It’s definitely a Van Beuren sort of day here….
Cubby Bear cartoons are some of my favorite cartoons from Van Beuren. It was one of the first DVDs we did (back in 2004) and the Blu-ray set was in the works from pretty early on. It’s been out of print for a while now, and we hope to have it back in print this year.
First — a little news from the Thunderbean trenches:
While we wait to see if the Rainbow Parade cleanup drive can somehow be saved (we lost six cleanups, and have since redone one), we’ve been moving forward with the other things to finish on the set. One of them was combining the successive exposure negative for Bold King Cole (1936). I put it together last night with some excellent technical advice from Thad Komorowski, who’s been doing an excellent job of working on restoring the Color Classics and other great cartoons from Paramount’s master materials for the Fleischer restoration project.
It was amazing to see one of the films from this series from the negative. I just wish the master materials for all these had survived. Here’s some stills from the recombination. I can’t wait to get this set finished!
And — onto Love’s Labor Won:
This is one of my favorite Cubby Bear cartoons— and the second in the series. while I wouldn’t rank it among the best cartoons ever made, it’s a solid piece of joyful, musical cartooning, meant for enjoyment rather than any scrutinizing.
Cubby is introduced to a cheerful song touting his flute playing skills, sung by some birds sitting on a fence (I always wondered if these are supposed to be caricatures of people that worked at the studio- I bet they are. This sequence of cubby playing the flute and cheering all around him goes on for about 2 minutes— 1/3 of the cartoon, before Cubby makes his way to Honey bear’s house. After a parrot and chair join into the song, Cubby calls for Honey, who is taking a shower. He plays the piano and hen tries to spy on Honey through a keyhole. I don’t know how that isn’t a dealbreaker.
Cubby and Honey sing a song together, then they find a plant that looks enough like a microphone to make it act like one. He sings a cute depression-themed song called ‘“Get yourself a Girl and Fall in Love”. You can’t hate a song with lyrics like “Now if you’re worried ‘cause the rent is due… invite the landlord over, and let him worry, too” and “You should never worry, if times are hard…. You can plant potatoes and tomatoes in your yard”
Their song makes everyone happy, except for wolf, who Cubby fights (in a sequence animated by Jim Tyer) for several seconds before winning. The little cartoon ends and everyone forgets it.
While we don’t learn a lot about Cubby’s personality in this little cartoon, there’s enough fun music and action to make it an enjoyable cartoon. I really like the scruffiness of Van Beuren’s product at this point— and it’s a surprise that the studio’s output would change so drastically over the next few years.
The print of the film is from Chris Buchman, who purchased it from Keith Smith at Modern Sound Pictures. It was struck from their 35mm negative in the 60s. There was a tiny piece of the RKO logo fading out on Chris’ print of Opening Night, the cartoon before this one, so I made the guess that the RKO logo appeared on some of the first of the series besides just the first one.
Have a good week all, and I hope you enjoy this cartoon!
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.
What would a “Van Beuren sort of day” be like? Well, one with grey skies, like Michigan in February….
If those four birds are meant to be caricatures of anyone in particular, I suppose the bald-headed one with glasses (third from the left) could be either Mannie Davis or John Foster. Don’t know about the others.
I love “Love’s Labor Won” too, but it seems odd that Cubby’s lupine antagonist isn’t introduced until five minutes into a six-minute cartoon.
Have a happy Van Beuren sort of day — sort of!
Wow! It certainly has been a long time since I have been collecting your DVDs from Thunderbean.
I have the “Cubby bear“ set on both DVD and Blu-ray. I like them both! It’s nice to have these upgrades. After all, especially when it comes to classic animation, we all know that certain bits and pieces show up where we least expect it, including title cards, long lost to classic cartoons of another certain studio! Keep on searching, and I’ll keep on buying! Thank you always for all that you do.
Thad knows his stuff! I wish some studio would hire him to restore classic cartoons – or classic movies for that matter. I know that the end result will be well worth it! I lost touch with his web blog or his podcast. I will have to keep looking him up to see what new things he has put on the web about classic toons.
I think you may already be aware of this, but Thad’s been recently doing some nice reviews of the new classic theatrical animation related home media releases from Warner Archive, although they aren’t that frequent (like the releases).
I’ve always been kind of “meh” on “Bold King Cole”, but seeing those samples of the restoration makes me think I’ll end up revising my opinion upward; those look great!
“Love’s Labor Won” is a fairly typical bit of early ’30s animated fluff, but the gag with wolf sharpening his teeth with a Goldbergian device was an inspired bit of silliness.
Interestingly, “Love’s Labor Won” was supposed to be the first cartoon in the Cubby bear series, “Opening Night” having originally been produced solely to promote the opening of the RKO Roxy theater. But Van Beuren couldn’t afford to waste time producing a cartoon that would only be shown once, so it was decided to integrate it into the series so that it could be marketed.
Having said that, I really like the music in “Love’s Labor Won”, and in particular Margie Hines’ rendition of the hit “It Was So Beautiful”.
This site has been a trip down (mildly traumatic) memory lane for me this week. An odd sort of coincidence in that two of the shorts profiled in separate posts these past few days, “Peter and the Wolf” and “Bold King Cole” I can vividly recall from childhood viewings, because they scared the hell out of me! I still remember being frightened by the snarling wolf stalking toward the screen followed by the presumed death of Sonia the duck (even the typical Disney fake-out death didn’t make it any less unsettling) and by the bizarre torture machine the ghosts subject Old King Cole to. Still, a pair of shorts I quite enjoy nowadays; I would rank “Bold King Cole” as among the better entries among the fairly hit-or-miss Rainbow Parades.