
Character recognition of the cartoon medium tends to come in short spurts during the years of 1953 and 1954, with all but a few limited to isolated gags inserted within the context of the plot. We’ll see a few trick endings, and one expensive process shot handled in masterful form by Tex Avery. Making up for its predominance over other studios in a few previous installments of this series, Warner takes a back seat, only referred to today in a couple of throwbacks to episodes from previous seasons I overlooked, while most of its competitors step to the forefront with their respective offerings to our theme.
Foghorn Leghorn earns a throwback reference to a few titles I’d passed by. His second appearance, Crowing Pains (Warner, 7/12/47 – Robert McKimson, dir.), featured the briefest of trick endings. Its plot involved the unexpected cross-over of the relatively new character Sylvester the Cat onto Leghorn’s farm. For this once, Foghorn seems more intent upon playing pranks upon the cat than upon Barnyard Dawg, sending Henery Hawk on his usual wild goose chase in search of a chicken after Sylvester. Most action involves Henery being disguised by Fohjorn inside a trick egg costume, and sticking to the cat like glue, while Foghorn attempts to dupe the cat into thinking he has become a mother. By the end of the episode, the cat and rooster are bickering as to who is a chicken, with the Dawg acting as arbiter. Henery can’t make heads or tails of it, and shouts for all of them to be quiet. He proposes a solution. Roosters have to crow at dawn. Suppose they wait until dawn, and see who crows? “Okay”, shout Sylvester and the Dawg in unison. “Okay, that is”, surprisingly chimes in Foghorn. Morning arrives, and the sun rises over our foursome. The crowing commences – but seemingly out of Sylvester’s mouth. The cat tries to cover his lips, but nothing seems to stifle it. The Dawg reacts with facial expression that seem to say, “Oh no. How can this be?” Henery doesn’t care, as he drags off his feline prize by the tail. Only Foghorn is left standing in the frame, who is revealed from a different angle to be crowing out the side of his beak, with the assistance of a book on Ventriloquism concealed between his wings. Foghorn turns to the camera. ‘Ya gotta, I say, ya gotta keep on your toes…” The iris circle begins to close in front of him, but Foghorn’s hands grab it at the last second, pushing it open enough to stick his head through, and complete his sentence, “Toes, that is!”
• Watch CROWING PAINS online by CLICKING HERE.
A Fractured Leghorn (Warner, Foghorn Leghorn, 9/16/50 – Robert McKimson, dir.), reuses almost the same gag. It is another departure film for the series, again pitting Foghorn against a cat (this time, one of McKimson’s creation, who would frequently appear in such episodes as “It’s Hummer Time”, “Early To Bet”, and “Swallow the Leader”, to name a few). Making this one further degree odd, there is no sign of either Henery Hawk or Barnyard Dawg. In fact, Foghorn is not even spending the day intentionally pulling pranks, but instead simply attempting to round up a dinner of a juicy worm. Coincidentally, the cat is also in search of a worm, having tried fishing in a nearby pond, only to receive a note from the fish attached to the hook, informing him “Dear Dope. You can’t catch us fish without a worm on the hook.” The competition rages between Foghorn and the cat, with Foghorn seeming even more blustery than usual in his non-stop verbal attempts to put the upstart cat in his place. Without letting the cat get a word in edgewise, Foghorn makes his case for the proposition that roosters stay away from mice, so it’s only fair that cats stay away from worms. He constantly advances upon the cat while talking, causing the feline to repeatedly stumble into various obstacles and hazards, then wraps up the conversation by calling the cat a blabbermouth. At the end of the film, the worm is finally within Foghorn’s grasp, and Foghorn proposes dividing him 50-50 by disecting the worm in two with an axe on a chopping block. However, the worm compresses himself, placing his body all on one side of the chopping line. Foghorn observes that the half on the cat’s side is gone, presuming he’ll now take all. Then the worm shifts entirely over to the cat’s side. Now Foghorn observes that his own half is gone. Rather than allow the cat to explain to the dimwitted rooster what the worm is doing, Foghorn lets go his hold on the worm, and begins endlessly blabbering about two halves missing, adding up to nothing – a little worm who wasn’t there. As the wom makes his escape to the cat’s dismay, the cat finally musters up the courage to say what he should have said all through the picture – “Awww, SHUT UP!’. with a slap that knocks Foghorn down. The cat exits, leaving Foghorn seated on the ground. Foghorn observes the audience, and feels an explanation is in order. He rises and addresses us. “Okay, I’ll shut up. I’m not one that has to keep talkin’. Some fellas just has to keep their mouth flappin’, but not me. I was brought up right. My Paw used to tell me to shut up, and I’d shut up. I wouldn’t say nothin’. One time darn near starved to death…” The iris begins to close rapidly on the shot, but again foghorn forcefully pries it open, to complete the thought. “…Wouldn’t tell him that I was hungry!” The iris visibly struggles against the force of Foghorn’s hands with a rubbery sound effect, then snaps tight, winning the battle, to close the cartoon.
• Watch A FRACTURED LEGHORN online by CLICKING HERE.
Another flashback to a previous season, with Walter Lantz. Termites From Mars (Lantz/Universal, Woody Woodpecker, 12/8/52 – Don Patterson, dir.), Woody’s celebrated venture in sci-fi horror, features at least one character who knows his way around the screen he is on. A massive invasion of the Earth is underway, as miniature space ships hurl themselves from the planet Mars, landing in a forested area, where Woody resides in the penthouse of a tree subdivided into the Broken Limb Apartments. Woody is watching a TV broadcast of a dance performance by hula girls, when a panicked announcer races between the girls, pushing them aside. “I interrupt this program to bring you the biggest news of the century.” He attempts to provide warning of the invasion, but Woody is not interested, changing the channel. Woody tunes in on a Punch and Judy puppet show. Between the puppets again appears the same announcer, pushing his way past to repeat the same lines from the previous channel. Woody switches the dial again, to a wrestling match. This guy must work for every network, as the announcer appears again, pushing the contestants from the ring. Woody finally hears the announcement through, watching coverage as the spacecraft land right at the foot of Waoody’s apartment tree, and the invaders reveal themselves – not men, but termites in glass space helmets! Woody pops his head out a peephole in the wall of the tree for a better look, and comes up with a small spaceship upon his beak, with termites parachuting out of a porthole. The termites quickly begin devouring everything in sight in the apartment, including the TV set. One termite takes two disconnected wires from the set, and fastens them to Woody’s beak.
Woody’s eyes develop visions of TV static, then come into focus – but with the TV announcer appearing inside Woody’s eyes as if they were the TV screen, pushing aside Woody’s irises. “I interrupt this program to…” As if able to see through Woody’s eyes like a window, the announcer suddenly becomes aware of the termite standing outside Woody’s head upon his bill, watching the show. The announcer reacts in shock, reaches upwards to find the handle of a zipper inside Woody’s head, then pulls on the handle, closing a curtain across the interior of Woody’s eyes to zip them shut.
The remainder of the film has no further screen interplay, but follows Woody’s efforts to battle the termites, who prove impervious to anything except a roll of Scotch tape, which acts like flypaper to them, gumming up their jaws and tying them up in a sticky mess. Woody strings a roll of the stuff around the forest, capturing the entire invading army. He then becomes an overnight business success, converting the bound insects into “Little Wonder Termite Tools”, taking advantage of their powerful jaws to serve as can opener, pencil sharpener, garbage disposal, and burglar alarm, and even their stingers to serve as needles upon a record player. Woody sets one to play a record of his own recorded laugh, for the fade out.
Here’s a version that combines the finished film with its original storyboards:
Johann Mouse (MGM, Tom and Jerry, 3/21/53 – William Hanna/Joseph Barbera, dir.) – An Academy Award winning fable of old Vienna, taken in a considerably gentler vein than most episodes of the series. The entire story is framed within the pages of a storybook. Johann Mouse (Jerry) lives in a gold-gilded mousehole within the home of Johann Strauss II, the Waltz King. Each day, Jerry is totally swept away by the lilting melodies played by the composer at his piano, and, spellbound, emerges from his hole to dance around the floor (sometimes with a partner, comprised of the tassel from a curtain pull). Strauss is unaware of these events, but one resident of the house is not – Tom, who watches Jerry’s every move. At the right moment, when Jerry wanders close, Tom makes a headlong run in attempt to capture Jerry. But infallibly, Jerry makes it to the hole just in time, leaving Tom to smash his head into the wall, and spend the remainder of the day bandaging and medicating his head lump. This goes on day after day, with the same result (and one variant, where Tom launches himself by sliding down a staircase banister, but soars straight through a window near the mousehole).
The pages of the storybook turn, and Strauss is called away on a journey. This leaves Tom with a predicament. No music, no mouse. What to do? Then Tom spots a bound set of sheet music atop the piano, with a cover reading “How to Play the Waltz in Six Easy Lessons, by Johann Strauss”. Tom takes the music upstairs to an old practice piano in the attic, and begins the course. The first page contains only one note. Lesson Two, two notes. Lesson Three, three notes. And so on, adding a few extra notes in the last lessons – all adding up to the first few bars of “The Blue Danube”. This is all that is needed – and suddenly, Tom is playing the whole piece from memory like a virtuoso. He slowly closes the cover of the piano over the keys, knowing he is ready. Soon, he is seated at the master’s piano, and lets fly with the opening strains of the waltz. Out comes waltzing Jerry. Tom grabs a fireplace poker with one paw, still playing with the other, and takes several whacks at Jerry, only succeeding in bending the poker into shapes of Jerry’s outline, but somehow not phasing the mouse. Jerry runs for his hole, but a few more notes played by Tom, and Jerry is in a trance again, swaying to the music. It looks as though Tom will continue to maintain control, but the servants of the house pop their heads into the study, wondering who is playing the music. Just as Tom finally gets his paws on Jerry, there is a round of applause from the servants at the sight of a cat playing and a mouse dancing.
Tom and Jerry are pleasantly surprised at the thought of having an audience, drop their quarreling, and begin another number. Word of the musical miracle spreads from the servants to the people at the square, then like wildfire, until it is overheard by one of the palace guards. He rushes the news straight to the emperor, who immediately orders a messenger to deliver command to Tom and Jerry to appear before the emperor for a command performance. Tom and Jerry arrive to a packed house at the royal ballroom, before the emperor’s throne. Both Tom and Jerry wear formal finery for the event, and Jerry dances atop the piano while Tom performs both waltzes and polkas, giving a masterful performance. They are crowd pleasers, and receive their applause. But Tom has not entirely forgotten his old ways. As soon as the performance is over and the music stops, Tom once again tries to catch Jerry with a speed run. However, even the palace must have rodent trouble, as Jerry finds a convenient mousehole to run into at about the usual distance from the piano, and Tom as usual crashes into the wall. “It was the same old story”, says narrator Hans Conried, as the orchestra score swells for a finale, and Jerry takes a few more spirited dance steps in the foreground. Disgusted Tom, laying on his belly, offers an assist to end the picture, reaching down to one corner of the screen, to take hold of the corner of the book page upon which he and Jerry stand, pulling it across the screen in front of them, flipping the page to a final sheet, reading “The End”.
• Watch JOHANN MOUSE online by CLICKING HERE.
Operation Sawdust (Lantz/Universal, Woody Woodpecker, 6/15/53 – Don Patterson. dir.) – Woody and Buzz Buzzard are lumberjacks at the Pine Away Lumber Company forest camp. Camp cook Wally Walrus knows the score when chow time arrives, emerging from the cookhouse wearing the mask and chest protector of a baseball umpire. (A gag easily missed is a floormat on the doorstep below him, with an inscription reading “Wipe ‘Em”.) Wally rings a triangle to call in the boys, who stampede over him like an express train. Wally emerges from the train wreck wearing the triangle twisted around his reddened nose, where it sways back and forth like a railroad crossing signal. Woody struggles for elbow room at the packed table inside, as a first plate piled high with pancakes is served. Forks jab for them from everywhere, and by the time Woody can get his in, all he stabs is the empty plate below, shattering it. More hands dive in with forks to gobble up the shattered pieces! Mashed potatoes next, but Buzz scoops virtually all of them out for himself, leaving Woody in the bowl, with only a thin covering of potatoes and butter all over him. It’s enough to attract the attention of the other lumberjacks, who stab at Woody with their forks, until Woody pecks a hole in the table and dives in, narrowly missing a fork that follows him into the hole. Woody bends the tines of the fork in three directions, so its owner can’t pull the utensil out. A bowl of spaghetti causes Woody and Buzz to predict the classic scene from “Lady and the Tramp” – but with different results. Each of them begin inhaling pasta on one end of the same strand, but Buzz’s inhale is stronger, causing Woody to be nearly swallowed by him. Buzz starts eating peas by rolling them into his mouth off the blade of a knife.
Woody places the tip of his own knife against the halfway point of Buzz’s blade, detouring the peas into his own mouth. Blueberry pie is sabotaged by Woody, who exhumes the entire fruit contents from the pie with the help of a fireplace bellows inserted into the crust. Buzz tosses Woody out the window, as another stack of hot cakes is delivered. Woody produces a bow and arrow, and makes a skillful shot from a tree limb with a rope tied to the arrow, snagging the plate’s whole supply for himself. Buzz has had enough, and darts outside, attempting to chop the tree out from under Woody. Woody drops a firecracker on Buzz, and as the explosion clears, Buzz is seen with an axe-head and handle protruding from his neck feathers, where his head should be. Suddenly, Woody appears in drag, disguised as a good fairy, begging Buzz to “spare that tree”. For a beautiful female, Buzz obliges, impossibly reassembling the wood chips from his cutting to make the tree whole again. “Goof job, woodman”, says Woody, clunking Buzz on the head with a costume magic wand. The wand must have some real power, as, without explanation, a bundled set of sticks of lit dynamite appears atop Buzz’s head. Buzz replaces his woolen hat over his head, taking no note of the dynamite underneath, and swooningly remarks, “She sends me”. Suddenly, the dynamite ignites, sending rocket-booster flames out of Buzz’s pantlegs, and launching him into the highest branches of the tree, where he briefly dangles helplessly. Buzz begins a sentence: “Just wait’ll I get my hands on you, you…” The animated hand of a human extends over the scene, holding an ink stamper, and stamps over the shot the word “Censored”, returning to Avery’s and Famous’s old gag. The word fades gradually off the screen, as Buzz’s silenced voice resumes for the last word, “…Woodpecker!”
The remainder of the cartoon pits Woody and Buzz in battles involving log cranes, and an extended chase of Buzz by a runaway buzz saw (which wants to be the epic sequence from Mickey Mouse’s The Dog-Napper, but on a comparatively shoestring budget can’t quite get there). Buzz finally puts the brakes on the saw when he reaches a lumber pile, and starts feeding the rotating saw logs one by one to prevent its advance. A final log has the unexpected effect of reducing the saw blade in size, down to nothing, the blade simply disappearing from existence. Buzz then checks out a small label on the lumber, reading “Petrified log.” Why didn’t he think of this sooner? Buzz advances on a cabin housing a camp gift shoppe (sure, every lumber camp has one), with Woody inside. But Woody has noted a special today on life-size Paul Bunyan balloons, and blows one up. Its arms and legs block Buzz’s entrance, protruding from doors and windows. Finally, the balloon manages to pop through the cabin roof and outside. Woody opens the air valve of the balloon slightly, causing it to slowly be propelled forward in a “lumbering” walk, chasing the frightened Buzz away through the forest. (I guess Buzz has bever seen the merchandise in the gift shoppe before.) Woody ends the film in the cookhouse, somehow having his fill of food all to himself (what happened to the other lumberjacks?), the iris out closing with Woody’s arm protruding through it, holding a fork chock full of juicy food, which Woody yanks back into the screen to keep for himself, letting the iris close.
• Watch OPERATION SAWDUST online, slightly askew, by CLICKING HERE.
The Three Little Pups (MGM, Droopy, 12/27/53 – Tex Avery, dir.) – Another marvelous Avery masterpiece, where every gag seems to work. It is among the first MGM cartoons to show a bow to UPA visual influence, using sparcer backgrounds in patches of solid color, and thicker character outlines, but making no sacrifice on character animation quality. It introduces three new characters – two nondescript brothers for Droopy, named Snoopy (how come Charles Schulz didn’t sue?) and Loopy – and a wolf who would become a memorable fixture in animation, not necessarily for his appearance, but for passing on his voice to several successors. Daws Butler had probably been kicking around his “Southern-fried” dialect for awhile – traces of it appearing in a rendition of “Clementine” in the soundtrack of Avery’s “Magical Maestro” – but crystallized it for this cartoon, providing a memorable homespun voice that would carry over to three sequels for MGM, and continue in longer careers for other studios, when Avery lifted it for use as Smedly in the Chilly Willy cartoon “I’m Cold”, and Hanna-Barbera commissioned it for use by their first true television cartoon star, Huckleberry Hound (not coincidentally with a theme song of “Clementine”). While Huck and Smedly would lose a few of the dialect expressions of their wolf predecessor, the flavor was still intact.
In parody of Disney’s classic Three Little Pigs, Snoopy, Loopy, and Droopy build doghouses of straw, sticks, and bricks, while “practical” Droopy warns of the impending presence of the “big bad dog catcher” who will take them to the pound if they don’t watch out. The wolf portrays such dog catcher, in a dog wagon which comes equipped with a gearshift setting marked “Sneak”. The vehicle approaches the dogs’ yard as if on tiptoe, and surreptitiously slips behind trees in its approach. The wolf makes his entrance, quickly blowing down the straw and stick houses. The dogs retreat inside the brick house, which proves to be another matter altogether. In super-speed action, the wolf pounds on the door, then attacks the structure with both axe and sledge hammer, but finally stops cold in an instant, and calmly addresses the audience in total underplay. “Now there’s a well-built doghouse, man.”
The wolf begins his campaign of gaining entry to the domicile. First, a large log as a battering ram at the doghouse’s steel door. The impact knocks the lumber right out of the center of the log, leaving the wolf holding only the drooping outer skin of bark. Again in underplay, the wolf complains. “Mighty poor grade of logs this year. Grain lumber.” Next, a lit keg of dynamite at the door. The wolf runs around the side of the house to await the explosion. But Droopy appears at a side window, blows air into a paper bag, and pops it close to the wolf. Thinking he has just heard the explosion, the wolf eagerly runs around to the front door – in time to receive the blast of the real explosion. Blackened, he slowly rounds the corner back into camera view, and spots and picks up the popped paper bag on the ground. Addressing the audience, he again calmly remarks, “I’m gonna tell you somethin’ right now, man. That there’s a pretty smart little ol’ dog in there.”
The wolf attempts to climb in the chimney like his Disney predecessor. But Droopy emerges from a hatch in the roof, and merely pushes the brickwork, which seems to be connected to nothing, along the roof and over its edge, hanging onto the bricks to let the wolf fall out from below. Droopy’s brothers position a springboard, extending from a bracing point in the window frame below, out under the wolf. A series of rapid-fire bouncing gags, similar to those seen in Tweety cartoons of Warner Brothers, have the wolf repeatedly bouncing upwards, to have his head collide with various objects Droopy extends from the roof. The final object is an inverted teapot, in which the wolf gets his head caught. Droopy has time to insert a lit firecracker into the pot’s spout before the wolf falls, and the springboard is pulled back by the brothers to let the wolf plop upon the ground. The wolf stands, the pot still firmly stuck upon his head, and is entirely unaware what he is wearing, responding only to the blackness he sees. “Man alive. Sure gets dark early this time of year.” Walking blindly, he stumbles into the radiator of his own dog catcher wagon. “Hey, y’all! Turn on your lights, man”, the wolf shouts into his personal darkness. With a loud “POP”, the firecracker explodes, blasting the metal pot apart off the wolf’s head. Now seeing daylight, the wolf assumes the unknown driver has followed his suggestion, and courteously remarks, “Thank you.” The wolf returns to the windows of the doghouse, but ducks quickly when he hears gunfire. Chancing a peek inside, the wolf rises, to discover the sounds are only coming from a television set in the living room, where Droopy and the brothers watch a live-action black-and-white Western rerun on the air. Outside, the wolf unwraps a huge and extra-long paper straw, then pokes one end of it through the window, and begins to suck with all the lung-power of his previous blowing. Snoopy and Loopy are almost sucked in, but Droopy grabs them out of the way. Instead, the TV set is sucked into the straw, with the wolf swallowing it whole with a painful gulp. The sounds of the gunfire and Western music are again heard, and the wolf opens his shirt, to reveal the images of the live-action Western projecting through his belly. “Heck spar. I seen that one last night”, complains the wolf, reaching for a button on his trousers which acts as a control knob to shut off the set.
A hand-grenade gag misfires when the wolf holds onto the grenade instead of the pin between his teeth. The wolf next tries the ruse of Donald Duck in “Donald’s Dog Laundry”, using a life-like cat puppet as a lure to coax the dogs out. Droopy and his brothers are seen inside the house, and to our surprise, are back to watching the same Western on TV. Droopy brings up the embarrassing detail, “Now don’t ask us how we got the television set back.” Instead of pursuing the feline, Droopy sends out a wind-up toy mouse. The cat puppet takes on a life of its own at the sight of the rodent, and drags its wearer all around the yard on a merry chase. However, the puppet pursues the toy mouse into the next yard, where the sight of a bulldog sends the puppet into reactive shock. The puppet drags the wolf up a telephone pole. Below, Droopy produces a slingshot. “Eight ball in the hip pocket”, he calls, firing a shot that knocks the wolf from the pole. The wolf lands on the dog, then is seen slowly emerging from the adjoining yard, with the dog’s jaws firmly clamped upon the seat of his pants. The wolf steps over to a dressing curtain, which just happens to be conveniently positioned out in the yard, including coat hangers holding two pairs of pants. Ducking behind the curtain, the wolf’s arm is seen taking one of the pairs of spare trousers, in which he emerges a moment later, while hanging up upon the curtain the old pair of pants, with the dog still firmly clamped upon it. “Good dog, man” says the wolf, patting the pooch on the rear as he passes. Then, Avery pulls a topper on top of the previous laugh. The wolf readies a small cannon before the doghouse door, turning to load an ammunition shell within. As he turns, Droopy removes a bulls-eye target which the wolf has placed upon the door, and fastens the target to the seat of the wolf’s new pants. The wolf pulls the cannon’s firing pin, and the shell performs a looping turn, zooming around in an arc to strike the wolf in the rear end. With embarrassment, the wolf sidles his way back to the dressing curtain, steps behind it, and retrieves the second pair of spare pants, replacing it on the hanger with the pair which still has the ammunition shell wedged into it. As the wolf emerges wearing trousers #3, he passes trousers #1 – to which the bulldog is still firmly clamped. Patting the bulldog on the butt again, the wolf remarks, “Okay, break it up, son. Joke’s over, hear?” The dog’s eyes briefly open in bewilderment.
Finally, the wolf resorts to his ultimate attack, much in the style of Tom in “Mouse Trouble” – surrounding the doghouse with crate after keg of gunpowder, dynamite, and skyrockets. The wolf lights a master fuse, then turns to the audience. “This here’s the last straw, man. If this don’t work, why I…I’ll go into television!” A gigantic explosion fills the screen, leveling the picket fence surrounding the yard, and producing a mammoth crater around the doghouse. But in the center, the house still stands upon a small wedge of land, unscarred. The camera dissolves to an inside view, of the brothers still watching TV, but now with a difference. In a full shot of the TV screen, we see a meticulously-animated image of the wolf, superimposed into the saddle through partial rotoscope work in place of the live-action rider atop a horse, and dressed in the full outfit of a Western hero. True to his word in the event of failure, the wolf greets his new TV viewing public with a shout of “Howdy, y’all”, then rides off across the plains, as the film fades out.
Nonsense Newsreel (Terrutoons/Fox, 3/1/54 – Mannie Davis, dir.) – This film receives honorable mention for a trick ending, not necessarily evidencing that the character has any awareness that he is in a cartoon – but certainly that the producers do. A pretty standard newsreel spoof, in the style of Warner and Fleischer films of long past, with an Avery-style running gag. Many pieces feel like they’d have gone over more acceptably, if produced fresh about ten years prior by Warner Brothers, and not sabotaged by cheap and shoddy animation (some contributed by Jim Tyer, which fails to match the tone and content of the dialogue track). A bit about a crooked politician running for office makes one envision a Bob Clampett sequence about a guy advising to cheat on paying your income taxes – ending him up in prison stripes by the end of the sequence. A ship Christening seems to steal the idea of Disney’s “Boat Builders”, the bottle causing the entire ship to crack up. Avery’s eruption of Old Faithful geyser as a spit into a spittoon is duplicated as the volcanic eruption of Mt. Slopover. A shadow-boxing gag seems lifted from Disney’s The Art of Self-Defense. A gag about a town solving its weekend traffic problem by detouring incoming traffic off a cliff seems like a repeat of an unfinished toll bridge gag from Robert McKimson’s There Auto Be a Law of the preceding season.
There are a few original concepts in a fashion show. Two $10,000 stoles being modeled by girls on the same stage turn out to be a live dog and cat, who bark, spit, and feud viciously in front of the spectators. A foundation garment based on the principles of the innertube can instantly be inflated to provide a girl of beanpole figure with the desired curves – until she sits on a chair with a tack on it. A few more old wheezes are trotted out, with an African explorer invited to dinner – in a cannibal stewpot, and the inventor of a bullet-proof vest volunteering for demonstration before the Tommy-guns of a mob of racketeers. He seems to survive the demonstration, but drinks a toast to his success – upon which he springs a dozen leaks from his torso. The running gag of the film takes us to an institute of psychic research, where a hypnotist puts a meek-mannered looking gentleman into a levitation trance, but forgets to keep track of the man while taking bows for his accomplishment. The levitated fellow floats away, faster and faster across the room, and smashes through a window, leaving the hypnotist helpless to rescue him, and merely shrugging his shoulders as if to say “Oh, well.” The little man continues to float past several of the locales of the sequences we have mentioned above (improperly defying the unstated “rule of 3″ usually applicable to repetition gags (original shot, repeated shot, then repeated with a different gag ending), showing up so often that his reappearances become more aggravating than funny. Finally, after the last scene of cartoon content, an end card appears on the screen, different than the normal Terry credits, with the levitating man floating past in the foreground, still with eyes closed in his trance, but now holding in his hands atop his chest a signpost reading “The End”, and also propelling himself along through the air with the rowing motions of one extended foot.
Satisfied Customers (Terrytoons/Fox, Heckle and Jeckle, 5/1/54 (date in question) – Connie Rasinski, dir.) – As much fun as this film offers, one comes away from it feeling a little cheated, as the writers fall back upon Heckle and Jeckle’s awareness of their animated existence as a means of getting around lack of a solid ending for the story. The two magpies are using the local supermarket as their own personal free lunch counter. After stuffing a watermelon slice into the bulldog manager’s mouth to shut up his complaints, the magpies race through the store, still eating armfuls of produce, and scattering peels and cores everywhere. The bulldog is tripped up on a banana peels, and crashes into a display of eggs. The eggs fly into the air, and the bulldog engages in the most dazzling display of rapid-fire juggling in attempt to save the entire day’s shipment. Heckle and Jeckle applaud from the sidelines, and add even more razzle-dazzle by tossing in several cans and bottles between the flying egg shells. The bulldog finally gets things under control with arms and one leg outstretched, on which are precariously balanced along his shoulders and on his head eight columns of combined eggs, cans and bottles – with one extra bottle balanced on one foot! “And this is the topper”, says Heckle, removing the dog’s nose as if it was a cork, and pouring into his sinus cavities a whole shaker of pepper. While we never see the expected fate of the eggs, the force of the sneeze blows the dog out from under them, then through an end display of cans with such force as to carve the dog’s silhouette through them, and finally through the market’s deep freezer, leaving the dog to come out the other end as an icy snowman, which Heckle and Jeckle decorate with two lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot nose.
A later sequence of current prints attempts to cover a censorable gag, but is unable to remove all artifacts. At about 3:27, look for a sudden cut from an explosion gag. If you freeze the right frame, you may see one of the rare blackface gags to appear in a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon. What makes it uncanny is that it is stolen right out from under Tex Avery. Jeckle has been posing as a female shopper carrying a bag. Heckle is inside the bag, swatting the manager over the head intermittently with a salami. In a not-so-well timed sequence, obviously set up merely to lead into the stolen gag, the manager drops a lit firecracker into the bag. Heckle and Jeckle, quite obviously to everyone except the manager, have already gotten out of harm’s way. But one of them adds the touch of pouring out a bottle of slippery oil onto the floor around the manager’s feet. The manager turns to run from the firecracker, but stays right where he is, as his moving feet fail to develop any traction. BOOM! CBS attempts to block it, but a stray frame shows us the manager, reduced to blackface, and no longer attempting to run at full speed, but merely shuffling along in the manner of the trademark slow walk of Stepin Fetchit. The stray drawing looks so identical to the pose struck by Butch the bulldog in Avery’s Garden Gopher (1950), that it’s a sure bet the Terrytoons artists brought sketch pads to a screening of the MGM cartoon before production.
The magpies retreat to a pie rack in the bakery section, and Heckle suggests the manager try the blueberry pie. He tosses a pie in the manager’s face, but the stain is red. Jeckle apologizes that that was mistakenly strawberry pie, and throws the correct blueberry. Then, each of the magpies suggests another new flavor for sampling – until the manager has face-sampled every flavor in the rack. The manager and Heckle run through a turnstyle, go into a spin, and come out embraced in a waltz, Heckle claiming he could go on dancing like this forever. The exhausted manager seeks out a cool drink, reaches for a bottle on a shelf, and gets Jeckle instead, compressed into the shape of a bottle. As the manager attempts to open the “container”, Jeckle provides spoken sound effects. “Squeak squeak squeak – pop! Glug-glug-glug-glug-glug.” The manager comes up with an empty paper cup, and when he turns on Jeckle, Heckle appears on a shelf above. “Thirsty, chum?”, he asks, splatting the manager in the face with the stream of a seltzer bottle. The manager starts flinging cans at the birds, who are standing before a counter that just happens to stock gallon glass jugs of water, and boxes of Doubly Bubbly Suds. Numerous bottles are smashed, then a box of the soap is disturbed, falling into the puddle below and absorbing water into its entire volume. The box bursts open, emitting a stream of suds everywhere, which envelops the camera view. An exterior shot of the store’s front reveals all doors and windows bursting open, emitting a flood of soapy foam. A view of the roof reveals a skylight also opening from the force, out of which pops a huge soap bubble, inside which the magpies and manager chase each other around like hamsters in a wheel.
A cartoon convention regarding drawing bubbles is exploited (actually, a gag lifted from all the way back in the Van Beuren days, used in Mannie Davis’s Cubby Bear episode, Bubbles and Troubles). The side of the bubble is drawn with four visible squares, resembling the light reflection from a window (though, as in the original cartoon, odd, in that the bubble is outside, with no window to reflect). Heckle and Jeckle step to the “reflection” from the inside, and lift the “panes” in a sliding upwards manner, providing themself an escape from the bubble (which does not deflate). They then close the “window” to seal the manager inside. Heckle taunts the manager, stating that they outsmarted him this time. But the manager points downward, indicating to the birds that they are standing on thin air. Maybe this gag would have worked with Screwy Squirrel or some other mammal protagonist – but with birds, it makes no sense, as they could merely flap their wings and fly away, as they have done in so many other pictures. For no reason at all, the magpies allow themselves to fall. Heckle shakes Heckle’s hand in dramatic fashion on the way down. “So long, old pal. This is the end.” Heckle maintains a smiling face, reassuring, “Don’t worry, chum. This is only a cartoon.” We cut to the shot of the front entrance of the supermarket, as the camera pulls back, to reveal, in the exact manner of an old Fleischer film, that the market is only a drawing on an artist’s board. Heckle and Jeckle drop into the frame, take a bounce off the coating of soapy suds in front of the store, and land in a small pot of flesh-toned paint on the artist’s desk, plopping in as the film fades out. Shades of Inkwell Studios! And what a cheat for an ending! I imagine the 50’s audiences sitting in their seats in total silence rather than laughter or applause, and thinking to themselves, “You mean, that’s it?” It might have been more fun if the magpies could have resorted to their previous “power of thought”, and made the store into a cartoon drawing to effect their escape.
Billy Boy (MGM, 5/8/54 – Tex Avery. dir.) – A return for Avery’s “Southern-fried” wolf from “The Three Little Pups”. Oddly, Avery tries an experiment in this one, adding a tape loop to he end of several of the wolf’s lines, causing him to repeat a last word of dialogue six times in sequence like a broken record. The effect is only aggravating, and the film actually plays much better by taking a copy and cutting past the repeats – what might have been.
This time, the wolf is cast as a hayseed farmer. An anonymous note is slipped under the front door of his farmhouse, announcing the presence of an abandoned waif outside, in the form of a baby billy goat. The note adds “He eats anything”. Thus, the one-gag plot that Avery takes to extremes with theme and variation. The goat begins by entering the room, chewing a trail in the carpet, detouring up the sofa, carving a line through the upholstery, then devouring a wall of wallpaper sheet by sheet. Climbing atop a table, the goat munches on a calendar, chewing the skirt off of a picture of a sweet young girl. He then passes a globe, reducing its sphere to the shape of an apple core. One devoured set of drapes, and the goat returns to the wolf, polishing off a pair of the wolf’s overalls for dessert, and leaving him standing in flannel underwear. “Now there’s a pretty hungry little billy goat”, understates the wolf.
The wolf begins a battle of wits with the goat, attempting to find a safe place to tie him up. The base of an old farm windmill seems promising. Only, a second after the tying is finished, he hears the telltale sounds of crunching. Billy stands where the windmill once had been, munching on the last bits of the girders which supported its weight. The wolf looks up, to find the windmill’s blades still spinning high above, attached to nothing. The wolf rows Billy in a boat to the middle of an island, with Billy in chains, and locks the other end of the chain to a tree at the island’s center. He turns around, not only to find Billy already free, but well aware of his theatrical surroundings, eating the very theater screen on which the film’s image is being projected, leaving a gaping hole, and cutting away the entire lower half of the wolf’s image.
The wolf finally hits upon a masterful idea. He introduces Billy to the end of a rail on a trans-continental railroad track. “Take a chaw on that, Billy.” The goat obliges, getting his daily supply of iron, as he disappears down the track and over the horizon. “Don’t forget to write, hear”, calls the wolf in gentle sarcasm. That night, for the first time in days, the wolf settles down to sleep peacefully. Who should appear coming back down the track line but Billy – now eating up the opposite rail. Dozens of souvenir travel stickers of the type people used to stick to their luggage are stuck to his fur, indicating he reached the end of the line, and is now making the return trip. The wolf, who had just pulled down the windowshade to shut out the moonlight, is awakened by increasing light in his room, and opens his eyes to find the whole farmhouse devoured around him, with Billy chomping on the last splinters. With amazing reserve of character, the wolf reacts with feigned politeness, playing at a welcoming greeting to the returning goat, and alleging that he sure did miss him. While stating this, the wolf’s actions speak louder than his words, as he carries Billy into the barn, then emerges with Billy tied to a long rocket. The wolf states he is sorry that Billy has to be rushing off again, then lights the rocket fuse. The rocket soars into space, making a direct hit onto the moon. To the wolf’s wide-eyed shock, the full moon, with the sound of crunching heard from thousands of miles away, is quickly reduced to a half, then a crescent, then disappears from the sky entirely. As the night is reduced to pitch blackness, the wolf strikes a match in the dark, lighting his face long enough to bid us, “Good night, y’all.”
• See BILLY BOY online by CLICKING HERE.
NEXT WEEK: Almost everybody gets into next week’s animated capers.
The storyboard to “Termites from Mars” indicates that the interrupted puppet show was meant to be “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie”; the puppet on the right distinctly resembles Kukla with his round head and bulbous red nose. However, in the completed cartoon the puppet has been redesigned as a generic Punch character. Maybe Lantz was afraid of a lawsuit. If so, he couldn’t have been worried about getting sued by professional wrestler Gorgeous George, who is clearly being caricatured in the very next scene.
I suppose the reason Charles M. Schulz didn’t sue over the “Snoopy” character in “The Three Little Pups” is that in 1953, the Peanuts comic strip had only been around for three years, and good ol’ Charlie Brown’s beagle had not yet obtained his status as a pop cultural icon. I don’t think a young cartoonist from Minnesota would have stood a chance against MGM’s legal department, especially since Avery’s Snoopy and Schulz’s otherwise have absolutely nothing in common.
I’ve never been to a lumber camp, but during my family’s annual vacations in northern Michigan we saw many tourist gift shops just like the one in “Operation Sawdust”. They were rustic log buildings, usually with a totem pole or statue of Paul Bunyan in front and displays of tacky Indian souvenirs (invariably made in Japan or Taiwan) and novelty taxidermy inside. I assume there were similar establishments in the woods of northern California and the Pacific Northwest.
I wonder how Daws Butler felt about what the sound engineer did to his lines in “Billy Boy”. I’ve heard of “looping dialogue”, but this is ridiculous.
One of the titular characters in the 1966 Hanna-Barbera program The Space Kidettes was christened Snoopy, though curiously not the Snoopy look-alike dog character, Pupstar. No resulting lawsuit here, either. I imagine the show’s considerable obscurity in the years since was deemed punishment enough.
In The Three Little Pups, the line uttered by the wolf is, “Heck’s fire, I seen that one last night.” Fire is pronounced far. The use of the wolf for understatement in the crazy world of cartoons is sheer brilliance. Break it up son, in the wolf’s voice, is a standard around our house.