Animation Trails
December 29, 2021 posted by Charles Gardner

Flights of Fancy (Part 2): More First Contacts

Ready to rise above it all? Then continue with us as we soar to new heights with our overview of ‘toons about planes.

As we progress deeper into the dawn of talkies, air flight continues to play a prominent role, sometimes as a passing highlight, and in others as a primary motivation. Notable during this period, as further discussed below, was a nostalgic tendency to look backwards upon “The Great War”, where airplanes had first found their application as offensive weapons. Cartoons’ love of violence developed into a somewhat ravenous appetite for such fare, taking the aerial battle to new extremes that would have made aces’ faces grow pale.

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (Fleischer/Paramount, Screen Song, 5/23/30, Dave Fleischer, dir., Willard Buwsky, anim.) is nearly related to this survey in title only. Its opening sequences deal with the unrelated subject of delivering a piano to a cat’s high-rise apartment. The bouncing ball is briefly seen superimposed upon a live action shot of the New York skyline taken from the cockpit of a plane, as if bouncing in mid-air out the window. The final chorus of the song has the cat picked up for a date by a boyfriend in a propeller-driven dirigible. Lines about a trip to Mars have the vehicle shot from the cannon mouth of a Martian warrior. The final line “And we’ll visit the man in the moon” provides the unusual ending of the craft sailing right into the moon’s open mouth, with the pilot cat’s hand emerging briefly to retrieve his hat which has fallen off during the entry, and the clouds obscuring the moon’s face for a black out.


Bully Beef (Terrytoons, 7/13/30 – Paul Terry/Frank Moser) is one of the first talkie cartoons to look back at WW1 – a trend that was becoming popular for cinema in general, stemming largely from MGM’s “The Big Parade” (1925), and subsequently including such films as the Oscar winning, “Wings” (1929), “All Quiet On the Western Front (1930) (another Oscar winner), “Hell’s Angels” (1930), and “Dawn Patrol” (1930), among others. Even Laurel and Hardy would soon join in the act, in “Pack Up Your Troubles” (1932). As Terry films were apt to do even this early, one will notice certain opening scenes bearing considerable similarity between this film and “Sherman was Right”, reviewed below, as a cat and mouse compete for a female mouse’s affections as the call to battle summons them off to war. The present Terry epic conducts most of its battles on the ground and in the trenches (including numerous bits of gratuitous violence where whole rows of mice are beheaded (with blood drops) by enemy fire (accounting for the film’s non-inclusion in the CBS manifest). But it also takes a few shots to depict the aerial campaign. An enemy cat strafes the anti-aircraft nest of the mouse with machine gun fire, and also hits his cat comrade squarely in the face. The mouse loads himself into the breech of the anti-aircraft gun, and fires, launching him into the clouds. Armed with a pistol, he pursues the plane on foot, by hopping from cloud to cloud in a scene that looks like something out of a Mario Brothers platform game. (Imagine if some creative video game designer were to come up with an “Aesop’s Fables” game, a la Cuphead.) The plane fires back with its machine gun, as the mouse ducks bullets between his cloud leaps. Finally, the enemy pilot (as only cartoon pilots can) puts his plane into a mid-air hover, and hides inside a cloud himself, as both combatants engage in a shoot-out as if in a Western hiding behind rocks. A lucky shot downs the enemy, who falls to earth, yet immediately gets up uninjured and runs away. Terry animals were as durable as Wile E. Coyote – always ready to rise again. And the same goes for the mouse’s comrade, who the mouse attempts to tend to upon landing nearby with a parachute. The mouse thinks the cat is a goner, but he is merely playing possum, and flirting with the mouse’s girlfriend again behind his back. Discovering the trick, the mouse retaliates with a stone from a slingshot into the car’s rear, and gets the girl for an iris-out kiss.


Dumb Patrol (Warner/Harman-Ising, Looney Tunes (Bosko), 5/19/31) – One of the more thrill-packed installments of this series. The film opens by placing the audience in the heart of the action, as explosions rock even the title card, and we fade-in in mid air in the midst of an aerial dogfight, with planes filling the skies in pursuit of one another, and one heading straight on toward the camera, crashing into the lens with an explosive blast. Down on the ground, Bosko, in nearly identical fashion to Putrid Pete from Oswald (a series in which Harman and Ising also had roots), nurses a pot-bellied mini-plane by squirting oil into its joints, and even having the plane blow its nose into a hanky. He paraphrases a whistling version of the “Get Happy” theme all the while, ignoring the fact that small bombs and shells are dropping precariously close by, bouncing Bosko and the plane off the ground intermittently from their explosive force. Our scene changes to a close-ip of an enemy plane high above. The pilot seems to be a gorilla, and his plane is made of solid metal, with row upon row of protruding rivets to make its appearance even more menacing, and wings that seem fabricated from steel bars cut absolutely square about a foot thick, with no sign of air-flow streamlining. The pilot is so inherently evil, he takes note of the audience watching him, and turns his machine gun fire directly at the camera to blast the audience with multiple lethal rounds. (So I guess no one survives to see the end of the picture.) Spotting Bosko below, the villain pulls a lever, opening a rear belly-hatch and dumping out a huge blockbuster bomb. The bomb scores a nearly direct hit on Bosko and the plane, submerging the two of them into a deep crater, and showering them with rocky rubble. A second shot lands in the crater, causing the plane to leap into Bosko’s arms. Well, this assault cannot go unchallenged, so Bosko spins his plane’s prop, then gets whirled around by it in reverse direction (Terry’s gag from Lindy’s Cat). The plane adopts flying techniques from previous cartoons we have discussed, including both flapping wings and swimming strokes through the sky. Bosko comes up behind the tail of the villain’s craft, and opens fire with his synchronized machine gun through his propeller blades. (This may mark the first time such invention is depicted literally in a cartoon – a major improvement in positioning of firepower on warbird aircraft, minimizing the inaccuracy of aim resulting from positioning of guns on upper or lower wing surfaces, or the limitations of aiming perimeter which would result from depending only on a tail gunner with rotating mount, who could never turn his gun to aim in a forward direction, as the wings and the pilot would be in the way. By mechanical gear interaction, the synchronized machine gun timed gunfire to place shots between the rotation of the prop blades, allowing the pilot the freedom of more natural aim without worry of danger to his power source.) The villain is surprised to find someone on his tail, but has special equipment for just such a situation – an impossibly large cannon, which rises out of the fuselage and points backwards over the tail, to fire a cannonball at Bosko. A first hit blows all the fabric off Bosko’s plane, exposing engine parts and the spindly framework of the body and wings. A second hit obliterates the plane altogether, sending Bosko plummeting down toward the bombed-out wreckage of a provincial home in the French countryside. Bosko is fortunate enough to bounce off the keyboard of a piano, landing inside some long johns on a clothesline, and emerges from the garment’s drop seat.

A musical interlude ensues as Honey, the owner of what is left of the place, comes home and finds her surprise visitor. Bosko’s French isn’t much, but he knows the universal language of ragtime, and despite a rocky start of prematurely sealing a kiss from Honey, he begins to win her over with a lively performance on her piano. But there’s still the matter of that villain, who unloads another couple of bombs upon the already open-air home, reducing the piano to a harp framework. Bosko is now riled. “I’ll get you!”, he ineffectively threatens. Finding the old dependable aerial standby of a dachshund, Bosko places a bench across the dog’s shoulders for wings, a broom to extend his tail, and for ammunition, grabs a meat grinder and a picket fence. Twirling the dog’s head like a prop, the dog’s head begins spinning to provide the thrust, and Bosko is back in the air again, for the second time instantly attaining choice position behind the enemy’s tail. Placing the picket fence into the meat grinder, Bosko shoots out a stream of pointed pickets. In a scene that makes no sense whatsoever, since we’ve already established the enemy’s plane as metal, the wooden pickets somegow poke at the enemy plane’s rear, causing the plane to come to life with a shout and attempt to protect its sore rear end. The villain tries turning his machine gun on Bosko, but Bosko produces a curved section of pipe from nowhere, catching the enemy’s fire and U-turning it back upon him. Back to the villain’s big gun, as the cannon emerges again. The cannonball shoots right down the dachshund’s throat, and lodges inside the dog’s tail. Bosko squeezes the dog’s body like a tube of toothpaste, launching the cannonball back at the villain. Now the ball explodes upon impact, and the huge war machine is reduced to a flock of mini-planes that fly in aimless spirals like a swarm of insects, until Bosko appears among them, spraying at the pests with a Flit-gun, and spitting a direct hit on the last one to knock the pests from the skies. Bosko gives a hearty laugh as the film irises out.


The Explorer (Terrytoons/Educational, Farmer Al Falfa, 3/22/31), finds our favorite farmer returning to the air again, this time in an autogyro assembled from another old jalopy with a vertical prop inserted into the hood, departing from a hangar on a quest to the North Pole. Continuity of plot is not of much concern to the Terry staff this day, as the film makes little coherent sense, mostly concentrating on random gags as every animal in Farmer Al’s livestock seems to want to join him in his flight. A mule tows a cat aloft on a box kite, but the cat falls to his doom, producing nine dancing cat angels. Another cat, without any good motivation, flies up to Al’s vehicle in a plane with four props driven by the hand-cranking of mice, and ties a box of skunks to Al’s tail, causing a fracus in the cockpit, and Al to hang out his clothes for airing on an aerial clothesline. A cat riding astride a goose keeps other animals aloft atop an umbrella by blowing hot air under them with a fireplace bellows. A long polka-dotted dog propels himself with a rotor tail. A pack of cats flies atop the surfaces of a set of biplane wings, propelled by a cat towing the assembly through the sky by means of a bicycle – then for no reason, the bicyclist loops to dump the passengers off, who all hit the silk with parachutes. Farmer Al’s craft drags its anchor, upsetting the bell in a church steeple, and then overturning a pair of igloos at the pole. Eventually, after some unnecessary musical dancing by bears and walruses, Farmer Al acquires the North Pole in a barter with a Jewish bear (cut from CBS’s print), and flies it back to the states. A welcoming committee presents Al with a loving cup – but inside it are the skunks again, who chase Al out if the county in the final shot.


Trouble (Van Buren/Pathe, Tom and Jerry, 10/10/31 – John Foster, George Stallings, dir.) – Tom and Jerry, accident attorneys, can’t find a case to work on, but seem to be on the verge of finding the biggest accident of their careers. In the heart of the city, a dirigible bores through the clouds toward a tall skyscraper. One cloud, before releasing the ship from its core, develops a face and puffs on the ship like a giant cigar. (We’ll see this gag reused later in a Max Fleischer Screen Song). The ship heads for what appears to be the Empire State Building, while a lanky man attempts to meet the ship the hard way – by climbing up the side of the building like a human fly. A a crows of curious passers-by crane their necks upward, the man reaches the pinnacle of a mooring mast at the top of the tower, reaches out, and grabs a ring in the nose of the airship. However, he can’t seem to moor one to the other, and soon finds himself being pulled off the mast by the huge ship. Reduced to a one-finger grip with each hand, the man finally loses his hold on both building and ship, and falls in a dizzy spiral down, down to the ground. Tom and Jerry wait below to sign up what is left of their prospective client, but at the last second, the man decelerates in his fall, does a series of slow, graceful loops through the air, and lands delicately on his feet, bowing to the crowd and tipping his hat, from which fall a large number amount of business cards which he leaves on the street, then proceeds on his way. Jerry picks up one of the cards, and reads, “Joe Spoof, World’s Champion Slow Motion Actor.” Tom and Jerry faint dead away, and make use of an ambulance themselves instead of merely chasing one.


The Wolf At the Door (Charles Mintz/Columbia, Scrappy, 2/29/32, Dick Huemor, dir.) Is a well-made, atmospheric episode set in the frozen North. An old goat in a remote cabin is being terrorized by the howls and attempts to gain entry of a timber wolf. He places a call to the local mounted police. Officer Oopie is sent out first, but despite his best efforts and braving of a terrible storm, only proves true the old adage, never send a baby to do a boy’s job. Mountie chief Scrappy is thus finally summoned to the scene, and travels there by way of plane from a private log cabin hangar. His plane has unique maneuverability, shifting from stationary on the ground to a right angle vertical position straight up to rise above the hangar roof, then an instant U-turn to point itself in the direction of the goat’s cabin. It is also sectional, repeating Krazy Kat’s gag from “The Stork Exchange” last week, as its propeller gets ahead of the plane itself, with the body having to inch its way forward through the air to catch up. When Scrappy lands alongside the cabin, he detaches the machine gun from his plane, mounting it on the ground. Then, he climbs a ladder to the roof edge of the cabin, and breaks off a long string of icicles hanging from the roof eaves. Feeding the icicle strip into his machine gin, Scrappy uses it as a ammunition belt, peppering the wolf with the pointed ends of the icicles. An added snowball barrage from Oopie, and the wolf is soon on the run. The wolf is left howling on a hilltop, while the smoke from the chimney of the log cabin forms the outline of a hand giving him a deriding nose-wave for the iris out.


Sherman Was Right (Terrytoons/Educational, 8/21/32) begins in similar fashion to “Bully Beef”. A mouse on military guard duty flirts with his girlfriend, while an officer cat attempts to move in on the action, ordering the mouse to proceed with his drill. The mouse gets back at the cat by parading a bit too close to the spooning couple, repeatedly knocking the cat’s hat off with the tip of his bayonet. Then comes the attack, from a squadron of planes piloted by cats, each of which craft bears an insignia of a skull and crossbones on the tail. Long before the notion of a blitzkrieg, the sky is suddenly filled with bombs, some falling straight to their targets, others miraculously shooting through the skies in horizontal paths as if somehow fired from a cannon, with several making passes very close to the camera. Various “takes” on the predicament provide most of the early gag content. A clothesline empties itself of clothes, which run away over the horizon under their own power. A very unfunny shot finds a mule pursued by a bomb, which collides with him and explodes, crippling the mule’s hind legs, and forcing him to balance on his front two to carry his hindquarters away elevated above his head. Farmer Al Falfa makes one of the shortest appearances of his career, running away with his livestock in only a single shot of the film. One dog rounds up his collection of bones, while another dog family evacuates by piling all the kids into a long section of pipe, while Mom and Pop assume positions inserted into the front and rear ends of the pipe, carrying away the whole brood looking like a single long dachshund. A lookout in a tower is barely missed by a passing shell, and wig wags signals to the troops with signal flags, until a second shell explodes his tower, leaving him to fly away by using the flags as flapping wings.

A unique piece of weaponry is employed on the ground by the cats – a large cannon, which advances on a set of live legs, and sucks cannon shells like an elephant’s trunk to load before each firing. The infantry regiment is finally alerted with a bugle call, and the mouse we began with is called into duty, after kissing his love goodbye. By now, the cats have entrenched, with a solid row of cannons behind them. A cannon ball is shot at the mouse. In “Bully Beef”, one mouse batted cannonballs back at the enemy as if baseballs. This cartoon takes the same gag one better, not only allowing the mouse to bat the cannonballs out of the park, but providing him with a baseball diamond to run the bases between hits. A large shell swoops in, and picks up the mouse as a riding passenger. The mouse provides a precedent for what would become a Mighty Mouse gag, bending the nose of the shell upwards at a right angle, thus changing its trajectory to soar into the skies, directly at one of the enemy planes. The mouse bends the shell again to level off below the plane’s belly, and climbs aboard the plane by grabbing the landing gear. Entering the cockpit, he engages in a fist fight and ejects the cat crew, then speeds ahead in a low buzzing of the ground to dive into an enemy trench and knock an entire row of cats out of the burrow. Rising in elevation again, he collides head on with another plane, and the two planes duke it out, using their landing gear as fists. Both planes perform a loop and collide nose on, with the enemy cat’s plane taking it on the chin and falling from the skies, leaving its owner in a heap on the ground. The mouse gently descends to the ground, to land his plane in the middle of a victory parade and roll down the street to the cheers of a crowd, for the iris out.


King Neptune (Disney, United Artists, Silly Symphony, 9/10/32 – Burt Gillett, dir.), doesn’t really feature aircraft, but sea creatures that mimic the attacks of aircraft. A pirate ship has spotted a bevy of topless mermaids. (In a Disney cartoon? Yes, it happened, with surprising realism in a shot or two). They capture and take one prisoner after a struggle, eventually locking her in a strongbox. Neptune is kept out of the action for a good deal of the cartoon, by getting tangled up in anchor chain. But the sea creatures wage a veritable war upon the pirate vessel. Principal shots of importance to our survey include what may be animation’s first reference to the aircraft carrier – a development primarily stemming from the late 1920’s in various navies, often from conversions of existing ships, though ships specialized for aircraft use would shortly follow. Here, such a vessel is formed by a whale who has somehow been misshapen since birth into a flat top, from which a school of flying fish take off, carrying below them payloads of lobsters, which they drop in bombing formation to the deck of the ship. The crustaceans quickly have the pirates on the run, with an attack of claws aimed at their toes. A second aerial squadron develops, as octopi fill fish with sunken cannonballs, then rise from the waves, using six arms as helicopter blades, and the remaining two to dump the cannonballs from the fishes’ mouths. Neptune finally breaks free, and spears the ship with his huge trident, then swirls up the seas and sky into torrential storms and whirlpools, finally bringing the ship down by jumping upon it, and sinking it into the depths under his massive weight. The mermaid is saved, and gets an added bonus, as the strongbox was full of jewels, which she shares with all her mermaid friends.


And for a bonus extra while we’re still in the holiday season, Santa’s Workshop (Disney, United Artists, Silly Symphony, 12/10/32 – Wilfred Jackson, dir.), features one of the earliest uses of a toy plane, which is sent down a chute ready for tryout in Santa’s testing department (supervised by Santa himself). Santa winds up the rubber band motor and sends the toy successfully flying around the room. He laughs his hearty laugh, but opens his mouth a little too wide, allowing the plane to make a direct landing almost down his throat. Santa takes it in stride, and launches the plane again, which performs loops through three shelves of toys, knocking them to the floor, where they put on an elaborate toy parade that takes up most of the remainder of the film. A jolly sendoff for this week’s installment.

Happy New Year, all!

11 Comments

  • A wonderful installment this week, with no less than three early sound Terrytoons! Though the repetitive nature of the studio’s output is somewhat apparent in this juxtaposition. The gag of a box full of skunks tethered to a flying machine, for example, was used earlier in “If Noah Lived Today” of 1924, and we haven’t seen the last of it yet.

    When the soldiers are chanting “We want a touchdown!” in “Bully Beef”, the German subtitles read “We want an office job!” Germans in those days knew nothing of American football, but the longing of front line infantry for cushier assignments is universal.

    Always a pleasure to see “King Neptune”, but that’s not the only Disney cartoon to feature topless mermaids. One of the mermaids in “Peter Pan” — the redhead who looks like Ariel — clearly is going without any form of scallop-shell or starfish support garment, though her strategically placed tresses keep her appearance in line with the Hollywood Code.

    I’ve seen “Santa’s Workshop” several times, but until now I never noticed the wind-up dancing Jew in the toy parade. Did toy companies really manufacture such things? And did gentile kids ever ask Santa for them?

    Two Van Beuren Tom and Jerry cartoons from 1932, both directed by John Foster and George Rufle, begin with the mismatched pair tooling along in an airplane. “In the Bag” (26/3/32) opens with a duck flying into the plane’s propeller and exploding in a burst of feathers. Jerry grabs a plate and pulls the duck — now roasted to perfection — out of the propeller. As they prepare to partake of drumsticks, the plane plummets downward and crashes in the Old West, where, for the remainder of the cartoon, they track down a dangerous outlaw for a $1000 reward.

    And in “Plane Dumb” (4/6/32): “If we make this nonstop flight to Africa, we’ll be heroes!” Tom says expositionally. Hoping to make themselves less conspicuous among the natives, Tom and Jerry blacken their faces and assume stereotypical old-timey plantation accents. Almost immediately their airplane goes into a spin and crashes into the ocean. They eventually wash ashore in Africa, where their blackface disguises do them no good whatsoever.

  • “Sora no Momotarou”, or “Momotarou of the Sky” (1/10/31 — Yasuji Murata, dir.), is an early example of aviation in Japanese anime.

    An albatross and a penguin have come to Japan to tell the hero Momotarou about a rogue eagle that has been terrorising their island. Momotarou agrees to help, but there’s just one problem: “Your island is almost 10,000 km away. We’ll have to refuel twice.” No problem, say the birds, as they’ve already set up fueling stations for him. Out on the tarmac, Momotarou’s animal companions — a pheasant, a money, and a dog — prepare the plane for “our first mission since the Ogre war” (referring to the traditional story of Momotarou from Japanese folklore, as familiar as “The Three Little Pigs” was to Americans). After seeking divine blessing at a shrine, Momotarou and his friends take off in their airplane, with Mt. Fuji looming majestically in the background. (This would take place at either Haneda Airport, which opened in 1931, or — more likely — its predecessor Tachikawa Airfield, a military base. Mt. Fuji can be seen from either airfield on a clear day, which rarely happens in real life.)

    The first fueling station is manned by an albatross on the back of a sea turtle. As Momotarou’s plane flies by, the bird passes the fuel tank to the monkey, and off they go. The second fuel station is manned by a penguin on the back of a whale, but before the plane arrives they are attacked by the rogue eagle. The whale submerges until the penguin, extending its neck like a periscope, gives the all clear. When Momotarou’s plane arrives, the whale sends the fuel tanks up to it by using its spout.

    Momotarou and his friends arrive at the island to find the eagle wantonly killing seals. They pursue the eagle, and the monkey fires a machine gun at it, but Momotarou tells him to stop; the bird must be taken alive. Climbing onto the airplane’s wing, the monkey throws a rope and lassos the eagle by its talons, causing it to fall into the ocean; then, the dog slides down the rope and conks the eagle on the head with a mallet. The cartoon ends with Momotarou and friends flying back to Japan, the trussed eagle suspended from the rope (to which a Japanese flag has been affixed, with the inscription “Japan #1!”), as the seabirds down below cheer “Banzai, Momotarou!”

    An extraordinarily well-drawn and well-made cartoon for 1931, even if it’s blatant nationalist propaganda. In a later interview, director Murata admitted that the “rogue eagle” symbolised the American military presence in the Pacific. The characters from the Momotarou legend would later figure in a number of patriotic wartime films, including Japan’s first full-length animated feature.

  • Very nice installment!
    I’ve got an old 78 of Charlie Poole from 1928 singing Come take a ride in my airship.
    It’s titled I once loved a sailor.

  • Thank you so much for Santa’s Workshop …. and thanks even MORE for acknowledging that we are still in the Holiday Season! You would think it was over on the 26th judging by how quickly it vanishes from the media, but it really lasts at least until New Year and actually until January 6th!

    Great cartoons today.

  • The song “Come Take a Trip in My Airship” had been previously used more appropriately in the opening of “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” (Fleischer/Paramount, Screen Songs, 7/12/29 — Dave Fleischer, dir.).

    The cartoon begins with police officer Jim O’Shea standing on a platform atop a tower high above the city, directing traffic — airplane traffic, that is. The motorists in their single-prop planes conscientiously obey Jim’s signals, even pausing to let a flock of birds through the intersection, until he has to stop a mouse for flying the wrong way on a one-way skyway and issues him a ticket. As the mouse speeds off, Jim gets hooked on the anchor at the end of the plane’s tow line and is carried along forthwith. The mouse pilot shakes his fists, tears up the ticket and hurls the fragments at Jim. Then, sighting a cloud in his path, the mouse quickly changes into a swimsuit before passing through the cloud, getting drenched, and then finding a fish in his bathing costume. The mouse tosses the fish down the anchor line; it swims into Jim’s collar, and the policeman contorts wildly as the fish squirms around inside his uniform. Finally it escapes through his pants leg, but at the same time Jim unhooks himself from the anchor and falls to earth, landing on a tropical island, the setting of the title novelty song.

  • Two Warner Bros. cartoons with the same name: “Dumb Patrol”, respectively featuring Bosko and Bugs Bunny

  • I love these themed posts, and I really never acknowledged the BOSKO version of “DUMB PATROL” before. Wow! Imagine if his MGM counterpart were this action-packed and entertaining! The cartoons would have been amazing! This isn’t to say that some of those cartoons were not interesting at all, and folks are probably tired of reading my posts on how much I want to have all nine of ’em fully restored from as close to master prints as we can still get. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I look forward to the remainder of posts in this series.

  • Not sure if this counts, but at the end of “Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions” (Paramount/Fleischer, 27/1/32 — Dave Fleischer, dir.; Willard Bowski and Ugo D’Orsi, anim.), when a self-threading sewing machine goes out of control and starts sewing up everything in sight, Betty and Bimbo escape by using an umbrella that, when you press a button, turns into a helicopter!

  • “The Hare Mail” (Lantz/Universal, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 30/11/31 — Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, dirs.) opens with Oswald hawking newspapers whose headlines warn of the Plane Bandit, still at large. On cue, he hears a cry for help and rushes to investigate. He finds the Plane Bandit himself menacing a bound old man and his granddaughter, demanding to know the location of their gold. When the old man refuses, the bandit ties the girl to a plank and improvises a makeshift rotary saw out of an electric fan. The old man reluctantly discloses the hiding place: right under his beard. The bandit makes off with the gold as Oswald rescues the girl, and then the lucky rabbit pursues the malefactor.

    An airplane marked “Air Mail for Africa” is about to depart, but the bandit drags the pilot out of the cockpit and takes his place. He takes off in the plane, with Oswald arriving just in time to grab onto its tail. When the bandit notices Oswald dangling from the rear, he saws off the tail of the plane, and it plummets toward earth. Exclamation points of alarm appear over Oswald’s head; then, like Felix in another cartoon, he fashions them into a propeller and continues his pursuit. Infuriated, the bandit throws the mailbag at Oswald. It turns out to be filled with friendly monkeys, who help Oswald with the next stage of his plan.

    Climbing in altitude until his plane fragment is directly over the bandit, Oswald has the monkeys form a simian ladder to lower him down to the plane and wrest the gold from the bandit. As he attempts to follow Oswald, the bandit separates from the plane and falls, until he is ultimately snagged on a weathervane. Oswald says goodbye to the monkeys, leaving them to navigate their way to Africa, and dives with a parachute; but when he pulls the cord, only a sign comes out: “Do not open until Christmas”. Before he hits the ground, however, the girl stretches out her grandfather’s beard to break Oswald’s fall like a net. Oswald returns the old man’s gold, the girl coos “Sweetheart!” and puckers up, and Oswald kisses her, using the old man’s beard as a privacy screen.

  • In “Cinderella Blues” (RKO/Van Beuren, Aesop’s Fables, 12/4/31 — John Foster and Harry Bailey, dirs.), just as in the fairy tale, Cinderella flees the prince’s ball just before midnight, leaving a glass slipper behind. At the stroke of 12, her beautiful gown reverts back into rags, and her limousine transforms into a broken-down old clunker. When she tries to crank up the starter, the car disintegrates. As she runs home, an anchor descends from the sky, hooks her by the skirt, and pulls her upward. It’s the prince, piloting a private plane with a rotor on a vertical axis like a helicopter. He places the glass slipper on her foot, and her rags transform magically back into a beautiful gown. They kiss, and then the prince pulls the helicopter rotor blades down like an umbrella over the cockpit to give them some privacy as the plane zooms toward his castle in the sky.

  • Here’s a supplemental title, restored and screened at UCLA’s 2024 Preservation Festival.

    “French Fried” (Terrytoons (Audio-Cinema)/Educational, Farmer Al Falfa, 9/7/30 – Paul Terry/Frank Moser, dir.) – A farm dog, chained by a collar to his doghouse, for no apparent reason serenades the world with a howling vocal and guitar accompaniment. A noticeable aspect of his performance is a swarm of flies that constantly circles his head, causing him to take a couple of pauses in his performance to hopelessly try to shoo them away. Other animals of the farm begin to sing calls to their “Daddy”, as Farmer Al emerges from his farmhouse, dressed in a top hat and traveling suit, and tossing on the ground ahead of him a suitcase bearing the name of his destination – Paris. In a surprising baritone voice, Farmer Al SINGS a goodbye to his animal friends, who tag along behind him, still calling him Daddy. Farmer Al approaches a pier to a lake, where a dirigible appears to be anchored in the water. Al leaps into the water, landing in a submerged seat, and raises anchor – revealing that the dirigible is tethered to Al’s old model T, emerging from the waterline as the ship’s gondola. As Al ascends, the dog from the first shot calls out, “Daddy, don’t leave me”, and tugs futilely at the chain fastened to his collar. Al’s dirigible punctures a cloud, popping through the other side, and releasing a stream of the cloud’s rain water, which pours as if from an opened bottle until the cloud shrinks in size to nothing and disappears. Al repeats the process with another cloud, but this time, (in the possible first appearance of the gag), the cloud develops a face on the other side, and briefly holds the dirigible in its lips, as if smoking a giant cigar. Meanwhile, the dog is now running after Al on the ground, dragging his doghouse behind him. Tiring of lugging around the extra weight, the dog stops, removes his head with his hands, then steps forward to let the collar slip past his disconnected neck, and reattaches his head to resume the chase. Approaching a bluff ending at the sea, the dog jumps in. In close-up, he plunges head-first through the crests of two waves, then in long shot, we see him torpedoing through wave after wave, in a shot closely resembling what would become the classic swimming style of Mighty Mouse. His style transforms into other moves during his trip, as he produces a rowboat from nowhere to row through the crests, then also materializes a bicycle to ride up and over the outlines of the wave crests. We leave the dog for most of the cartoon, as our attention shifts to follow Al, whose dirigible is circling the Eiffel Tower in a rough and somewhat size-distorted attempt at dimensional depth perspective. Al lands to applause, and the first thing he does is attend to the priority item on his traveling itinerary – following a seductive lady down the boulevard, tipping his hat and provocatively winking his eye. We briefly cut back to the dog, seeing him make landfall, and proceed ashore with no apparent sense of direction, looking anywhere for “Daddy”. Back to Al, who has now advanced upon the lady, holding her from behind around the waist, and exchanging a few smacking kisses with her while never missing a step in their walk. They turn into a Parisian café, and proceed to the dance floor. There, Al engages in an uncharacteristically violent apache dance with the girl, throwing her in judo flips all over the floor. She does manage to get in one blow for herself, with a powerful smack to Al’s face, yet continues with the dance. While there is no direct indication given on screen of the girl’s knowledge or participation in a plot, Al just happens to dance backward toward a hatchway in the wall, where the camera observes by view from the wall’s opposite side that Al is being observed by a gang of four or five tough cats in striped French shirts, who have with them an oversized canister vacuum cleaner. Inserting the nozzle of the vacuum through the hatch, they turn on the device’s switch. Al is instantly pulled into the machine’s grip, and, in a prolonged shot, as he attempts to cling to the leg of a table, Al’s pockets are emptied, and his articles of clothing are pulled off one by one, until for a brief moment he appears to be butt naked, then disappears inside the machine. The cats emerge from a rear entrance of the café, pushing along the vacuum cleaner and their ill-gotten gains and prisoner within. The cats cross the boulevard, but their progress is stopped cold by a tall gentleman-like character, who perhaps is intended to depict a French gendarme, though his outfit does not strongly resemble a uniform. Producing a pistol, the man fires a few shots that rebound off the cats, who are sent scampering away in perspective up the street. Farmer Al, now at least wearing his shorts, wearily pops out the top of the vacuum canister. Suddenly, the clothing of the man is dropped, and a mask falls away, revealing Al’s rescuer to have been his dog, walking on stilts. “Daddy, Daddy”, shouts the dog, jumping into Al’s arms, and giving Al’s face repeated affectionate licks, for the iris out.
    The film’s titles use standard Audio-Cinema early season titling such as on “Jazz Mad” and “The Lorelei”, with the cartoon’s title in large block print. I believe release number was 2711,

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