Cartoons About Cartoons (Part 5)

All action today takes place in 1938, and all from two studios. Warner Brothers continues to contribute the lion’s share of self-referential action, including one tale actually involving a lion. Rounding out the field is Paramount and Popeye, with two instances where the usually self-sufficient sailor has to turn to outside assistance from beyond the theater screen.

Cinderella Meets Fella (Warner, Merrie Melodies, 7/23/38 – Fred (Tex) Avery, dir.) – Avery’s first retelling of the old Cinderella tale. As soon as Cindy’s stepmother and stepsisters step out, Cindy is on the phone to the police, calling in a missing persons report on her Fairy Godmother, who’s fifteen minutes late for her appointment. A voice on the other end of the line tells her not to worry – that they’ll search all the beer joints in town until they find her. The Fairy Godmother is dragged in, and still has to conceal a flask, giving clear indication what kind of an establishment she’s been in. The Godmother produces a grocery can labeled “Pumpkin”, yet is able with some effort to pry out of it the full-sized vegetable. Add some mice (from a mousehole with a one-armed bandit handle that pays off with a Jackpot), and we’re ready for a coach. A wave of the wand, and the pumpkin and mice are transformed into – Santa Claus and his reindeer? “Guess I got my dates mixed”, the Godmother utters as an excuse. Another wand wave, and – a Western stagecoach? Oh, well, it will have to do. At the ball, Cindy meets Prince Chow-Mein (aka Egghead), who reacts in Joe Penner embarrassment at Cindy’s beauty. Cindy plants a kiss on the Prince’s nose, and the lipstick marks animate to react in Martha Raye fashion, “Oh Boy”. A cuckoo bird tries to prolong the romance by attempting to hold back the clock hands from striking twelve – but the clock’s mechanism wins, spinning the minute hand and the bird around and around the clock face with each of the bongs that sound the hour.

Cindy runs for the door, but forgets something, returning to deliberately drop her slipper at the Prince’s feet. The Prince searches the kingdom for her. (This kingdom must have a drinking problem, as the Prince is almost tempted to look for Cindy in the same beer joint her Fairy Godmother frequented.) But the search doesn’t need to go much further, when multiple neon signs advertise the location of Cinderella’s house. The Prince darts Inside, but no one is home. Again looking in the unlikeliest of places, the Prince investigates another cuckoo clock, from which eight cuckoo birds emerge, replying in unison, “Now you KNOW she wouldn’t be in here!” The Prince finally finds a note from Cindy, reading “Dear Princy. Got tired of waiting. Went to a Warner Brothers show.” The Prince starts crying on the floor, until he hears a familiar voice calling him from off the screen. “Oh Princy, Princy.” In a shadow cast upon the screen, we see the figure of Cinderella, rising from the tenth row of the theater and waving to the prince, then cutting across the center seats from right to left, and advancing toward the stage, to join the Prince in the screen frame from stage left. After an embrace, Cindy asks the Prince what do they do now. The Prince replies, “Let’s go back in the tenth row and stay for the newsreel.” The two exit the screen through the iris out, and exit to screen left, presumably to climb down and back into the theater. An opportunity was missed here, as it would have been even more fun if the “That’s All Folks” closing had played with the shadows of both Cindy and the Prince crossing again in front of the screen back to the far right to take their seats.

The Major Lied ‘Til Dawn (Warner, Merrie Melodies, 8/13/38 – Frank Tashlin, dir.) – Title is a pun on the feature film title, “The General Died at Dawn” from 1936 with Gary Cooper and Madelene Carroll. A British major tells a look-alike to British child actor Freddie Bartholemew (“Captains Courageous”) the tale of his safari, from which he acquired his fine collection of “head” decorating his study. Much of the film is a clever imitation of an Avery travel or nature mockumentary, with various spot gags on African wildlife, including an Avery-style running gag with recurring view of an elephant who, despite the species’ reputation for never forgetting, is trying to remember something. The major ultimately encounters the King of Beasts in the heart of the jungle – who is waiting for him in a boxing ring with an extra pair of gloves, coaxing the Major into a “fair” fight. The Major drops his rifle and accepts the challenge, though the lion does not play fair, loading his gloves with horseshoes. The action becomes hidden in a fight cloud, but when the dust clears, the lion, despite the loaded gloves, lies prone on the mat, the Major standing victorious. A surprise appearance is made by Tarzan, who reacts in shock at the outcome of the fight, and summons all the animals of the jungle to take revenge upon the Major, with the mighty yell of “Hi-Yo. Silver!” A stampede of wild beasts piles into the boxing ring, and amid the spiraling fight cloud, the Major is ejected, landing winded but not yet broken upon the ground. Now the Major acknowledges his cartoon roots, and his further knowledge of the theatrical competition, as he addresses the audience directly. “By jove. If it’s good enough for that sailor man, it’s good enough for me.” He produces from a coat picket a can of spinach, designed as a dead-ringer for Popeye’s typical can, and downs its contents. His chest swells, his arm muscles bulge, and a superimposed advertisement appears on the screen, reading, “With men who need muscles, it’s spinach, 2 to 1″. A raging battle follows as the Major goes to work, with a number of gags lifted straight out of Popeye’s own “Wild Elephinks”. An alligator is converted into a traveling bag. Another beast is sheared of his fur coat, which hangs on a clothes hanger upon a tree limb. An elephant is transformed into an ivory-keyed grand piano. And the lion loses his mane, which slips down to his waist to create a hula skirt. The Major triumphs, bringing his trophies home. But Freddie Bartholemew asks what became of the forgetful elephant. The camera returns to a shot to the creature, as he finally recalls what it was he was supposed to do. The camera pulls up to him for a facial close-up, as he addresses the audience directly, uttering “That’s all, folks!” – his sole mission for the film, as the superimposed titles appear, and the shot fades out.

A Feud There Was (Warner. Merrie Melodies, 9/24/38 – Fred (Tex) Avery, dir.) Avery’s hillbilly epic includes several classic instances of characters’ cognizance of their role in a cartoon, and of the audience watching them. The first gag to set such a scene depicts a member of one of the feuding families firing rifle shots out a window, with a gun that has nine triggers attached to the barrel. After firing a volley from each trigger, the shooter laughs, and declares that “In one of these here now cartoon pictures, a body can get away with anything.” The member of the rival family who receives the shots has his long beard trimmed by the bullets almost up to his chin. He looks at the remaining stubble, and declares to the audience, “The old gray hair, ain’t what she used to be.” He breaks into spontaneous laughter at the self-perceived cleverness of his joke, then appears to realize that the audience isn’t laughing with him. Casting his eyes downward in apologetic fashion, he remarks, “Well, it sounded funny at rehearsal, anyway.” Another hillbilly attests to his total hatred of the Weaver family, then decides to be sure if any of his foes might be watching from the darkness. “Is there a Weaver in the audience?”, he shouts to the house. A shadow of another hillbilly rises in front of the projected image. “Yeah, ya skunk”, and raises a shadow shotgun to fire two blasts at the screen, scaring the on-screen feuder out the window. As the film ends, Egghead, appearing for the first time under the name “Elmer Fudd, Peacemaker”, cures the rival families from feuding, by single-handedly laying them out when both sides gang up on him, the only one now left standing. He meekly tips his hat to the audience, stating “Good night, all.” The shadow of the disgruntled Weaver again rises from the audience, and snarls, “Good night!”, firing a shot into Egghead’s posterior, for the iris out.

Porky In Wackyland (Warner, Looney Tunes (Porky Pig), 9/24/38 – Robert Clampett, dir.). A Clampett classic, introducing the character of the Dodo Bird, the head inhabitant of a world of insanity known as Wackyland (It can happen here). The dodo is said to be the last of its kind, worth so much money, the zeroes of its price tag run off the newspaper column in which headline appears, and have to be picked up below as a P.S. Those familiar with the cartoon will remember the wide array of denizens that inhabit the land (creatures with bulb-horn heads, a duck-like creature whose only reason for being is to repeat over and over Al Jolson’s “Mammy” (and never censored by local stations!), a robber with no prison yet still feeling incarcerated by carrying around his own set of iron bars, a human totem-pole of characters who raise the sun from the horizon each morning, a threatening monster who climaxes its roars with an effeminate “Boo”, a multi-handed direction-booth attendant who points in all directions at once when directing tourists, and, in this 1938 version, the original catdog, to name a few).

But the dodo himself is alone more madness than can be handled. He makes a grandiose entrance out of what appears to be a castle drawbridge, but turns out to be a speedboat, then drops an anchor over the boat’s side to sink the whole craft into the moat. He breaks into a ”vo-do-de-oh” dance whenever anyone mentions his name (and sometimes even when they don’t), trampling his pursuers. And he has all means at hand of distractions and escape. He proves his own cognizance and mastery of the cartoon world by pulling out a pencil in the manner of a Van Beuren character, and drawing objects in mid-air which remain two-dimensional but become usable and solid. By such means, and with a “Hocus, pocus, presto!”. he draws a door to hide behind, then doesn’t even open it to enter – instead, he grabs the bottom outlines, stretching them upwards from the ground in the center as if they were made of rubber, and forces an opening below for himself to slip through, the outlines snapping back into original place. The door refuses to perform the same trick for Porky, who pounds upon it to be let inside – even though there is no structure drawn around it, so one would think he could simply walk around. (Such door gags, on a side note, would be remembered by two ex-Warner executives (Katz and Binder) in the 1940’s for an extended running gag in the Columbia Color Rhapsody, “Up ‘n’ Atom”). The dodo appears again, now having drawn a window frame in mid-air which he whistles and waves from. (Cartoon physics become remarkable at this point, as the thin air between the door and window not only somehow seem to prevent Porky’s entry, but conceal the lower portion of the dodo’s torso from view below the elevation line of the base of the window frame.) Porky tries to leap in the small window, but gets stuck halfway, allowing the dodo to cross back to the door, exit through it, and deliver a kick to Porky’s rear to pass him through the window framework. We do not see whether the dodo’s next piece of handiwork is drawn by him, or just exists in this land, but the dodo is next able to master the fact that he is two-dimensional – entering a square panel that is definitely drawn as flat as a pancake, while dressed as an elevator boy, and shouting “Going up!”.

An equally flat outline of an elevator door shuts in front of him across the panel, and the whole rectangle rises, still flat, into the sky. Porky can only stand and watch it disappear in wonderment. Then comes the ultimate recognition of the dodo’s place in the world. In the first gag-use of the studio’s W-B shield logo, the Warner shield suddenly zooms into perspective from the horizon into the middle of the shot, the same as it does on all their pictures, but with a twist. The dodo emerges from a place of concealment behind the shield, taking a pot-shot at Porky with a slingshot. Then the shield does a 180-degree in reverse, revealing its blank backside with the dodo clinging to it with his arms and legs, and the shield reverses its zoom away from the camera and back to the point of infinity, the dodo performing a dismount with a parachute just before the shield disappears. (For many years, this groundbreaking scene was excised from Guild Films television prints, who did not want to acknowledge the original studio ownership of the film, but thankfully, Warner’s re-acquisition of ownership rights has allowed its re-inclusion.) The dodo performs one more feat of two-dimensionality, appearing to find himself cornered at the edge of a high mountain cliff. However, the scenic view turns out to be painted on a backdrop, which the dodo merely raises like a curtain to get it out of the way. Then, the dodo effortlessly pulls into the frame a very three-dimensional brick wall, into which Porky crashes. Porky finally turns the tables in the final shots, posing as a newsboy with an Extra headline about the dodo already being captured, which instantly attracts the bird’s attention. “Who? What? Where? When?” asks the dodo. “N-n-NOW” responds Porky, smashing the perplexed bird a conk on the noggin. But as Porky celebrates having caught the last dodo, the bird summons confirmation of being the last of his kind – from a flock of about fifty other dodos, substantially defeating the worth of Porky’s prey. One could have climaxed this film with a line from a later Hanna-Barbera Lippy the Lion cartoon, where the hatching of a new brood of the creatures elicits the observation from a museum curator, “Dodos are a dime a dozen.”

Porky’s Naughty Nephew (Warner, Looney Tunes (Porky Pig), 10/15/38 – Robert Clampett, dir.) – This cartoon isn’t so much about film conventions or filmmaking, but at least observes a presence of its characters within the medium, irrespective of how much they are aware of it themselves, by its setting – the Cartoon Animals’ Outing at a local beach, with a main event of a swim race. (A footnote to the poster advertising the event advises, “Elephants mist wear their trunks while swimming.”) A line of animals enters a single narrow dressing stall, exiting the rear door of the stall without missing a marching beat – yet somehow, they are instantly transformed by passing through the stall from street clothes into swimming trunks. A “bathing suit fitter” provides those with ill-fitting suits the ability for custom sizing. A bear cub in an oversized suit turns a knob, and is doused with a water shower, which shrinks the suit to perfect size. (Of course, a shrinkable suit might prove a problem the instant one hits the water.) A bigger dog, too large for his suit, also turns on the shower – and himself is shrunk to a size to fit his own suit.

Most of the cartoon revolves around the interruption of Porky’s peaceful day upon the sands by his nephew Pinky, who is largely a pest. A bickering match between Pinky and a neighboring child gets Porky repeatedly smacked with a sand shovel. Pinky himself asks to bury Porky in the sand – and performs the feat with a dump truck (a gag which would be repeated in “Malibu Beach Party”.) Daffy Duck announces the start of the swim race, with a large inscription etched on his rear, reading “NOW!” A stampede of species mows him down to get to the starting line. Porky joins the contestants, and at the firing of the starting gun, dives into the water. But all the other animals reverse direction, heading back up the shore, to retrieve all manner of devices with which to cheat in the race. Daffy slaps Porky around, by means of a propelling rear paddlewheel. A stork rides a bicycle over the terrain underwater, while a longer-legged ostrich merely runs on the turf below the waves as if in a track meet. A human jockey and race horse somehow wind up unlikely contestants, but don’t stay in the race for long, as the surprised horse remarks “This can’t be Santa Anita”, and sinks into the briny blue. A tired goose swallows a whole rowing crew of small animals in a racing scull, the outline of the oars within his belly providing him propulsion for the rest of the race. Eddie Cantor makes a surprise appearance as another contestant, smacking into a floating course marker, but thrilled to find it. “At last! A buoy” (play on Eddie’s inability to father a male successor). An elk unfurls a full set of sails from his antlers. Porky finds himself running dead last among the remaining participating contestants. But Pinky comes to the rescue, producing a wind-up toy sailboat, with a sail that wraps around its mast to resemble the fin of an advancing shark. Porky is scared into terror by the sight, and puts on an extra burst of speed, quickly passing all other contestants to win the race. Porky scrambles up the banks, cowering in panic as the fin closely approaches the shore. Pinky arrives, laughing himself silly, and attempts to calm Porky’s nerves, revealing that the fin is just a little toy sailboat. But when Pinky raises the fin from the water, he gets his own surprise. The sailboat has somehow disappeared, and the fin remains fastened to a real shark! Porky and Pinky both head for the hills, as the shark looks on, for the iris out.

Goonland (Fleischer/Paramount, Popeye, 10/21/38 – Dave Fleischer, dir., Seymour Kneitel/Abner Matthews, anim.) – The first filming of the oft-told tale of how Popeye found his missing Poopdeck Pappy who left him when he was a baby. This would be the film debut not only of Poopdeck, but of the goons of Goon Island, where Pappy has been held a prisoner for forty years. Popeye mingles well with the goons, using some local foliage on his arms and legs to simulate “goony hair”, and stretching his facial features into contortions to resemble a goon. It doesn;t take long to locate the cell where Pappy is imprisoned, passing the time playing a solitaire game of checkers with himself. Pappy is anything but hospitable, reacting to Popeye’s presence with the greeting, “I don’t like relatives.” Popeye becomes dejected, knowing when he’s not wanted, and forgets to reapply his goon disguise, leading to his capture. Rather than imprisonment, Popeye is bound with ropes in a staked-out position at the base of a tall mountain cliffside, while the goons roll a massive boulder to the cliff edge to drop upon him. Popeye’s spinach can is knocked away by a goon, and rolls up against the outer wall of Pappy’s cell, beneath a barred window. “Spinach! I ain’t had spinach in forty years!” shouts Pappy. Pap reaches his arm out the window as far as it will go, but the can remains just out of reach. Pappy hits upon a clever idea, and uses his pipe as a tool, hooking one end of it into the lip of the open spinach can, and carefully lifting the can upwards so that it does not topple from its precarious balance upon the pipe bell. One dose, and Pappy develops an eight-tier muscle – enough to pry the bars of the window apart, and split the entire cave side that forms his cell. Popeye meanwhile dodges falling pebbles as the boulder moves closer and closer to the drop-off point, remarking that someone wants to “rock” him to sleep. Pappy arrives, but doesn’t have time to tear away all of the ropes holding Popeye down. Instead, he twirls like a corkscrew, and propels himself skyward, just as the boulder begins to fall, meeting the rock halfway.

Pappy’s punch sends the rock aloft, causing it to land upon and pin down the goons on the cliff above. But more goons surround Popeye and Pappy in the valley below. Despite being outnumbered, the super-powered Pappy and Popeye take a stand, ready to fight. As this action occurs, the camera is setting us up for a surprise, in a sequence of five shots, each one progressively pulling the outline of the film frame back from us a notch at a time, so that by the fifth shot, there is considerable black letterboxing around all sides of the frame. The goons launch their attack upom out heroes, and the scene is a jumble of fighting characters, similar to a fight cloud but with the combatants not obscured from view. Suddenly, the picture is disrupted, as the image splits in two across the middle, and sprocket holes of film become visible around the frame, as if the film has broken apart before our eyes, its halves flapping in opposite directions from the white projection area as if sticking dimensionally out from the theater screen. The split in the image causes Popeye and Pappy to cling to the upper half of the ripped film and hang on, while the unlucky goons, deprived of a background to stand upon, fall out of the film and entirely off the screen into blackness. (Does this mean the audience will now have to deal with them occupying the theater seats?) “That was a lucky break”, comments Pappy, as we hear on the soundtrack the clapping and stomping of the audience as if cueing the projectionist to fix the film so we can get on with the program. A pair of live-action hands (depicted by a series of frame-by-frame photographs copied onto cel and placed over the animation drawings) reaches into the screen area, taking hold of both halves of the busted “film”, and patching the two pieces together by connecting them with a safety pin! (I’d love to see the projector that could pass this obstacle through the film aperture.) Somehow, the film is restarted, and Popeye exits, carried happily in the arms of Pappy, who ends the Popeye theme with the line, “I’m Popeye the Sailor’s old man.”

A Date to Skate (Fleischer/Paramount, Popeye, 11/18/38 – Dave Fleischer, dir., Willard Bowsky, Orestes Calpini, anim.) – Again, Popeye needs an assist from off-screen. Popeye talks Olive into learning the art of roller skating, with Popeye’s instruction. Just getting skates for Olive is a challenge, as everyone is too embarrassed to ask Olive’s humongous shoe size. “Make a fist” suggests Popeye, and the skate rental attendant wraps a skate sole around her clenched hand to get a measurement. “She’s got a hand like a foot and a half”, he observes, finally finding an appropriate fit with the measurement. Olive is an off-balance nightmare upon the rink, and even Popeye can’t keep a pillow under her posterior. Olive rolls out the front door, gets mixed up with a cop directing traffic, rolls through a department store, and finally winds up hanging desperately to the trailing ladder of a passing fire truck on its way to a fire. Popeye is unable to keep up, and pauses to reach for his trusty spinach can – but finds his pocket empty. “I must be gettin’ old. Now don’t tell me I left it home,” mutters Popeye. He is finally forced to project his head directly at the camera, seeking the assistance of the audience in the manner of Scrappy in “Showing Off” – “Is there any spinach in the house?” The shadow of someone in attendance rises before the theater screen, holding the recognizable shape of a spinach can in his hand. “Here ya’ are, Popeye”, calls the patron’s voice, as he hurls the shadow-can toward the screen, where it is caught in full light by Popeye. Popeye has his vitality restored, and overtakes Olive in a wild downhill race through a series of interconnecting bridges and street overpasses, finally colliding with and catching Olive in his arms at a rotary. He asks if Olive is all right, and instead of being panicked, Olive has finally taken to the sport, and suggests, “Let’s do it again!”

Daffy Duck in Hollywood (Warner, Merrie Melodies (Daffy Duck), 12/12/38 – Fred (Tex) Avery, dir.) – Avery’s “Darnfool Duck” hit the screen in “Porky’s Duck Hunt” with such impact, he was quickly launched into a short series of Technicolor appearances in the Merrie Melodies – while Porky was left behind to labor in black and white upon the Looney Tunes. Among Daffy’s early appearances was this Hollywood epic. Daffy is once again aware of his existence in the media of Hollywood, this time haunting the executives, directors, and actors of the studio with random acts of insanity. As Germanic swine director Von Hamburger takes a break to smoke a cigarette, Daffy steals it away, then uses it to skywrite in smoke within the sound stage the words “Warner Bros.” He turns to the audience and says, “Just giving my bosses a plug. I got a option coming up!” He crosses lighting fixture wiring with plumbing outlets, turning the director’s call for “Lights” into an instant showerbath. Daffy plants a munitions belt of machine gun bullets into a hand-cranked camera, resulting in rapid-fire action when the crank is turned. “This isn’t a gangster picture”, weeps the director. Lunch is called for, with an order for “Turkey with all the trimmings.” Instead, the director gets Daffy under the cover of the chef’s special, who bites his nose with a honk.

Daffy now crosses over to another structure on the studio lot – the film library. Seeing all the reels within, Daffy shouts to the audience, “Wow! I’ll give ‘em a real feature!” Snipping shot after shot from various reels with a large pair of scissors, and splicing everything randomly together with film cement, Daffy produces a one-reeler. That evening, at Von Hamburger’s private screening of the rushes for the studio exec, Daffy switches his own reel for Hamburger’s. The picture is a slapdash mess, combining a few shots from Warner’s first Technicolor feature, “Gold Is Where You Find It”, with scads of old black and white newsreel footage. But sound has been edited in odd ways too, providing new narrations not intended for the scenes they accompany, and producing unexpected laughs (such as a lion from Central Park zoo seeming to remark, “Motion pictures are your best entertainment.”) The director’s eyes pop, and he cowers in anticipation of the executive’s critique of the work. When the reel ends, the executive shouts a string of about ten superlative adjectives in praise of the film, then adds, “And it’s good, too.” The camera pans to Von Limburger, who has fainted dead away on the floor. The film ends with Daffy now seated in the director’s chair, dressed in a version of Limburger’s outfit his own size, and himself calling for a lunch of “Turkey with all the trimmings. To match the role reversal, Von Limburger appears under the lid of the lunch, bites and honks Daffy’s nose, then zips out the studio door into the distance, “Woo Woo”ing in Daffy’s signature exit, for the iris out.

NEXT: 1939 and on…