Cubby is knocked out by his own poison. Where the rest of the music in the cartoon comes from, I cannot say.
The music throughout (except for the piano music at the end) is all from ‘Easy Does it’. The ending music is a piece that shows up on other silent films, so it must be a piece of available stock music.
The music for the most part doesn’t have a “cartoony” quality to it— it sounds more like it belongs in a suspense film or a murder mystery.
Even if this tonal disconnect is the result of Mr. Harman making do with what he had available, I find that I really like the results. It gives the film an oddball quality that makes this standard mouse frolic stand out in a way that it wouldn’t if the score was a typical slapstick outing, with plenty of slide whistles and sirens and gunshots and other typical early talkie-era sound effects.
I’ll call it a “happy accident,” although Paul Groh obviously disagrees with me.
I’m really enjoying the recent posting of some very obscure cartoons here— why, until yesterday, I had no idea that Heckle & Jeckle were originally a male-female couple! They also look much more birdlike than the later, more stylized versions. The bickering of the magpies is probably a takeoff on “The Bickersons,” a very popular radio comedy show of the 1940’s.
The 1933 animated short A Dizzy Day also stands out for its bold and particularly original orchestration. This naturally leads me to wonder about your personal preferences when it comes to musical style, a topic I would be delighted to learn more about.
Me? I’m something of an expert on classic jazz, blues, and vaudeville-pop music from the early to the mid 20th century. I got started on the 78 collecting shitck as a kid by a great-uncle who’d been in the record industry in New York since 1935!
My adult self had a music website that was devoted to these genres up until last year, when I shut it down and retired it— after 22 years and several changes of web hosts. The page may be gone, but the full, downloadable contents can be found right here:
https://archive.org/search?query=Pilsner%27s+Picks
The title? Well, my longtime web “DJ handle” was Pilsner Panther— a name that has more to do with the Three Stooges than with music (but after all, the Stooges were musical sometimes). I’m sure that some people here have visited my weekly playlists, but those are gone now. However, I encourage everyone to visit the Internet Archive link above, Poke areund in there to your heart’s contentt, and please feel free to download whatever you might like.
Popeye the Union Man: A Historical Study of the Fleischer Strike by Harvey Deneroff provides valuable insight into the reasons that led Van Beuren to establish contact with Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. The book notably explains that in 1933, Van Beuren dismissed more than half of its workforce following an attempt at unionization, which resulted in the studio losing its status as the largest American animation studio in terms of number of employees. It is therefore highly likely that, in order to compensate for this massive loss of staff, Van Beuren entrusted part of the production of its animated films to Harman-Ising.
I sincerely hope that this aspect of the Van Beuren studio’s history will be addressed in your future publications.