A surprising number of Terrytoons appear in this week’s survey as we resume our overview of episodes with characters demonstrating studio and 2-D consciousness, or interacting with audiences, narrators, and/or animators. By this point, even the budget-stretched New York studio knew that keeping up with the industry meant being as much like Warner Brothers and/or Tex Avery as possible, and borrowing styles with minor modifications became something of the order of the day. Still, the studio maintained a small stamp of individuality, reviving a house-style of operatic melodrama that would return as a memorable sub-genre of the Mighty Mouse series. Other contributors to this week’s doings include Famous Studios, Chuck Jones in a lively Bugs Bunny jaunt, and of course, Tex Avery.
We start out this week with a bit of a backtrack to something overlooked – and representative of a whole sub-genre of cartoons produced by Terrytoons. A Fight To the Finish (Terrytoons/Fox. Mighty Mouse, 11/14/47 – Connie Rasinski, dir.), marked the re-introduction of the character of Oil Can Harry, first seen in “The Banker’s Daughter” as a human melodrama villain, but now in a clever and well-drawn re-design as a cat, to provide Mighty Mouse with a recurring foil. A melodrama also requires a damsel in distress, so Pearl Pureheart was also born for this episode (in a design which actually isn’t far from that used for the costumed singing “Trilby” mouse in the previous “Svengali’s Cat”). Unlike most of the previous Fannie Zilch cartoons, which opened with printed-word “recaps” of the alleged previous serial installments, Tom Morrison provides spoken introduction, claiming that “In out last episode”, we left Mighty Mouse and Harry in a furious battle. (Of course, there never was a “last episode” throughout the Mighty and Harry series – which was a running-gag theme of them all, but which led to quite a bit of confusion to junior audiences (including myself as a youth) as to where the previous cartoon was that I must have missed.)
Harry and Mighty battle hammer and tong (literally with sledge hammer and ice tongs) in what the announcer says, as far as Harry is concerned, is a fight to the finish. Harry is asked to speak up, and merely repeats verbatim, “As far as I’m concerned, this is a fight to the finish.:” Pearl Pureheart waits for the outcome, tied in a chair in the next room. The narrator says she never gives up hope, and Pearl again appears to be ready to repeat the narrator’s words, but with a twist: “I’ll never give up Hope – He’s my favorite radio comedian.” (How did Paramount studios miss doing this line?) The normally-unstoppable mouse is left by Harry tied to the railroad tracks, with a lit bomb balanced atop his nose. Mighty extinguishes the bomb fuse, but the train shows up, as announced by Morrison, “on time for the first time in 20 years. Wouldn’t ‘cha know?” Mighty braces his feet against the train’s forward wheels, piling the locomotive and its cars sky-high, while Mighty uses the extra power of the train’s momentum to snap his rope bonds. He engages in a sword duel with Harry in his mountain hideout, during which Harry drops Pearl out a window, into a log-filled stream below. Mighty’s blade carves Harry into segments, which reassemble themselves upside down as they land, and Harry leaps out the window himself, unable to swim in the river below, and going down for the third time. Pearl, atop a log, is bound for the buzzsaw in a sawmill, and Mighty hurtles through the skies to the rescue. “Will Mighty Mouse arrive in time? See the following episode next week”, says an announcer, as an iris slowly begins to close upon the image of the flying mouse, and the music seems to reach its closing coda. So is this truly a serial, or not? Morrison provides the answer, with a shout of “STOP!” The iris and action freeze in place, as Morrison resumes a calmer tone, and humbly pleads. “Gosh, we can’t wait until next week. Please show us what happens, won’t ‘ya?” The iris reopens, and Mighty saves the girl, for a romantic finish against a background of heavenly clouds.
Lucky Ducky (MGM, 10/9/48 – Tex Avery, dir.) – Not quite sure if the characters recognize they’re in a cartoon, but at least they recognize a cartoon film-process. In a script apparently written for George and Junior, a pair of silent hounds closely resembling the aforementioned characters wait in frustration in a rowboat upon a duck pond. The pond is teeming with ducks, a group of which perform a taunting conga dance along the rowboat’s rail. But our hound hunters do not shoot, as a time clock on a nearby tree instructs that no hunting is alowed before 6 a.m. A whistle on the clock sounds the appointed hour, and before you can blink, all the ducks are gone. Excepting one – a mother duck flying above with a nest strapped under her belly, who somehow forgot to read the signs. A shot from one of the hunters misses mama, but hits the strap holding the nest to her midriff. The nest falls with an egg, which begins to hatch on board the rowboat. A newborn duckling emerges, removing the last portions of eggshell like a strip-teaser. However, the duck might as well be a junior Screwy Squirrel, plotting looney diversions for the hunters, ad even exhibiting unexpected super-strength in picking up the rowboat with the hunters in it, and splashing it repeatedly into the lake surface, then uttering a sarcastic shrill duck-laugh. Chasing, chasing, and more chasing follows, together with various explosive pyrotechnics, and the almost-expected Avery blackface gag of the period. The two most toony gags are standouts, often written up about. All our characters pause at an intersection marked “School crossing” – to watch an entire schoolhouse walk across the street under its own power. Then, our trio races across a white line – and suddenly are converted to black-and-white photography. They walk back to the line to check out a sign they overlooked in their haste, reading “Technicolor ends here.” As they reverse direction, they regain their three-strip hues, except for one hunter who trips across the line, leaving him half in color, half black-and-white. The whole thing finally ends with the duck holding up a stop sign to the hunters, and pointing again to the time clock, on which sign now reads, “No duck hunting after 5:00.” The whistle sounds, and the lake and conga line of ducks instantly return, the little duck becoming the newest member of the conga line.
• You can watch LUCKY DUCKY online if you CLICK HERE.
The Old Shell Game (Paramount/Famous, Noveltoon, 12/17/48 – Seymour Kneitel, dir.) – Kneitel tries to be somewhat Avery-esque, with some stock-in-trade Warner and MGM gags borrowed to boot, but comparatively at a turtle’s pace. And why not, considering that the co-star of this film is a turtle. The other star of the film is Wolfie, no doubt moping at the loss of Blackie, leaving him for the moment without prey to pursue. He tries to seek out alternative meat, first setting his sights on a young calf. But the bull in charge of the pasture sees red, and Wolfie takes the butt of his attack. Wolfie calls this a “grave situation”, tightening his belt to a setting reading “Starving” – one notch before a final belt-hole depicting a grave and tombstone. Wolfie will settle for any kind of steak – even stooping to the level of an old turtle steak, when he spots a turtle reclining along the side of the road, playing a solitaire game of checkers against himself atop his inverted shell. Simply carrying off the turtle isn’t such a hot udea, as Wolfue receives a painful chomp on the nose from the turtle’s snapping jaws. So, a clever trap is in order, with Wolfie casting a fishing line, the end of which splots into four separate lines with corks tied on each end. A skillful cast pops corks into the arm and feet holes of the turtle’s shell, preventing his locomotion. Wolfie reels in, then consults a cookbook for how to prepare his prize. Foremost instruction is, remove turtle from shell. Easier said than done.
Wolfie removes the corks from the turtle shell, then reaches one hand into a hole, expecting to merely pull the turtle out. His fingers get caught in a mousetrap. He reaches in again, and begins to discover an array of unexpected objects stored within the shell. A long string of paper dolls. A line of nautical signal flags. A clothesline of drying laundry. And, the proverbial kitchen sink. Wolfie keeps tugging on the continuing rope, while the hands of the turtle emerge from another shell hole, tying the other end of the rope to one of Wolfie’s feet. Wolfie pulls his own leg through the shell, clamps a pair of sandwich slices around it from a loaf of bread, and takes a sizeable bite. Boy, that hurt! Wolfie shakes the shell vigorously, then hears what sounds like the pounding of waves along a shore. “It sounds just like ocean waves in there”, says Wolfie. Suddenly, Wolfie is deluged by an actual wave of water pouting out of the shell. “See?”, concludes Wolfie to the audience. In a gag as random as Screwy Squirrel’s pause for Coo Coo Cola or Avery’s wolf’s penchant for the same kind of snack in “Wild and Woolfy”, an ice cream wagon passes the scene. Wolfie orders an ice cream bar, and the turtle orders one of a different flavor, then pops back into his shell, leaving Wolfie to pay for both. Wolfie pulls a gun on the turtle shell, announcing, “If ya don’t come out when I counts three, I’ll shoot.” Wolfie shuts his eyes in anticipation of the blast, and starts to count. The shell parts in two, its top half pivoting upwards, to reveal a telescoping artillery cannon emerging from the shell, extending to envelop Wolfie’s gun and entire arm. The turtle’s head pops out the top of the shell as if he were in the command cockpit of a tank, and the turtle sounds the last number “THREE”, then fires. Wolfie is launched across a country mile of terrain, catapulted back by a springy tree, and lands inside one of the holes of the shell. Wolfie’s head, arms and feet emerge through the shell holes – then suddenly, he is painfully ejected from his new residence, with the turtle’s head and limbs emerging from the holes, carrying a bent pin with which Wolfie was speared to eject him. “Trifle crowded, don’cha think?” remarks the turtle to Wolfie.
Wolfie tries to force his way back inside, only getting his head back in – then reacts in shock at what he sees. From a vantage point within the shell, we see Wolfie’s head peering into a deep interior tunnel with traun tracks leading within – and out of the darkness emerges a subway car, headed straight toward Wolfie. BAM! Wolfie is knocked out of the shell and into the side of a tree trunk, muttering to the audience, “I don’t believe it!” The Wolf is through fooling around, and, unlike the later-to-be Katnip, decides to do just not what the book says. He lassos the turtle shell with a rope, and tosses the whole thing into a boiling pot of water. The turtle’s head emerges perspiring, shocked to find where he is, and the sight of Wolfie cutting carrots to fill the pot. In a surprise ending, the camera pans away from this scene to the far right, as one side of the entire paper background is folded forward, by a character on another background underneath. The new character is a rabbit, dressed in track-and-field garb and wearing a racing number across his chest, standing before a title card on the second-level background, reading “The Tortoise and the Hare”. The rabbit calls out to the turtle, “Hey, Murgatroyd! Where ‘ya been?” The camera returns to the ppt, where the turtle apologizes to Wolfie, “Pardon Me. I’m in the wrong picture.” The turtle leaps out of the pot, joining the rabbit and disappearing with him into the second cartoon world below. Wolfie’s eyes pop out at losing his lunch, and he begins to cry bitterly while prone on the ground, wailing that he’s got to eat. His tears fall on a worm emerging from a hole, who reappears carrying an umbrella and wearing a derby. (The worm closely resembles Avery’s in “The Early Bird Dood It”, and would appear again in the 1950’s in “The Oily Bird” under the name “Inchy”, also seen on the reshot leaders of Harveytoons cartoon issues.) “MEAT!”, shouts Wolfie at spying the worm, and dives underground after him, tunneling for miles across a background, uprooting many distant trees in the process.
The Power of Thought (Terrytoons/Fox, Heckle and Jeckle, 12/31/48 – Eddie Donnelly, dir.) – Heckle and Jeckle over the years became two of the most frequent characters to point out the artificiality of their existence since Koko the Clown, and to further take advantage of their complete ability to bend and twist the laws of nature, gravity, and common sense. This perhaps was the episode that started it all. It begins with the magpies sharing an apartment, for once not embroiled in mayhem or a get-rich-quick scheme, as the two magpies sit quietly on a double-bed. Jeckle seems deeply engrossed in thought, while Heckle catches a few winks. Jeckle rouses Heckle, and tells him that he’s been lying there thinking. Heckle sarcastically asks, “With what, chum?”, but Jeckle calmly replies, “Brains, old boy.” Jeckle posits the theory he has reasoned out. “We cartoon characters can have a wonderful life, if we only take advantage of it. We can do anything we think of.” Jeckle demonstrates. “Supposing I want to be a mounse?” (A worthy goal, if you happen to work at Terrytoons.) Snapping his fingers, Jeckle transforms. “Click. I’m a mouse.” Then, “Click. I’m myself again.” Heckle suggests trying for a puppy dog, which Jeckle accomplishes with equal ease, then a hard one – a one man band. With instant musical proficiency, Jeckle has piano, trumpet, trombone, violin, and drums appear at will for use in respective solos, ending with a swinging finish. “That’s great. How do ya fo it?” asks Heckle. “I just think about it, and then it happens, says Jeckle.
Now horizons for the magpies expand, as Heckle asks, “Do you suppose I could do it?” “Certainly”, responds Jeckle, asking what Heckle would like to do. Heckle suggests taking a bath – and instantly, their bed changes to a bathtub, with water just the right temperature. Jeckle proposes a swim – “We’ll just lengthen the tub and go ahead.” Following the characters’ will, the tub begins to stretch, as the magpies demonstrate their breast-stroke style. The scene cuts to a view of the outer wall of their upper-story apartment, as the end of the tub bursts through the wall, the tub continuing to stretch to accommodate the birds’ swimming moves. As the tub extends over a city street, a few drops of water fall upon the head of a bulldog cop below. “Hey, what’s going in up there?”, he shouts. The birds avoid the question, reversing direction, and swimming back into the apartment. The tun contracts as they go, but before disappearing into the wall without a trace, empties its supply of water onto the cop’s face. “I’ll come up and get you for this”, threatens the cop. From a window, Heckle calls, “Okay, chief. Take the elevator.” “What elevator?”, says the cop below. Suddenly, a block of street pavement rises from below him, carrying the cop up to the window level, with no visible means of support from below. Heckle prevents the cop’s entry into the apartment, by folding several times onto itself the outlines of the window frame, until there is no opening in the wall at all. Jeckle appears on the street below, calling to the cop, “How is it up there?” “Get me down outta here”, demands the cop above. With another thought, Jeckle produces a lever installed in the sidewalk, and pulls it. The bottom falls out from under the cop’s invisible support, and he and the pavement stone plunge unto a subterranean basement. The magpies push into the scene a large packing crate full of dishes, then pull the street lever in the opposite direction. The pavement stone and cop rise into the air again through the crate, leaving the cop balancing a tall stack of fine China in his hands. The cop wants down again, so Heckle produces an extension ladder which materializes upon his wrists, up to the cop’s level. The cop takes a careful step with the dishes onto the ladder’s topmost rung, then breathes a sigh of relief. In vigorous Jim Tyer animation, the ladder splits in two down the middle, sending the cop and the dishes crashing to Earth.
The flustered and dusty cop demands to know what this is all about. Jeckle fills him briefly in. “We’re cartoon characters. We can do anything we think of.” Jeckle provides another demonstration, producing the flame of a cigarette lighter upon his thumb, lighting his other hand cupped like a pipe, and enjoying a smoke. The cop tries to use his own thumb as a lighter, and succeeds in producing a flame – but can’t put it out. Heckle transforms into a fire hydrant, while Jeckle turns it on, again dousing the cop thoroughly. The cop pursues the magpies, but Jeckle stops running, stands in place, and transforms into a lamp post, into which the cop crashes. Becoming himself again, Jeckle remarks to the cop, “You see what I mean?” The cop takes several whacks at Jeckle with his club, but the blows go right through Jeckle – who then turns invisible, leaving only bird footprints upon the ground. The cop follows the prints, remarking to the audience, “I’m on the right track now”. But suddenly, the bird tracks become train tracks, and a locomotive approaches rapidly. The cop runs, but the train overtakes him, enveloping the shot in a cloud of dust. When the dust clears, the train and tracks are gone, and the cop is shaken, but entirely untouched. All he can say to the camera is “I don’t get it.”
Now the magpies do something entirely nonsensical – rowing a small boat into the air. The shadow of the boat trips the cop, and he takes aim at the airborne boat with his pistol, shooting it down – on top of himself, while the magpies escape again. “It’s about time I got some brains knocked into my head” the cop says. For the first time, his own thought begins to have an effect. A hammer appears in the air from nowhere, clunking him several times on the cranium. Bot the cop smiles. “Do it again”, he calls out. The hammer repeats its actions. Even happier, the cop remarks. “That did it. Now I’m thinking.” An x-ray cutaway view shows wheels, springs, and gears turning inside the cop’s skull, as he formulates his thoughts. The cop again pulls out his pistol, and flings it in the direction of the escaping magpies. The gun grows in size, pulling its own trigger and firing in rapid-fire style at the birds. An extension emerges from the gun’s barrel, on the end of which is a bear trap. The jaws of the trap clamp upon the magpies, swallowing them back inside the gun barrel. Then, the gun turns inside out, transforming instantly into a wheelbarrow, carrying a set of wooden stocks in which the magpies are imprisoned. “I say, what happened?”, asks Jeckle. The cop, wheeling away the prisoners, turns to the audience in close-up for the curtain line. “I’m a cartoon character, too, and I’ve been doing some thinking myself.”
Dingbat Land (Terrytoons/Fox, Gandy Goose, 2/1/49 per Wikipedia (possibly based on old info from “Of Mice and Magic”), 5/27/49 per IMDB, Connie Rasinski, dir.) – Dingbat, a weird yellow bird with a long nose and a small white hat with Donald Duck-style tassel, may have been a reaction to two competing characters at once. His insanity and unpredictable mannerisms, plus the jungle setting in which he is found in this introductory episode, directly suggest a ripoff of the Aracuan Bird from Donald Duck’s “Clown of the Jungle”. The little hat and his yellow color might also suggest some influence from Tweety Pie of Warner Brothers, who around this time was also occasionally seen wearing a little hat with a tassel (“I Taw a Putty Tat”, for one.) Obviously, the Terry boys wanted to keep up with the Joneses – whether theur back yards were clear across the country or not.
This film deserves honorable mention, as another where characters are not necessarily sure they are on a screen, but are at least aware that they have the surreal power to walk into the pages of books, such as in Donald Duck’s “Duck Pimples.” Gandy is reading of the Dingbat in a book appropriately entitled “Life of the Dingbat”. Sourpuss is intrigued, thinking that if someone could catch this creature that no one seems to have ever seen, they’d make a fortune. Sourpuss asks where this bird can be found, and Gandy responds, “The only place I know is in this book.” So, grabbing rifles and pith helmets, our heroes open the book’s cover, and walk inside. They emerge in the middle of the jungle, via a sidewalk elevator that appears in the ground from nowhere, then disappears entirely back into the ground without a trace as soon as Gandy and Sourpuss step off. They spot a trail of huge footprints, and follow them. Up ahead, we see the trail being made – by the tiny Dingbat, towing a wheel with four large false wooden feet to make the tracks. At the end of the trail Dingbat waits in a tree, changing into the hat of an information guide. Sourpuss asks if he’s seen a Dingbat. The Dingbat, in sped-up dialogue, describes the Dingbat as simultaneously tall, short, thin, and wide, then steps over to a camera and tripod, poses for a picture of himself, and presents the photo to Sourpuss. “It’s him”, shouts the cat. The Dingbat directly lifts a gag from the Aracuan Burd, hopping upon an invisible motorcycle, and driving it up a tree. Sourpuss climbs, and is offered a tool by the Dingbat to cut the limb upon which the Dingbat sits. Of course, it is the old gag of the tree falling instead of the branch when the limb is cut.
Visual madness abounds, including a tug of war that somehow gets Gandy, Sourpuss, and the Dingbat all pulling on the same end of a rope – with a lion on the other end. Sourpuss steals a gag from Tex Avery’s “Jerky Turkey”, telling the lion that it’s about time for him to be going – but the sentence is finished only by Sourpuss’s false dentures in mid-air, as Sourpuss has already fled the scene before uttering all the words. Another surreal gag is lifted from Daffy Duck’s “Birth of a Notion”, as Gandy and Sourpuss, at the prompting of the Dingbat, open a door panel inside a cave, only to see a moving view outside as if they were looking out from a boxcar aboard a speeding train. A final cave door unleashes a herd of both gray and pink elephants upon them, and our heroes make a retreat, somehow finding a way to relocate the cover of the book, and exiting through it. To ensure that nothing further crazy will happen to them, Gandy and Sourpuss nail the book to the floor, and its covers shut. “You and your dingbats”, snarls Sourpuss, obtaining a mallet, and conking Gandy over the head with it. The top of the mallet pops open, and Dingbat emerges, with a second mallet to conk Sourpuss. The film ends with Dingbat performing a Russian-style dance in celebration of his victory over his pursuers (the dance demonstrating yet another connection with the Aracuan Bird), for the fade out.
The Lion Hunt (Terrytoons/Fox, Heckle and Jeckle, 5/13/49 – Eddie Donnelly, dir.), provides another brief opportunity for the talking magpies to comment upon their animated medium. Looking at stereoptic photos of ferocious lions through an old viewer, Jeckle dreams of having the chance to go to Africa and hunt wild game for the zoological society. No sooner said than done. “We’re off”, shouts Jeckle. Suddenly, their living room background disappears by jump-cut, while the magpies stay in position, the scene around them changing to a panning shot of a car speeding down the highway. They reach road’s end at a cliff drop-off, but in another jump-cut are instantly the passengers of a helicopter. The conveyance descends to ocean level, and in another cut is instantly transformed into a speedboat. The boat suddenly shifts into vertical mode as it encounters the base of a waterfall, climbing up the flowing water and into the sky. Taking an arc curve forward, the boat plummets toward dry land, and seems about to hit it at a 45 degree angle, when the ship stops cold in its forward progress, slowly levels off, and descends softly upon the ground. All Jeckle can say is, “My, things happen quickly in a cartoon, don’t they?”
The rest of the film is a madcap hunt, possibly loosely inspired by Tex Avery’s “Half-Pint Pygmy”. The magpies trek through a noise-filled jungle, then pause, as the sounds also pause. “Did you hear anything?” asks Jeckle. “No”, responds Heckle – and they proceed on. Jeckle begins taking pot-shots at random into the sky. In Avery fashion, down from the clouds fall an elephant, a giraffe (face first into the ground upside-down), then a piano, a bathtub, and a dressmaker’s dummy. Heckle cautions Jeckle not to waste ammunition. “You can buy all you want of that stuff in a hardware store.” Jeckle calls out, “Are there any lions around here?’ The heads of four such beasts pop out above the brush, shouting “YES”. Jeckle uses Heckle as bait, providing his friend with a trumpet to signal when a lion is about to eat him, while Jeckle waits with a rifle in a nearby tree. Of course, Jeckle falls asleep, leaving Heckle to blow for assistance while inside the lion’s skin, seen in silhouette inside the lion’s tail. Once the magpies reunite, more madness ensues, one notable gag being sort of a cross between gags in Tom and Jerry’s “Mouse Trouble” and Daffy Duck’s “Ain’t That Ducky?” Heckle and Jeckle are discovered hiding in a tree stump, but are laughing hilariously over something funny printed on a sheet of paper they are reading. The lion, not understanding the joke, nevertheless gets caught up in the contagious laughter, and finally asks what does the paper say? The magpies hand it to him, to read the words, “You are standing in quicksand.” Many TV prints excise a dated gag, where the magpies hide behind a rock, claiming at last they’re safe, while a skunk creeps up behind them, and utters the slogan of Arrid deodorant, “Don’t be half-safe.” After an explosion, Jeckle plays dead, with a lily on his chest, while Heckle raises the accusation to the lion, “You killed him.” The lion is whisked through a mock trial with Heckle playing judge, defense counsel, and jury, bringing in a finding of “Guilty” (chimed in with by the supposedly-deceased Jeckle). The panicked lion hides trembling inside a log, as the magpies fake him out, making Jeckle appear to be a floating corpse. Then the magpies push the log down a hill, lifting a Screwy Squirrel gag as they play drum rolls at the foot of the hill, waiting for the log to crash. To their surprise, the log knocks them upwards and into the sky, and now it is the lion playing the drum rolls. The magpies land inside their own capture cage, and the lion marches down the road, pulling along his captives in the cage wagon, while both magpies play trumpets, sounding the previous distress call of Heckle for anyone to help.
Frigid Hare (Warner, Bugs Bunny, 10/8/49 – Charles M. (Chuck) Jones, dir.) – The surface trail resulting from Bugs’s underground burrowing disturbs an unusual kind of terrain – the ice-covered reaches of the South Pole. Out from a hole fly a series of objects not normally seen in these parts. A bottle of sun-tan oil. A pair of festive sunglasses. A book titled “Fun on the Beach”. A beach chair, umbrella, and ice bucket of cold drinks. Bugs emerges, in an antiquated bathing suit swiped from the Coney Island Baths, yelling “Miami Beach at last!” Yes, it’s another failure to turn left at Albuquerque. Bugs finds this out the hard way, diving into the ocean water – which freezes solid as it splashes above the waterline, turning Bugs blue. As Bugs consults his road maps, he is interrupted by being knocked down by a passing penguin, being pursued by an Eskimo. (Wait. Eskimos at the South Pole? Almost as mixed up as penguins at the North. In fact, it may not be clear if the script originally called for the action to be at the North or South Pole, as Bugs makes verbal reference in the course of events to “up here”, when perhaps he should properly have said “down there”.)
This Dell comic book has NOTHING to do with this cartoon… but we couldn’t pass up a chance like this to post it.
Bugs resorts to his favorite diversion – cross-dressing as a female Eskimo. He flirts with the Eskimo, then grabs away the sack containing the penguin. “For me? Just what I always wanted.” The Eskimo is too shy to complain, and Bugs empties the sack behind his own back, again pushing the penguin into a slide down the mountain to get him out of harm’s way. The Eskimo presents Bugs with a large fish, but insists on a reward for it, lifting Bugs up to steal a kiss. The hood of Bugs’s parka falls away, exposing his rabbit ears. Bugs and the Eskimo take a slide themselves down the mountain slope in a revenge pursuit, straddling large crevasses in the ice as they go. Finally, they both slide out to the end of a pointed ice ledge. The ice begins to crack, with Bugs and the Eskimo clinging desperately to the ledge tip as it drops at more and more severe angles. Bugs helps the Eskimo hold back a sneeze, then sneezes himself, leaving the ice ledge hanging vertically by a thread. The penguin reappears on the solid side of the ledge above, and a single downy feather from his chest is the straw that breaks the ledge’s back. As the ledge tip falls, the penguin becomes rescuer, reappearing with a bucket of water. He tosses the bucket’s contents over the edge, where they begin to instantly freeze, forming an ice bridge from the upper ledge, and extending down to catch and freeze upon the falling ledge tip below. Bugs merely steps off the ledge tip onto an extending sheet of snow below. The Eskimo remains slightly above him, and lets go of the ledge to drop to Bugs’s level. Bugs steps to one side, allowing the Eskimo to impact the snow – and fall right through, out the bottom of another ledge overhanging the ocean. But the Eskimo never hits the water, as he is saved by the water spouting from a passing whale’s blowhole, upon which the whale carries the Eskimo away and out of sight. Bugs’s adversary is vanquished, but the penguin is still lonely, now crying ice cubes at the thought of Bugs leaving. Bugs tries to explain, “But what am I gonna do with only four days vacation left?” The penguin signals Bugs to bend down, and whispers in his ear. “What?”, says Bugs, “The days are six months long up here?” The penguin nods. Bugs does some mathematics. “Wow! If I stay up here, I won’t have to be back to work until July, 1953!” (For a rabbit who’s supposed to be an expert at multiplying, something appears direly wrong in his calculation, given only four days and the film’s release in 1949.) Whatever the case, Bugs zips out of frame and returns into it again, wearing a top hat and the top half of an old tuxedo, to match the penguin’s natural formal attire. “I always wanted a nice long formal vacation. Let’s go, kid.” Bugs and the penguin waddle away together against a background of Northern lights (or is it Southern?), for the iris out.
Out-Foxed (MGM, Droopy, 11/5/49 – Tex Avery, dir.), contains some brief breaking of fourth wall and referential humor. At a fox hunting lodge (in an opening shot closely paralleling a setup for Warner’s 1940 short, “Of Fox and Hounds”), a master of the hounds announces that today’s hunt will be a special one, and for each fox brought in, the lucky hound will earn a thick, juicy steak. The dogs are thrilled at this incentive – including Droopy, in his own unique underplayed way. But earning such reward won’t be easy, with the likes of local Reginald Fox as prey. Reginald is an ultra-cool and collected Britisher, with a voice and personality resembling Ronald Colman. As a first hunting dog creeps into his hollow tree home carrying a sack, Reginald, calmly reading a newspaper titled “Fox News”, turns to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, fear not for my safety. After all, I am smart as a fox, you know.” The dog grabs up Reginald in a whirlwind spin – but after the spinning ceases, it is the dog who is tied up in the sack. Droopy next appears at the door, asking politely if the fox will climb into his bag “so I can catch you?” Amused by Droopy’s naivete, the Fox takes in Droopy’s bag, then hands out the filled bag with the dog inside. Droopy runs happily through the woods, singing “I’ve got a fox”, until another dog appears, and steals Droopy’s bag. He presents himself at the door of the lodge kennelmaster, but the occupant of the sack starts to act up. Dog #2 grabs up a shovel, and whacks the sack with a resounding blow. Out comes dog #1, with a huge lump on his head. Repentant dog #2 tries to make amends, offering dog #1 bigger and bigger bones. Dog #1 will take nothing but the shovel – flattening dog #2 with a return blow.
As four more hounds approach with sacks, Reginald tosses four bricks into the air. Each falls with precision timing to clunk the dogs, except the fourth. Dog #4 bags Reginald, and carries the sack all the way back to the kennelmaster’s door – inly to have brick 4 finally conk him out upon the doorstep. Reginald turns to the audience, and quotes Cecil Turtle from “Tortoise Beats Hare”, claiming he does this kind of thing to the dogs all through the picture. He does indeed, including an explosive bone trick, and a giant firecracker that blasts four dogs into the stratosphere. When all the other dogs are routed, Droopy reappears at Reginald’s doorway, sack still in hand. “Now can I catch you?”. he asks. Reginald replies in a manner that might have befitted Blackie the sheep: “As they say in America – – Are you kiddin’?” Droopy begins bawling, blurting out that “Now I won’t get a steak.” The word “steak” rings bells of attention in Reginald’s brain, and he investigates further as to the arrangement of a steak for each fox. “I think I can help you”, says Reginald, rushing to a bank of telephones, from which he calls every relative in his extended family to hurry over. Droopy finally appears at the kennelmaster’s quarters, with a line of foxes in tow stretching all the way to the horizon. That night, as the wounded hunting dogs trudge their way home, they hear the sounds of celebrating from the lodge’s banquet hall. The hall is filled to capacity with foxes, all with a steak on a platter before them, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to Droopy at the head of the table, also with a steak of his own. (How did the math work out here to leave Droopy a steak? Dod two foxes generously agree to split one steak between them?) Droopy addresses the audience: “You know what? I’m jolly.” As a final gesture, he places a monocle before one eye, and in best English tradition, remarks to us “Pip pip”, for the iris out.
NEXT WEEK: Lots of the usual suspects get into the act.
Charles Gardner is an animation enthusiast who toils by day as a member of LA Law – but by nights and weekends indulges in classic jazz and ragtime as a performer; and studies classic Hollywood cartoons… maybe a little too much.
Wow! A lot of great Terry tunes cartoons here! Boy, do I wish these could be restored and released on physical media to us all. I never realize that there were so many of these that made mention of the fact that they are cartoon characters. Love it! Thanks for another great post.
Okay, more needs to be done with Heckle and Jeckle if they can just warp the basis of reality to their whim. I can do with less of Dingbat, though.
However, “The pond is teeming with dicks” is, I hope, a typo. Even still, any response I make will be an easy joke here.
Since the I and U keys are adjacent, it’s an easy typo to make. Something similar happened in another Cartoon Research article that mentioned “Snagglepiss”.
Typo corrected – thank you, boys.
“The Power of Thought” was one of the classic cartoons from which excerpts were shown in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie. Its third segment, “It’s a Good Life”, is a horrifying depiction of what a nightmare life would be if the only law were “I just think about it, and it happens.”
I quite liked “The Old Shell Game,” which I don’t recall having seen before. Murgatroyd is no Blackie, of course; but as prey animals go, a turtle is more Wolfie’s “speed”.
There’s nothing wrong with Bugs Bunny’s reckoning in “Frigid Hare”. When he says that days are six months long at the poles, what he means is that there are six months of daylight, followed by six months of night. If we calculate the day/night cycle as equivalent to one day, that extends Bugs’s vacation all the way to the first year of the Eisenhower administration. Q.E.D. As for the question of how Nanook came to be at the South Pole, I dunno. Maybe he forgot to turn left at Albuquerque, too.
The bigger question is, why is Nanook puckering his lips to kiss Bugs in drag? Everyone knows that Eskimos only rub their noses together!