Cartoons About Cartoons (Part 4)

The 1930’s continued to progress, as animated characters became more and more knowledgeable about their own world. A certain level of humor and reality-bending was becoming more associated with animation, leading to the increasing development of various tropes and presentation styles that would remain characteristic and unique to cartoons, and unlikely to appear in live-action comedies. Though some of the novelty of the creative process which went into production of the films was perhaps waning in audience interest, there remained enough curiosity for the occasional view behind the animator’s chair. A more prevalent trend, however, was to immerse both viewer and characters in the theater-going experience, with interactive wordplay and action between characters and off-and-on-screen narrators, and sometimes allowing characters to address projectionists and the audience itself for assistance, guidance, and even criticism – adding to the perception that the characters, though pen-and-ink, might be real personalities after all.

As mentioned last week, Betty Boop continued in the later ‘30‘s to have a few more excursions out of the old Fleischer inkwell, no longer requiring the assistance of Koko to get into mischief. The next in sequence of such episodes to appear was More Pep (Fleischer/ Paramount, Betty Boop, 6/19/36 – Dave Fleischer, dir., Dave Hoffman/Thomas Johnson, anim.). Nominally, this installment “features” Betty’s little dog Pudgy. However, the pup, usually mild-mannered and anything other than a star-struck show off, curiously finds himself in an unexpected situation. The hand (supposedly of Max) paints in a background of a theatrical stage, including props for a daredevil act. An announcer (certainly not Max himself) provides the alleged voice of the studio head, delivering a high-intensity introduction in the manner of a circus ringmaster, describing the feat to be performed by “that daring, breathtaking, exciting exponent of wizardry in the air” – Pudgy! On the stage, Pudgy is to climb a platform, leap from it onto a trampoline, bounce onto a slide and perform a double loop-de-loop, then sail through a ring stuffed with razor-sharp knives without being injured. What did Pudgy do to Max to deserve this treatment? Introductions completed, the spotlight and camera turn to the stage wings, from which emerges our star – disinterested, drooping, and half-asleep, in no mood to be a daredevil. His eyelids drop and he attempts to curl up for a siesta twice before even crossing the stage, and has to be prodded on by the insistent call of Max. He finally mounts the first platform, but his eyelids sag again. He now views the trampoline as a perfect hammock, and softly plops himself into its center, nodding off into a sound sleep.

From the ink bottle at Max’s side, Betty emerges, laughing herself silly at Max’s total failure to get Pudgy to budge. “You seem to be having trouble, Uncle Max”, she calls out, barely restraining her giggles. “Say Betty, you’re just the one I want to see”, says Max. “No kiddin’”, laughs Betty. Betty volunteers to see what she can do to make the show go on. Grabbing Max’s pen, she begins singing a great little Sammy Timberg tune entitled “You Gotta Have Pep”, and devises her own means to put some life into the puppy. Lifting Max’s pen, she draws a giant juicing machine, with a large chute for inserting all manner of ingredients for blending. Then, she draws a large refrigerator full of nutritious foods to use as raw ingredients. “Milk and eggs will give you dancing legs”, she sings, also adding “fruits and greens, peas and beans”. Everything goes into the blending apparatus, which indicates on a thermometer-like gauge the concoction’s reaching of the levels of vim, vigor vitality, and finally pep, the mercury inside the tube reaching a bursting point at the top. Suddenly, the machine goes haywire, and begins hopping around the stage as if alive. It starts to perform somersaults, sloshing its fluid contents every which way, then finally the machine hops off the drawing board. A splash of its miracle elixir sends a cickoo clock into high gear, and sends a horseman in a painting falloping off into the distance. The machine hops out the window into the live-action world of New York, continuing its somersaults along the building ledges and splashing its super-powered contents everywhere. In clever use of speeded-up live action reference shots, a sandwich-sign street hawker quadruples his walking pace back and forth. A parade regiment trots through a military review at alarming velocity. New York vehicular and foot traffic becomes a visual blur. The juicer finally hops back in the animation studio window, and lands a dose of the juice upon Pudgy. The pup awakens from his siesta, so charged up that he breaks spontaneously into a rapid-fire Russian dance. He then zooms up the platform again, now taking his leap properly upon the trampoline, and within a split second or two has performed his double loop-de-loop and soar through the ring of blades. He’s so full of energy, he performs the same trick again – and again – then lands in Max’s ink bottle. The juicer follows right behind him, followed by Betty, who pauses before submerging into the bottle to say, “So long, Uncle Max.” “So long, Betty, and thanks a lot”, Max replies, replacing the bottle’s stopper for the traditional iris out of the good old days.

One of the least-frequently seen Betty episodes – and one of the most politically incorrect, is, for obvious lack of the the writers of a better title, simply called Out of the Inkwell (Fleischer/Paramount, 4/22/38 – Dave Fleischer, dir., Thomas Johnson/Otto Feuer, anim.). The film opens on a page from a live-action book on the art of hypnotism, instructing the reader to look the victim in the eye, manipulate hands, then say the magic words, Dunk-a hunk-a lunk-a. The reader of the book is a black janitor at the Fleischer cartoon studio (played by one Oscar Polk, whose face and voice do their best to rival Stepin Fetchit for the title of laziest and dumbest in the world). The janitor tries out his black magic on Max’s fountain pen. The cap flies off, and the pen starts trotting on its pen point, then approaches a drawn background on Max’s drawing board. It begins drawing a spinning whirlwind, from out of which appears a very dizzy Betty Boop, who lands with a plop on the floor of the background. The janitor breaks into laughter, but Betty doesn’t see what’s so funny. The janitor gives his powers another try, zapping Betty right between the eyes with a Dunk-a hunk-a lunk-a. Betty is almost knocked backwards, and her eyes spin freely and cross-wise in their sockets. “You are now a high-diver”, says the janitor. The spellbound Betty obliges, climbing an invisible ladder to the top of the background, diving off an invisible board, and doing a lap or two in an invisible tank of water below, before coming to. She cautions the janitor to cut out this nonsense, but the janitor hits her with another zap, rubberizing her into a fit of bouncing. When she pops out of the second spell, she scolds the janitor, telling him he’s had enough rest, and to get to work. The janitor finally stands up, but has so little interest in getting any work done, he falls asleep standing, propped up only by his broomstick.

Betty takes this opportunity to investigate what exactly the janitor has been doing to her. She hops off the drawing board, finding the hypnotism book, and reads the same instructions. She decides to try a hand at it herself, repeating the magic words at a small statuette of a Scottie dog on Max’s desk. The statue comes to life, stretches, and trots away. A zap at the typewriter causes it to self-type the hypnotic magic words. Another zap at a pair of scissors causes the blades to tap dance. Now Betty is ready for the janitor. Climbing down from Max’s desk, she first casts her spell upon the broomstick. The broom falls away from under the janitor’s arm, causing the groggy, lethargic fellow to fall to the floor. Betty declares that maybe some fresh air will wake him up, and puts a zap upon the cord of an electric fan, causing the device to plug itself into a wall socket. The breeze from its rotating blades sweeps three tall stacks of finished animation drawings off of a table, scattering them all over the room. The janitor frets as to how he will ever clean up such a mess. Betty offers some assistance, hypnotizing the broom to sweep dust and paper fragments under a rug, cigarette butts to hop under their own power into an ash tray, a broken chair to reassemble itself, and a feather duster to dust the room. “Now you’re going to work”, she declares, emitting a forceful zap at the janitor, which briefly causes his skin to turn white. At triple-speed, the janitor finally begins helplessly tidying up the room to spic and span condition, as the laughing Betty, her work done, climbs into the inkwell, and pulls in the stopper with another utterance of the magic words, for the iris out.

Tex Avery continued to score breakthroughs in breaking down the fourth wall between his characters and those in charge of production, in his work at Warner Brothers. A Porky Pig cartoon, The Village Smithy (Looney Tunes, 11/14/36) would introduce what would become a commonplace trope for nearly every animation studio for years to come – characters talking-back to an off-screen narrator. While a stoic voice-over provides the rhyming passages of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, things happen on-screen with startling suddenness. The spreading chestnut tree drops from the sky, landing with a thud in the shot inside of a mere few frames. Just as suddenly, the Smithy drops from nowhere, landing in a reclining position under the tree. The narrator’s line reads, “The village smithy stands”. So the narrator has to take a time-out from his read to inform the smithy, “Stand up, you lug!” The burly canine responds, but faces away from the camera. “Hey, this way”, yells the narrator, getting him to spin around. The narrator reaches a line about the smith’s arms being strong as iron bands – but the dog’s arms are built like pipe cleaners. Repeating the line in a threatening manner, the narrator again prompts the smith into action, as he blows air into each of his thumbs, inflating each arm like a tire. Now, on the narrator’s cue, the blacksmith shop falls from nowhere. The narrator recites about children looking in to see the smith at work, and indeed, a small group of kids gathers around the shop doorway. However, as soon as the line is over, the narrator shoos the unnecessary kids away – “All right, kids, get out of the scene now. Ya bother me.” The rejected kids sulk away in aggravated fashion, one of them angrily kicking away a tin can. The narrator continues to boss the smithy, with a recitation about him working day in, day out, from morn till night – working the big brute into a panting frenzy. The smith tosses down his bellows, and confronts the narrator. “Listen, chief. Take it easy. We got plenty of time. This cartoon ain’t half over yet!”

Finally, Porky is introduced as the blacksmith’s assistant. The narrator indicates all they need now is a horse. Porky and the blacksmith look high and low, but there is obviously none in the shop. Suddenly, a beast of burden walks in – but of the wrong breed – a black camel! Porky and the smith react with a start, but the narrator apologizes, indicating this little fellow belongs in their foreign legion picture. A theatrical stage hook enters the shot, to pull the steed out from the frame, and just as suddenly, a horse and wagon are dropped into the set. The smith seats the nag in a chair made from an old barrel, and measures a hoof like he was a ladies’ shoes salesman, calling out to Porky for a “size 6 7/8″. A series of mishaps develops when Porky grabs one from a box of kids’ game rubber horseshoes instead of an iron one. When Porky finally gets the right horseshoe, he heats the iron in the fire, then trips while attempting to carry the horseshoe to the smith with a pair of tongs. The hot shoe singes the hair on the hose’s rear, and the startled animal charges forward with the wagon hitched behind, picking up the smith as unwitting passenger along the way. A two-minute sequence depicts a frantic dash through town, destroying a general store, a bank in which a crook is working on breaking into the safe, and speeding over a deep ditch where a construction worker works with a pick-axe. As the horse hits a wire fence and ricochets backwards, Avery lifts an idea from a Betty Boop of the preceding season, “Baby Be Good”, in which animation was intentionally run backwards. (This actually was stolen by Max too, who borrowed it from a brief sequence in Bud Fisher’s silent “Mutt and Jeff at the Movies”). But while the Boop film developed no real laughs from the gimmick, Avery times his scenes for comical impact in backwards mode, and even embellishes with an extra piece of animation not seen in the forward run, as the ditch digger rises from the hole after the wagon passes over again, to scratch his head and remark, “Say, am I missing something?” Even the general store does not get rebuilt in reverse, but is already reconstructed by the time the wagon returns, with the workers sliding the whole structure out of the way so it doesn’t get hit again. The film ends as the smith demands that Porky explain how all this happened. Porky repeats his actions, and a hot horseshoe is launched onto the horse’s rear again. The forward action is commenced once more, ending in the re-destruction of the general store, for a typical “Here we go again” Avery ending.

Avery would revisit the narrator-interplay idea many times, including two within the following couple of seasons. Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (Merrie Melodies, 7/12/37) features more direct interplay of the narrator’s words with every member of the supporting cast. Little Eva is introduced at the tender age of six years old, and proves to be a chatterbox, spilling everything she can say about herself, including trying to show off the lace on her panties! The narrator asks if the cast members are ready to start the story (after two minutes of introductions). Villain Simon Simon Legree remarks, “The sooner, the sooner.” Simon’s hounds, who have been sound asleep through the introductions, also begrudgingly admit readiness: “Yeah, I guess so. There ain’t nothin’ else to do.” Most telling of the characters’ awareness of their cartoon roles is Uncle Tom’s response to Simon’s whip. “My body may belong to you, but my soul belongs to Warner Brothers.” All ends well, as Uncle Tom raises the money for his own release, with a pair of loaded dice that roll past the iris out.

The Isle of Pingo Pongo (Merrie Melodies, 5/28/38) would again fall back upon the narrator bit, establishing a formula for all of the Avery travelogues and nature spoofs to follow. Interplay becomes important in establishing the running gag of the film, as the narration is repeatedly interrupted by the intrusion of Egghead, carrying a large violin case. “N-n-now boss?” asks Egghead. “No, not now”, repeatedly answers the narrator, until the end of the film. In clever parody of the popular Fitzpatrick Traveltalks, a long-running series of live-action travel films, then currently enjoying a surge in popularity at MGM from the recent addition of Technicolor, the narrator calls for the sun to sink slowly in the West. The sun doesn’t move. As the irritated narrator is repeating the line for the third time, Egghead enters the shot again. “N-n-now boss?” “Yeah, now”, finally responds the narrator. Egghead reaches into the violin case, pulling out a rifle, and shoots the sun out of the sky like a popped balloon in a shooting gallery, Egghead laughs uproariously as the skies turn dark, and the camera irises out.

Frank Tashlin was not oblivious to Avery’s success at breaking down the fourth wall, and decided to have his own hand at it, without the use of narration, in The Case of the Stuttering Pig (Looney Tunes (Porky Pig), 10/30/37). This dark-and-stormy night film provides us with out only view of Porky Pig’s extended family, present at the reading of the will of the late Solomon Swine (a porker look-alike to Oliver Hardy). Present at the reading besides Porky are Patrick, Peter, Percy, and Portus Pig – and Petunia? Confusing, in that Petunia was originally introduced as Porky’s would-be girlfriend – so how does she happen to be a member of the family at the will reading? Are Porky and Petunia kissin’ cousins? Things get complicated by the will provisions, which leave the whole estate to the pigs, except in the event of their demise, with a reversion of the property to Lawyer Goodwill – the attorney presiding over the reading. Goodwill makes his departure, but sneaks into a hidden laboratory in the mansion cellar. There, he sinisterly concocts a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion, which he samples – with no effect. Only mixing the beverage with a soda-fountain stirrer activates its ingredients, which transform Goodwill with horrific eyes, a long black nose, and clawed hands, plus increase his height by about one-third. The transformation shots are climaxed by some nicely-dimensional forward views as the monster faces the camera, and seems to arch forward as if towering over the audience in addressing them (a sequence that undoubtedly needs to be viewed on the big screen to achieve its full effect). The monster not only shares with us verbally his plans to do in the pig family, but is fully aware of the potential for audience resistance to his schemes, adding, “And you can’t help them, either, you bunch of softies!” He specifically points to one member of the crowd in the darkness, “Yeah, you in the third row – you big softie.” One by one, the pigs begin to disappear as the house power switch is repeatedly shut off by the monster’s hand. Porky becomes the only free pig remaining, while the others are bound in stocks in the cellar. The monster again turns to the camera. “And if that guy in the third row comes up, I’ll fix him, too – you big cream puff!”. After a terrifying chase, Porky stumbles across the secret lab, and the captive family. “Land sakes alibe”, reacts Porky, quickly freeing the others, only to have the monster reappear, cornering all of them, and advancing menacingly. He is suddenly hit in the face by a flying theater seat, knocked backwards, and falls into the stocks, which lock tight upon him. “Who did that?”, asks everybody on screen. “Me!”, shouts a voice from the audience, identifying himself to the villain. “I’m the guy in the third row – you big sourpuss!”. The villain is left to sulk at his own downfall, as the film irises out to Porky’s “T-t-that’s all folks.”

The Lion Hunt (Terrytoons/Educational, 1/7/38 – Mannie Davis, dir.) – Yes, the spirit of Tex Avery even had some brief influence upon a Terrytoon. Initially, a narrator has verbal interplay with the king of the beasts upon the screen. As the narrator touts the lion’s ferocity, the lion pauses in his walk, to provide the narrator with verbal encouragement for his complimentary words. “You tell ‘em, pal, you tell ‘em.” The narrator adds comment about what sharp teeth the lion has, then asks the lion to show the folks his teeth. The lion does so – by removing a set of false dentures from his mouth, and clapping them together like castanets. A little mouse with a miniature car and trailer travels through the jungle, the narrator remarking that this little guy is out to beat the rent problem. However, the narrator shouts a warning to the mouse, too late, as he drives the car and trailer across the lion’s tail lying in a jungle path, bending the tail severely. The lion quickly grabs up the mouse in one paw. However, a mother mouse and a row of mouse children emerge from the trailer. She sings a well-performed bluesy number to the lion that sounds much like “He Was Her Man”, producing weeping from the lion (while one of the mice offspring remarks, “Keep it up, Ma. He can’t take it”). The lion lets papa mouse go, with pop’s usual promise to do the lion a good turn someday. Before long, the lion is pursued by a white hunter atop an armored elephant, shooting machine-gun bullets from behind an armored tank-style shield mounted atop the elephant’s back. Also joining the chase are a tribe of black native warriors, three of which march in the manner of the “Spirit of ‘76″ fife and drum corps.

The lion takes refuge up a palm tree, but the natives arrive a moment too late, and surround the trunk of an adjoining palm like a pack of howling hound dogs. In fashion again mimicking the Avery style, the narrator takes a personal “hand” in things. “Hey, stop! You’re barking up the wrong tree”, he shouts. The natives pause, briefly motionless, and, in jitterless transition to live-action (possibly shot right on the animation camera mount), a live hand, casting natural shadow upon the background and character cels, enters the frame, pointing to the opposite tree trunk with its index finger. “Not that tree, THIS tree!” The chase resumes. Another odd moment somewhat predicts Avery’s and Frank Tashlin’s wild takes to come from the 1940’s. The lion retreats behind a boulder in piecemeal, each move depicted in a single frame of action by a pop-out of part of the drawing. As the lion pauses, first, his torso disappears entirely from our view. Next, his face disappears, leaving only his mane whirling around in the air, over to the rock, from behind which the lion, head and body reassembled, rises to catch the mane like a wig on his head. At another boulder, the hunter matches the action, with his body first popping out, then his head, and his pith helmet doing the twirl, to be caught by the reassembled hunter behind a rock.
Ultimately, the mouse and trailer return. The mouse revives the lion from a knockdown with smelling salts, jams the big cat into his tiny trailer, then leads the natives onto a rope bridge, which the mouse cuts through with his teeth. Without a pay-off gag, the film ends in a handshake between the mouse and lion, the favor repaid.

Happy Scouts (Lantz/Universal, Oswald Rabbit, 6/20/38, no director credit), the last regular production entry in the Oswald Rabbit series, is in many respects a by-the-numbers Oswald, and routine scouting cartoon, with the rabbit, as was the custom at such late stage of his career, taking a back seat to the antics of the duck quintuplets, who form his scout troop. However, the film features a surprising opening gag, actually beating rival Tex Avery to the punch on a concept which Avery himself would modify in later years, and which Chuck Jones would even later milk to death in “Duck Amuck”. Oswald, leading the ducklings through the woods, takes a turn at a fork in the road, with four of the ducklings following his path. The fifth duckling (the only black one of the quints, named Fooey), ignores the lead of the others, and continues walking in a straight line, taking the opposite fork in the road. He proceeds ahead about a dozen steps, then reacts in shock, as he finds himself in an amazing dilemma. He has marched so far off course, that the background painting has simply run out, and he reaches the unpainted edge of the drawing paper. But the edge is not entirely empty, as the Lantz artists have been using it for a doodling pad (including random scribbles, a badly-drawn eyeball, and an even more poorly-drawn outline of a canine), a game board (including multiple completed games of tic-tac-toe), and a memo pad (including a grocery list, and the reminder “Alex Lovy owes me a buck”! Also included in the unpainted space are a few notes that would suggest internal notes checking the artwork, one reading “BD – See Forkum about this pan”, and “BEH! Okay as changed. Fred.” Needless to say, Fooey quickly reverses direction, and races back to join the others. The film also ends with an Avery-style finish, as Fooey gets his neck stuck in the iris out, and struggles helplessly as the words “The End” appear on the blank screen below him.

Voodoo In Harlem (Lantz/Universal, 7/18/38 – Rudy Zamora, dir.) – Late 1938 found the Lantz studio in an atypical situation. New management had taken over Universal. renaming productions as by “The New Universal” instead of emblazoning the name of Carl Laemmle above the credits. Probably at the influence of the studio heads, the Oswald series was dropped, Oswald now becoming merely a figurehead on credits reading “Oswald Rabbit presents” but making no appearance in the cartoons, which no longer generally even concerned his universe of supporting characters. The Meany, Miny, and Moe experiment had fizzled a short time before. Thus Lantz was forced to surge forward without a starring character, necessitating a period of complete experimentation in search of a new cartoon personality to chart the studio’s course, punctuated by a flock of one-shots to fill the annual release schedule.

Among the early one-shot efforts arose this film, which the staff may have viewed as something of an inexpensive “cheater” to fill time. It is a combination of live-action and animation, but not even striving for the level of interplay between the two mediums common to the “Dinky Doodles” series. Instead, all shots are either straight live-action, of consist of photographic stills over which animation cels are laid. No shot includes a moving live-action image under the animation. As the inclusion of live shots eats up at least a quarter of the film, and no backgrounds had to be drawn, it can be presumed that the savings on art labor probably allowed the studio to produce this outing considerably on the cheap. Yet, at least one can say the animation is reasonably vigorous, and well-placed among the photographic images, and the title song by Frank Churchill is catchy and memorable, such that audiences probably never much noticed the short-cuts and shortcomings, and considered it an interesting departure from Lantz’s norm. Nevertheless, Lantz would not return to the technique again until the days of the Woody Woodpecker show, when Woody and his “boss” would interact in Lantz’s office under the direction of Jack Hannah.

An animator (only seen from rear view), is busy at a work desk as the hour aproaches quitting time. IMDB believes the artist is Lantz himself, but the character drawn in close-yp on his drawing board is the title character from a concurrent production, Problem Child, also directed by Rudy Zamora, so it is equally possible that the artist is Zamora. The clock sounds quitting time, and the yawning animator quits for the day, locking the office door, but leaving the window open. Clouds move in outside, and a wind gusts up, blowing through the open window, and scattering a large stack of blank drawing paper over the office floor. A bottle of ink is also toppled sideways, and drops of the stuff begin dripping off the desk onto one of the pieces of paper. From the puddle emerge four characters – a singing quartet of African cannibal-type natives, the last squat one of whom first rises as a poolroom 8-ball, then transforms into character. Above on the desk, more natives rise from the puddle of ink emerging from the bottle, and begin to scatter throughout the room. The film is utterly plotless, bit instantly becomes a four minute production number, with dancing natives and a king chieftain scrambling over a piano keyboard, a world globe, desks and bookshelves, all for no purpose but to entertain. The crow of a rooster, as with all “midnight in a…” films, sends the natives running for a second bottle to hide in, and the four original natives back into the puddle on the drawing paper on the floor. A black cleaning lady enters, as upset about the scattered papers as the janitor in Betty Boop’s film discussed above. She wonders what the black spot is on the single sheet of paper, but rounds up all the scattered mess, and deposits it all, including the ink-soiled sheet, into an incinerator outside. The film ends with a view of the smoke emerging from the incinerator chimney, with the presumption that the four natives will be chanting their ditty in whatever heaven is reserved for cartoon ink stains. [LINK]

More late 30’s, next time.