As I’m getting a bunch of films ready for broadcast on MeTV and MeTV Toons, I’m enjoying a lot of old favorites. Sometimes they’ve not making it into the final files heading for airing. Galloping Fanny (1933), known for many years as Galloping Hooves, has just about *everything* needed to insure a difficult or impossible broadcast, even 90 years after it was made.
This cartoon, starring Cubby Bear, was one of the first Van Beuren cartoons I ever saw, having purchased a 16mm print from Frank Bueno’s $5 table at the Columbus Cinevent in 1983 or so. All of those prints were pretty beat up, and I bought two prints of it and put them together to make a pretty complete one.
In the 80s, these cartoons were far from being seen beyond people that owned prints.. so nearly every Van Beuren cartoon was a new cartoon to me! I know, I know, I’m a piker for those who saw these cartoons in the 50s and 60s.
Having been born in 1968 kept most black and white cartoons out of my viewing growing up. I think I’ve established a least a little street cred these days for helping more people find these little films just like I did. Then again, I know there’s a bunch of folks reading here that are younger as well.
It’s no wonder that Official Films changed the title for the 16mm release. ‘Fanny Gallop’ was a slang term around in the 20s and 30s referring to female sexual excitement. These days that term is of course not known very well. I have several dirty little 8-pagers (Tijuana Bibles) that use the term…. and I won’t be sharing *those* here!
The cartoon starts off with an excited crown singing about the big race. Within seconds we’re treated to the most New York of New York cartoons, featuring almost equal opportunity ethnic caricatures of Jewish, Italian, Russian and British, as well as a tough horse from the Bowery. Listen carefully!
We meet Cubby Bear’s horse, the favorite, who looks and sings like a horsy Mae West. She also sounds like she was recorded in a bathroom. Moments later, we learn she’s eloped, forcing Cubby to grab two black porters to jump inside a horse suit to run the race. Somehow that solution is his best bet to still run the race.
The Bowery horse and tough cat-rider very publicly dope-up as they’re waiting at the starting line, adding another element of pre-code fun. From there we have a bunch of the usual sorts of racing gags as peppy Van Beuren music carries the action. Cubby and his two porters win the race in the end— and revealing a laughing porter coming out of the horse costume’s mouth.
This film is full of shots that are pretty primitive right next to shots with really great, fun animation. I really like the mix of shots and how this particular film really understands that sometimes a cartoon just needs to be entertaining and not much more. Despite all the stereotypes, it’s still a really enjoyable outing all these decades later. I especially like a section where the Bowery horse and rider spin a one way sign and confuse things.
Right at the end of the film, there is a cameo of sorts: Tom and Jerry, now unemployed, make their last appearance as characters in the crowd. It’s sort of a nice little tip of the hat to a series that just completed.
A Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Steeplechase, was released earlier in the year and has almost the same plot. This cartoon was released at the end of December, with the Mickey cartoon coming out in September. It’s pretty doubtful that the studio saw The Steeplechase and turned around an imitation that quickly; it’s more likely that both films were inspired by this basic idea that shows up in silent comedies as well as comics. I find this cartoon to be a lot more fun, although not as well animated of course.
So, here’s a Cubby you won’t be seeing on MeTV Toons… at least I don’t think so.
Have a good week everyone!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
I first became acquainted with “Galloping Fanny” on Thunderbean’s “Uncensored Animation” collection. That was a pretty beat-up print; this one is much better. No matter how many times I see it, the sight of “Dago Joe” and “Smoky Moe” reduces me to fits of hysterical laughter. I can’t help it. Maybe MeTV Toons should set up a late-night programming block called — what else? — “Uncensored Animation”, to showcase cartoons like this one. You could have a back-to-back comparison of “Galloping Fanny” and “The Steeple Chase”, followed by a scholarly four-hour panel discussion.
Does anyone know of any specific examples of silent film comedies where a couple of African-American grooms don a horse costume and win a race?
Tijuana Bibles! I saw one of those when I was in Boy Scouts. It featured Popeye and Olive Oyl, and I found it very disconcerting at the time, though I’m sure I’d appreciate it more today. If you won’t share your collection here, can you at least let us know if you ever decide to share it someplace else?
Nice MeTV Toons article on their new Thunderbean relationship:
https://www.metvtoons.com/lists/everything-you-need-to-know-about-tom-and-jerry
A handful of cultural references, in no particular order: (1) the Jewish horse refers to the Bronx, which was a borough that acquired an increasingly Jewish character in the 1910s and 1920s when the IRT subway was built, allowing many in the heavily Jewish Lower East Side to move there — see Arthur Kober’s “Thunder Over the Bronx”; (2) the Italian horse refers to Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, who still had something of a positive reputation at this time, prior to Ethiopia, Spain and the Second World War — Hitler had only just come to power at this time, and was not viewed in the same light of strength as Mussolini; (3) in a lot of 19th century stage productions shown in, and set in, the Bowery (an area of downtown Manhattan), you’d often see the underdog Bowery hero beat the favorite, usually someone upperclass; (4) the trope of the Southern colonel betting lavishly on horse races goes back a very long way, deep into the 19th century; (5) it wouldn’t be until 1939 (a few years after this cartoon) that parimutuel betting would be legalized for horse races in New York State, largely driving bookies out of prominence; (6) Fanny Lou (the real one) is of course Mae West, who was near the peak of her popularity in Paramount films at the time of this cartoon; (7) illicit affairs with the ice man were a running gag for many decades in the pre-Frigidaire era (cp. with the later Avery cartoon “I Only Have Eyes for You”); (8) the Bowery was quite notorious for many years for the heavy use of alcohol and drugs — yes, this is very much a New York-centric cartoon.
Steve,
Do you think, that some Cubby Bear cartoons willl be aired on MeTV Toons?
This one has always been a favorite for how vulgar and over the top it is in pushing the limits, a last hurrah of pre-code entertainment in many years. Considering THE STEEPLECHASE was released a mere three months before, it got interpreted by press as a parody of the cartoon. What I think happened is Ed Donnelly, who is credited on this cartoon and had been laid off from Disney at the beginning of the year, knew about this cartoon’s production and story structure, and when he arrived back in New York at Van Beuren, came up with the idea of doing a very NY version of the same story, turning every element they could into differing taste. A theory, but what seems to be the case…
Primed by the “Oops” of Animation Trails, I wondered if the horse costume rubber-banding off the tree used the cels of the outbound trip in reverse order for the return, and noticed that the final motions of the segment were not seen at the beginning -at least, in this print. And I also see the use of separate cels means the return of the pantomime horse is to find the Bronx horse galloping, not preparing to un-kick it away. Cubby, kicked off at a different angle, returns from that same angle (untold story!), but the unicycle, not needed for any more gags, does not return on its reverse course.
Once, looking for something else, I saw Guinness keeps records for speeds of pantomime horses. From the speeds, I’d guess they came from the field of track & field rather than the legitimate stage. There were categories for males and females, but not mixed doubles.
(suggestion for an editor of this article: check this part of it)
“The cartoon starts off with an excited crown singing about the big race.”
I think most of us understood that “crown” is a typo for “crowd.”
“Galloping Fanny” wasn’t the last appearance of Tom and Jerry. In Cubby’s next cartoon, “Croon Crazy”, Tom and Jerry appear among a group of men in a pool hall listening to the radio as Cubby (in drag) sings a Mae West number. When Cubby/Mae sings “But what I’ve got, I’ve got a lot of,” Tom gestures with his hands to delineate Mae’s voluptuous bust. Pre-Code cartoons are the greatest!
The Van Beuren cartoons are at least consistent— consistently AWFULl, that is. Here we get a double dose of racist caricatures, both Jewish and Black! Maybe others, too, but as usual with VB’s, I couldn’t stand to watch it all the way through. I think that I’d rather have a root canal— even without an anaesthetic.
The most interesting thing about this sorry bargain-basement studio is that some major animation talents passed through it (for example, there’s Steve Muffatti’s credit on this one). Bill Tytla and Frank Tashlin also did some time in thist dire dungeon, and probably got away just as soon as they could. It was the Depression, when everyone grabbed any regular paycheck that they could find, and there weren’t many of those.
These things are a constant reminder that EVERY profession has its lowest rung. Lower than low, in some cases. But they remain a part of animation history, and should be preserved as perfect examples of how NOT to make cartoons.
Yeah, but tell us what you REALLY think!
And yet a whole lot of them are enormously entertaining.
That Tom and Jerry cameo is really cool to see! The way that they’re positioned as the only human characters in the crowd, and waving at the camera, makes it 100% clear that the animators wanted the audience to notice and appreciate this little shout-out. I wouldn’t have expected a detail like that from Van Beuren.