Go East, Young Toon (Part 3)

Continuing a couple of years into the 1930’s, the appeal of Arabian adventures hasn’t taken any noticeable drop, and continues to proliferate in animation. The public was still considerably conscious of the news-making archeological recoveries from the tomb of King Tut. This probably largely inspired the newest of Universal’s monster franchises – Boris Karloff s “The Mummy” (December, 1932) – which only served to lift interest in ancient Egypt to even greater heights. Along the way on today’s trail, we’ll encounter possibly the first cartoon based upon the exploits of Ali Baba (though pretty much in name only, throwing out every recognizable element of the classic tale), and meet our first cartoon legionnaire – Harman and Ising’s Bosko.

Betty Boop’s Museum (Fleischer/Paramount, Betty Boop, 9/16/32 – Dave Fleischer, dir., William Henning/Reuben Timinsky, anim.), receives an honorable mention for one gag. Betty visits a museum, where Ko-Ko operates the tour bus to take visitors there (a fake vehicle with mask-heads attached to the seat backs by springs to make the bus look full to patrons on the outside, but concealing a small two-seat jalopy as the actual conveyance), and Bimbo acts as caretaker and watchman over the exhibits (most of which consist of statues, skeletons, and dinosaurs, appearing to be far from dead). Betty spends most of the afternoon feeding wax fruit to a statue of a scrawny man representing hunger, to fatten him up. She fails to here the sound of the closing signal from a skeletal cuckoo clock, and is still inside when Bimbo locks the door for the night. Before he does so, Bimbo catches a visitor attempting to steal a mummy case, hiding it inside a jacket so that the carved head looks like a very-tall customer. The mummy case is left on the floor inside the entrance, where another guest has carelessly dropped a cigar butt on the way out. The lid of the mummy case opens, and its wrapped occupant sits up, reaches out with one hand, and grabs up the cigar butt, placing it between its wrappings at lip position to smoke it. The mummy then reclines in the case once again, saying (in a heavily Jewish-accented voice), “Oh, I think I’ll go back to sleep for another thousand years.”

Betty spends the remainder of the cartoon wandering around in the darkened, locked museum. Dinosaurs, skeletons, and statues cavort, then seize Betty, insisting she stay. Betty puts up a mild protest, via a singing rendition of “Was That the Human Thing To Do?”, then gets chased by a dinosaur skeleton. The skeleton collides with the statue of the Discus Thrower, who throws his disc into the head of a statue of Samson, chained between the pillars of a temple. Angered Samson comes to life, and pushes apart the stone pillars, causing a collapse of the entire museum. Out of nowhere, Bimbo appears in a Roman chariot to rescue Betty, while the skeletons all retreat to a graveyard, diving into a grave like those in Disney’s “The Skeleton Dance”, then pulling up a gravestone which reads, “The End”.

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The Crystal Gazabo (Charles Mintz/Columbia, Krazy Kat, 11/7/32 – Ben Harrison/Manny Gould, dir.) – At least two cartoons (both in today’s survey) are inspired, at least to the extent of featured character names, by the success of the radio show, “Chandu the Magician”. Oddly, the radio Chandu wouldn’t even fit our survey, being an American-born individual who learned mystic powers from a mentor in India. The cartoons, however, thought of India and the Middle East interchangeably, and so transposed the name to native-born mystics of the Arab world.

We open this cartoon with entrance through four layers of outer gates at a palace, with various gongs announcing our entry. Two gates are attended by identical pairs of turtles, who hit each other’s shells with mallets to produce the gong sound. (There is a lot of repeated action in this active cartoon – probably necessary, in that the budget for the production was likely pushed to the studio’s maximum limit.) A third gate is attended by an elephant, who produces the gong effect by flapping his ears together. A final gate guard, a monkey, uses a real gong, but strikes it by throwing cocoanuts at it. The palace is presided over by a mystical magician, who performs tricks like gazing into a crystal ball, then scooping out from it the miniature images of dancing palm trees (which clap their “palms” together like real hands), pyramids, and the Sphinx, and storing them as treasures in a bottle for safekeeping. He tunes in his crystal ball to a new image, to find Krazy and Kitty traveling the desert by camel, as Kitty sings “The Shiek of Araby”, and adds her own music to Krazy’s guitar notes, by plucking the camel’s tail like another stringed instrument, and squeezing and stretching apart the camel’s humps in the manner of playing an accordion. Notable also is that Kitty has planted poles in each of the camel’s two humps, allowing her to string a hammock up between them to ride upon. The mystic places a cloth over the crystal ball, then pulls it away and shakes it, shaking loose the full-sized Kitty, in the flesh. She is not only surprised, but embarrassed that she has been pulled into another dimension without her skirt, and reaches her hand back into the crystal ball to retrieve the missing garment from off of the camel’s back. Still inside the ball’s image, Krazy protests, but the mystic slams upon the ball with his fist, temporarily dazing Krazy, and knocking out (possibly dead) Krazy’s camel. In a weird gag, Krazy unzips the prone camel’s humped back, producing from within another slightly smaller live camel as a “spare”. Then it’s gallop across the desert to find the mystic’s palace. (How does Krazy even know where it is?) Halfway there, the second camel collapses, causing Krazy to lift out of the second camel’s back the lever-post of a railroad hand car, on which he pumps most of the remaining way over the tops of pyramids and palm trees,, finally spinning the handle like a helicopter blade to traverse the final distance.

At the palace, finding the entrance guarded by two sword-wielding pigs, Krazy converts his tail into the form of egg-beater type blades, and bores a hole with it through the palace wall, hitting the mystic in the rear end. The mystic outruns Krazy to a glass-doored elevator shaft, descending into the palace dungeons with Kitty. Unable to open the elevator door, Krazy tugs at other doors nearby, and finds himself in an endless flip from doorway to doorway as one of the doors becomes unhinged and takes Krazy along for a ride. Krazy finally falls into a trap door, and survives a harrowing descent through a chamber which alternately widens and narrows in size (something right out of an early Disney or Winkler Oswald scenario). Krazy treks through a room full of mummy cases, four mummies emerging and attempting to creep up upon him to bash him with a spiked club. Krazy locks a door between himself and the mummies, but walks into a death-trap of sorts that really doesn’t make sense. The inner chamber of a tall, glass-encased grandfather-style clock, with a large sword swinging suspended from the clock’s pendulum, between Krazy and the front door panel of the clock. The pendulum and sword don’t appear to have much momentum, so it is entirely unclear why Krazy can’t just grab the sword’s hilt and or clutch the pendulum to stop its swaying. In fact, the latter option seems to be what in fact occurs. A stray bee inside the clock gears stings Krazy, causing his whole body to swell to fill the clock chamber. Does Krazy’s torso get cut buy the swinging blade? No. Instead, his swollen body seems to stop the pendulum’s progress, and, even when Krazy is rescued by some woodpeckers who peck away the shut wooden back door of the clock and deflate Krazy by pecking his torso with their beaks, the pendulum no longer sways.

Now Krazy does battle with the mystic in fisticuffs. The mystic seems to have forgotten his magic powers (or doesn’t have enough time to cast spells?), and simply fights with his own two hands and objects around him. Spotting a snake, the mystic stuffs a bunch of grapes into his mouth, then rotates the snake’s tail to have him spit out seeds like machine gun fire. Krazy runs atop the spray of seeds like a bridge, and lays blows upon the mystic once again, knocking him into several earthen jugs, then into a wall containing a rack of his potions bottles, the bottles toppling upon him. A last bottle is labeled “TNT”. The mystic catches it before impact, then tosses it at Krazy and Kitty. Kitty screams, and the scene is obscured by the white flash and smoke from the explosion. The view dissolves to a shot within the peaceful confines of Krazy’s living room, before a large radio set, with Kitty clutching to Krazy in still terrified fashion upon a sofa. A radio announcer’s voice is heard: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes another episode of No-Kan-Du the Magician. Good night.” Kitty, realizing her imagination has just been running away with her, kisses an understanding Krazy fondly, for the iris out, and the trademark NBC chimes.

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The Forty Thieves (Terrytoons/Educational, 11/13/32 – Paul Terry/Frank Moser, dir.) – Early Terrytoons are often quite bizarre – and this one does it all without a bazaar! In fact, it does without a lot of things. Who ever heard of a film supposedly about Ali Baba’s 40 thieves without a magic cave or an utterance of the words “Open Sesame”? Well, that’s what you get here. What’s more, there isn’t a single shot where 40 thieves appear on screen. An actual appearance might seem too enterprisingly rich for a Paul Terry budget at first blush – but it could have been accomplished with mammoth repetition of a single cycle of cels – even Max Fleischer’s later thieves for Popeye were largely achieved with double sets of repeating cycle cels. But Terry doesn’t even go so far as to have all 40 appear together in a motionless still shot! Talk about false advertising.

This cartoon seems to have even less plot than “Hot Turkey”. Most of the opening sequences focus on a mouse (seemingly Placide again, in a late appearance), flying through the Arabian skies on a magic carpet. Even by 1932, Terry was still falling back on silent cartoon techniques, having the words “Honk Honk” appear on screen when the mouse honks an auto bulb horn with which his carpet (also including steering wheel) is equipped. Below, four passengers ride upon the humps of an unusual four-humped camel (shall we double-back to a double-Bactrian?). The carpet buzzes the camel’s back, sawing off all four humps, and sending the passengers scattering. The carpet punctures holes in a cloud, providing a shower bath for a passing bird, and irrigating the desert below, producing four dancing palm trees that spring up instantaneously. (Amazing how fertile that barren desert sand is with a little watering.) A full-screen shot which might frighten George Melies follows, as the carpet flies up the nostril of a mammoth man-in-the-moon, appears inside the moon’s mouth for Placide to play some xylophone notes upon his teeth, then exits the moon out of one ear. Some quartet singing accompanies a shot of the mouse lighting off a star like a Roman candle firework, then taking a swim inside the big dipper. (The quartet is uncredited, but I believe I hear some familiar voices there from New York recording, possibly members of the American Quartet or Peerless Quartet.)

A human Arab, assumably one of the 40 thieves, spots the flying carpet through a 5-cent coin-operated sightseeing telescope. He reports it to their chief inside a palace, as a demon in the sky. The chief orders it destroyed, causing the thief to open a box, releasing two vultures. The birds fly up, land on the carpet, and cackle at the mouse. Placide (or should we call him Ali Baba this time?) honks his horn at them, temporarily shooing them away, then pulls out a carpet sweeper from nowhere, and cleans up the area they landed upon. The birds return, causing Placide to perform an aerial loop to dump them, then fly low through a hollow log to scrape them off. Stil the birds give chase, causing Placide to resort to a hidden machine gun to shoot the birds down. In what seemed to be a cartoon convention of the ‘30’s, shoot any character out of the sky, and they go down in flames, as if they were filled with gasoline. (The same thing would happen to Walter Lantz’s later “King Klunk”.)

We suddenly cut to a courtyard within the palace walls, where a female mouse breaks free of chains which have been binding her, and makes a run for the palace gate, knocking out a guard with a tossed earthen jug. (This is as close as we’re going to get to the 40 jugs of boiling oil.) She is rounded up and brought back to the chief by 4 (not 40) of the thieves. Over a full minute of the cartoon’s limited running time is expended in a singing duet where she tries to bluff as to why she ran away, and the chief insists she stay and fall in love with him. The setup is straight out of an Oil Can Harry operetta (whether human or feline form), and this time, the lyrics don’t even rhyme nor follow any particular meter, but are performed as straight conversational opera dialogue, with little regard for the music that accompanies them. In the skies, Placide has somehow noticed the goings-on, crashes his carpet through the stone wall into the palace, and demands, “Unhand my Fannie.” (Fannie Zilch and Oil Can Harry would not make their first appearance until the following year, so theirs were far from Terry’s first operettas, and it seems Terry was already envisioning things to come in his name choices.) One sock to the chieftain’s jaw, and there is no need for animated a battle with the other thieves, who stand around like statues, while Placide makes off with the heroine on his carpet, flying away into the sky for an anti-climactic singing sign-off.

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Pickaninny Blues (Van Beuren/Radio Pictures, Aesop’s Fables, 12/12/32 – John Foster/Mannie Davis, dir.) – Yes, the title alone still makes one reflexively cringe. And it’s not even based on the song of the same name recorded by Henry Burr in 1920. Instead, it’s about a black cat on a southern plantation, too lazy to atted to cotton picking, and instead spending his time floating in a small flatboat on the Mississippi River, being towed along by a mule on shore with a rope looped around its neck and fastened on one end to the boat. The cat, for reasons unknown, is dreaming about ancient Egypt and Cleopatra, wishing he could meet and romance her. Suddenly, the mule grows tired of towing, and leaps into the boat to take a ride too. His weight catapults the cat off the other end of the boat, shooting him high into the clouds. When he finally falls back to Earth, he has landed in Egypt. Remember that John Foster is lead director here – so we are now in for more of the same that we experienced in the previous “Gypped in Egypt”, but with less originality, several repeated gags, and no personality clash of Waffles and Don to sustain interest. Still, the film is somewhat enjoyable – especially for those who hadn’t seen the first film – and seems to concentrate a bit more on sprightly music than gags, which is a plus for fans of Gene Rodemich’s work.

Out first glimpse of Egypt features a continuous line of camels marching in the far background, that looks for all the world like the Van Beuren boys copying verbatim the opening shot of their New Rochelle rivals from Terrytoons’ previous “Hot Turkey”. The cat finds his own solitary camel, and rides it to an oasis for a drink. A prominent sign at the watering hole says “Water – 7 for 1.10″. If anyone understands the gag or whatever topical reference it may have followed, please explain it to me. The camel dips his mouth into the pool, while the cat cranks the camel’s tail. Instead of a standard gasoline pump gauge as in Mutt and Jeff, brief neon flashes within a cutaway view of the camel’s hump signal the days of the week for which the camel will continue to run on its supply. Then it’s off to the Sphinx – of identical design to the one seen in the Waffles and Don episode. The cat asks the Sphinx why it doesn’t speak. The Sphinx responds by sneezing, ejecting from its mouth a giant set of false teeth. For no good reason, in typical Foster dreamlike fashion, the impact of the teeth in conking the cat sends us into a dissolve to the cat rolling toward the camera down a zig-zagging flight of stairs in tracking 3-D perspective. It’s no Disney “Egyptian Melodies” or “Bimbo’s Initiation”, but for Van Beuren, it’s not bad work. My bet might be for this shot to be one of Mannie Davis’s contributions – and, for all we know, he may also have contributed the 3-D spiral staircase appearing in the previous film. The cat winds up in a mummy chamber. First a shot of the wall, with a direct “homage” to “Egyptian Melodies”, as a line of identical bare-midriffed female figures in traditional angled-arms poses begins to march-dance along the wall (saving animation dollars by making them all identical for repeating cycles), and repeats the Disney trick of bending in their flatness when marching around a corner, but with a few avoiding the turn, coming off the wall, and performing dives into a sacred pool. (The female animation is again highly likely to be contributed by Davis, the better artist of the two directors, who is also the likely source of the Cleopatra cat seen later, who looks to be a dead-ringer for character styles in several Cubby Bear cartoons and in “The Farmerette” on which Davis worked.) Next, a repeat of a Foster routine from before, but with new animation. The cat drops a nickel into a coin slot on a sarcophagus, and gets a music box and a piano-playing mummy (instead of a skeleton). More mummies chime in with harmony singing from another case. A pair of illustrations of Egyptian bird-gods leap off the wall to perform a brief dance. (Note the starting expression of the one on the right – practically predicting the later Gandy Goose, with a longer nose.) More possible Davis animation as a couple of realistically-proportioned male and female mummies emerge from their cases to perform a duet dance, then get scared back into their boxes by a live mouse.

Finally, the cat spots the case of Cleopatra. However, she is not wrapped as a mummy. What appears at first to be the painted lid of a mummy case turns out to be a lid made of clear glass, and Cleo is not only perfectly preserved inside, but instantly cones to life. Voiced by one of the alternate voices for Fleischer’s Betty Boop (IMDB speculates Margie Hines, but I am not so sure), Cleo dances, and asks if the cat is the Shiek of Araby, and if he will rule this land with her. The cat is flattered to be called a Shiek, and shows off his best dancing moves with her around the floor. Time for a repeat of a Foster gag, as the cat encounters a statute of a Pharaoh with long white goatee, and pulls upon it, activating an internal fire alarm. “Fire, fire!”, yell the mummy occupants of cases throughout the tomb, and a stampede of criss-crossing mummies replaces the stampede of skeletons in Foster’s previous film. The fire-fighting skeleton doesn’t show up, but his chariot does, and the cat and Cleo make an escape in it. The cat embraces Cleo in a kiss – but the scene dissolves back to where we started – the river flatboat, where the mule is licking his face. The cat socks the mule away, then sings to the audience that his heart breaks, for all the while, he’s been on the Mississippi though dreaming of the Nile.

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Magic Mummy (Van Beuren/Radio Pictures, Tom and Jerry, 2/7/33 – John Foster/George Stallings, dir.) – At least John Foster doesn’t repeat himself here. Tom and Jerry (the Mutt and Jeff-style human duo) are cops in a radio-equipped prowl car. They pass the time on their beat listening to police broadcasts, performed like a commercial-radio musical show, as an effeminate duo of cops sing “The Cop on the Beat, the Man In the Moon, and Me.” A call comes in to the chief’s desk, and he broadcasts an emergency call to Tom and Jerry – investigate another disappearance of a mummy from the museum. Outside the museum grounds, our heroes spot a mysterious figure cloaked in black (so how many other colors of cloak are available in a black and white cartoon?), carrying a mummy case into the graveyard. The culprit opens a grave like a hidden trap door, and descends below ground, with Tom and Jerry on his heels. There, they witness the thief (who is seemingly akin to the Phantom of the Opera) unwrap the mummy, revealing a shapely human Egyptian princess. Stepping to a piano, the villain commands the princess to sing. She attempts to take a few labored inhales in her efforts to return to life, but before she can perform, Tom and Jerry dash in, attempting to make an arrest. With hypnotic powers from his fingertips, the villain draws and repels Tom and Jerry to and from him (almost sucking their uniforms off), then casts them into a chamber and behind a pair of heavy stone doors.

The phantom takes the closed mummy case (into which, in a continuity error, the princess has apparently returned while off camera) from the piano antechamber to another larger floor below via another hidden staircase, where a second piano awaits. A curtain stands before them, and the phantom raises it with a winch mechanism. To give the place a spooky air, a nice touch is added of the curtain partly tearing/unraveling as it goes up, leaving its heavy curtain bar hanging at a 45 degree angle below it. We see, from POV behind the rising curtain, the revealing of an underground theater, filled to capacity with an audience of living skeletons. (Some nice detail here for a small animation house.) The phantom presents the princess again, and once again repeatedly commands her to “Sing”. This leads right into the lyric of the Tin Pan Alley hit, “Sing (It’s Good For You)”, performed by another, possibly different Betty Boop sound-alike as the princess. An all-skeleton orchestra provides the back-up. So where are Tom and Jerry? Trapped inside a large underground water main behind the stone doors. Enterprising Jerry, however, comes equipped for such emergencies, with an industrial-strength can opener, cutting a hole in the galvanized steel sides of the pipe. (Strong little guy!) They slip onto the stage, hiding under the piano. Jerry decides to take a curious look under the phantom’s robes, lifting a corner of the cloak to expose a bare, skeletal ankle. The phantom turns, reacting with the outrage of the Opera Phantom upon unmasking. Tom and Jerry shout in unison, “The house is pinched!” All the skeletons in the audience run for the exits to avoid the raid. The phantom grabs up the princess, replacing her in the mummy case, and beats a retreat, leading Tom and Jerry on a winding chase through a cave full of holes and stalagmites. The phantom enters another darkened chamber of the subterranean tunnels, with the boys following, and a fierce battle takes place in the darkness. When Jerry finds time to light a match, he finds no one else left with him in the chamber, but is standing upon the mummy case, left unattended upon the floor. Jerry hastens with it back up the steps to the surface world, hops into the patrol car, and straight to the police station, where he presents the mummy case before the chief. (A sound-editing error occurs, with audio pops on track where the splicing should be (dialog cut-ins in this and many other Van Beuren films are often awkward, the film cuts heard as loud pops before and after each line), as Jerry mouths the words, “The mummy!”, but not a word is heard on track.) Jerry opens the case. Now don’t tell me that Van Beuren wasn’t influenced by Mutt and Jeff in creating these characters – as we get the identical payoff as the previous duo’s “Mummy O’Mine” – a beat-up Tom staggers out of the case, and falls to the floor, with Jerry fainting dead away atop him.

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The Shriek (Lantz/Universal, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 2/27/33) – Lantz and Bill Nolan co-produce again, returning Oswald to the sands of Egypt after only three years. This time, plot is even more meager than the last, and almost feels like it could be borrowing from the minor synopsis known of the lost Disney silent “Harem Scarem”. Oswald and his girlfriend (by this time dating a dog, who is rather a female prototype of the later Pooch the Pup, but for once in this episode is finally identified while otherwise remaining nameless in other cartoons, referred to by the name “Tillie”) are found riding a camel in the desert. Sheik Putrid Pete abducts her (by simply having his own horse grab the camel’s tail and jostle her off), then makes a getaway across the desert. Oswald pursues (swiping the gag from “Mickey In Arabia” of having the camel turn upside down, then run with his humps). Everyone enters an Egyptian tomb. That’s all the plot there is. Cue the endless run of skeleton and mummy gags in the tomb, a la “Gypped in Egypt”, and fill for seven more minutes.

Some of the most distressing things about Oswald in this period are: (1) endless chases in spooky settings give no chance for the character to display any personality of his own, making it too painfully obvious that he is just a face drawn on a cloned body of Mickey Mouse. (2) Musical scores pay no attention whatsoever to the action on the screen, with nothing even timed to the beat of the music. Instead, James Dietrich just composes an overly-active gallop, and plays it continuously for the duration of the film, to the point where it just feels like it doesn’t fit. (3) No effort at all seems to be put into pacing or timing gags for maximum audience reaction. The audience, if it is laughing at all, wouldn’t even have a chance to catch its breath, as the next gag is already going through the motions before any time is allotted for the audience to figure out the payoff of the previous scene. These problems are not isolated to this one film, but occur again and again in the series. Lantz and Nolan seem to have felt at this time that action alone, and a lot of drawings, were the tickets to rivaling their competitors. Just cram as many sequences as possible into a reel, irrespective of continuity, and you’re done. It would take several more seasons for dawn to begin to break that there were many more ingredients needed for an appealing cartoon.

To the film’s credit, there are some attractive backgrounds in the exterior shots of the tomb, with pillars and carvings fashioned in moody, darkened tones. Some gags also work better than others (Fred “Tex” Avery was on the staff, and although none of the gags in this film rise to his usual quality level, there is probably little doubt that some of the better giggles came from his ideas). Without covering all sequences comprehensively, I’ll hit some highlights. Pete enters the tomb, closing a stone door behind him. Oswald runs right into it, flattening himself against it like a pancake. Before re-inflating himself with his own breath, he takes advantage of his temporary flatness to slip himself under the door like a letter from the postman. Inside the first chamber of the tomb, Oswald calls for Tillie, but is surprised when the only responder is the living skeleton of an Egyptian cat, which rubs up in friendly fashion against Oswald’s leg, and has to be shooed away. An early use of the cartoon-standard “skeleton key” gag – one made of a small skull and bones – appears (maybe the closest to evidence of Avery influence). Oswald and Tillie escape a room in unusual fashion – by grabbing the end of a mummy’s wrappings, yanking it until the skeleton inside is revealed spinning like a top, then using the spinning skeleton as a power drill to bore a hole in the wall. Another room reveals six (rather than the usual ten) mummy cases, lined up in bowling pin formation. Oswald can’t resist taking a rounded urn, fitting it on his hand, and bowling a strike. He then writes his score as an X on one of a set of nine mosaic tiles forming an illustration of the pants of an Egyptian on the wall. An illustration of another Egyptian appearing next to it comes to life, produces his own pencil from nowhere, and plays a losing game of tic tac toe with Oswald on the remaining mosaic tiles. Oswald spots two illustrations of small chariots on the wall. Merely grabbing them off the wall converts them to full three dimensions, allowing Oswald to put them on his feet as roller skates. Pete catches him, however, by unwinding more mummy wrappings, and using them as a cowboy lariat. Oswald dispatches him by dragging Pete around and around between two doors, then slamming one of the doors in Pete’s face. Finally, Pete is catapulted into the air, by means of dropping a boulder from the exterior roof of the tomb onto a stone slab Pete is standing on. Pete finally descends, directly into the open mouth of the Sphinx, who swallows him in some oddly grotesque animation, then licks its lips in satisfaction. Oswald and Tille share the traditional “Mickey Mouse” kiss to close the show – at least a full minute after the film has worn out its welcome.

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Coo-Coo, the Magician (Ub Iwerks/MGM, Flip the Frog, 3/6/33) – Perhaps the most heavily edited of all of Flip’s cartoons for television and rental versions, and one for which no uncut master elements appear to exist. It has only been semi-reassembled from fragmentary sources of varying quality – still without original titles. Viewers will recognize the often-omitted opening shot as the black and white original of the same opening used on the later ComiColor “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” – a black slave beating a huge gong to signal the beginning of the story, a la the signature opening later used by J. Arthur Rank, and by RKO’s “Gunga Din”. Of course, this slave’s gong is an inverted wash tub. The cartoon also notably features a comeback for a Betty Boop-look-alike girlfriend for Flip, designed by Boop’s creator Grim Natwick, which character was introduced in the preceding film, “Funny Face”.

Just as in “Mickey In Arabia” (again no doubt an inspiration for this production), Flip and his girl enter an Arabian bazaar for some sightseeing. However, they ride together with a tour guide upon an elephant, and are deposited on the street by the guide’s cranking of the elephant’s tail, raising its hind legs like an auto jack so that Flip and the girl slide down the elephant’s trunk. In the bazaar, Coo-Coo (again a play upon the name “Chandu”) performs magic at a small booth for another tourist, Iwerks’s ever-present old crone. With the utterance of the words, “Hocus Pocus”, Coo-Coo produces a bouquet of flowers instantly from a vase. However, the real magic is when the crone bends to smell them – and the blooms change to a swarm of small live crabs. The crone screams, disappearing down the street and over the nearest city wall. Flip and his girl are next. Coo-Coo repeats the flower trick, but Flip is not at all impressed. “Applesauce”, he remarks, then borrows Coo-Coo’s turban (under which in one shot the mystic is seen to be wearing a derby) to perform himself an even better trick. Producing a small Flit gun from nowhere, Flip sprays the turban, then inverts it – shaking out a goodly supply of head lice! (Too gross for television!) “Fooey”, says Coo-Coo, turning to a new illusion to up his game. At a clap of his hands, an assistant appears from thin air, and steps into a large box. “Abba Dabba”, says Coo-Coo – and displays the box, now seemingly empty. Flip grabs a nearby scimitar, and plunges it into the “empty” box’s side. “OUCH!!” shouts the voice of the lost assistant, leaping high out of the box with the sword stuck in his rear. Coo-Coo tries again, this time calling for the assistance of Flip’s girl. She stands at the magician’s instruction against a wall, and Coo-Coo pulls a windowshade-curtain down in front of her. A magic word or two, and the curtain snaps upward – with no girl to be seen. Flip shouts, “Where is she?”, and shakes the magician for some answers. But the magician’s entire outfit collapses into a heap upon the ground – he is not inside them. Instead, his face appears through a door peephole in the building against which the girl had stood, giving Flip a jeering laugh, then slamming the peephole in Flip’s face.

Flip attempts to gain entry. He grabs an axe to chop the door down – but it magically changes into a snake. He scales a ladder, but the rungs collapse, launching him through a manhole into an underground tomb. Flip bounces around upon a few Egyptian statues, one of which gets repositioned so that it is holding hand-to-nose in a razz position. Flip repeatedly calls out “Yoo Hoo”, until a mummy rises from a case (on the side of which hangs a “Do not disturb” sign) and shouts “Pipe down!” Meanwhile, Coo-Coo is on a floor above, presenting his prize girl to a sultan, for payment in gold. The sultan starts to test out the “merchandise”, plucking at the girl’s limbs like violin strings to test her strength. He finds out just how strong she is, when she socks him in the nose. The sultan calls out his large black guards, who quickly recapture the fleeing girl. Back in the basement, Flip encounters a small room, steps in, and finds it is an elevator to the throne room, where he attempts to rescue the girl from the guards. Instead, he is thrown out the window.

On the street below, Flip lands upon and meets again Coo-Coo, counting his money. Flip tries to summon up his own magical powers, positioning his fingers as if a hypnotist, trying to cast a spell on Coo-Coo. Nothing happens, and Coo-Coo just laughs, grabbing up a rifle and aiming it at Flip. Behind Flip, another black slave sleeps against a wall. Flip decides that maybe all his magic powers need for a boost is a little electricity – so he removes the slave’s fez, and rubs his fingers through the slave’s scalp to generate static electricity. Flip goes into spell-casting pose again, and magically changes Coo-Coo’s rifle into a garden hose, with which they both get sprayed with water, Flip riding upon a fountain of it up onto the palace roof.

Crashing through a skylight, Flip lands in a room upon an ultra-wide, room-filling bed and mattress. The bed-covers are suddenly thrown back, to reveal nine girls in harem attire. Seeing a male – even if he is a frog – the girls in unison proclaim, “Oh, goody goody!”, and begin to chase Flip. Flip dives into a pool, and the girls all follow. Only one figure rises at the opposite end of the pool – Flip, dressed in one of the girl’s outfit! (Now, what did Flip do or see to get his new wardrobe? And what of the girls (including the one without clothes)? Are they still down there searching for him? Or did they all drown?) Appearing before the sultan, Flip attempts to repeat (but with no reused animation) his harem dance from Movie Mad, revealing on the sly his true identity to his girl sitting with the sultan. The sultan enjoys the show, but likes to eat while he’s entertained. He chooses an apple from a basket, but has odd tastes when it comes to seasoning, applying a dash of pepper to the fruit. The pepper gets in his nose, making him sneeze – and blowing away Flip’s disguise. The sultan slashes at Flip with a sword, but misses, instead striking a tall pillar, which crumbles down upon him. From amidst the debris of the pillar, the sultan reappears, split into about ten little sultans and scattering in all directions. Now come the palace guards. They all jump on Flip in a battle-heap, but Flip simply crawls out of danger between their legs. As the guards all stand up, Flip grabs a crystal ball, and bowls a perfect strike to knock the guards down (adding a spit with a curve to topple the final guard who is still wobbling). Flip turns, to spot Coo-Coo, returned to the palace room, attempting to capture the girl again. Flip launches himself at Coo-Coo, and all three tumble down a long staircase, picking up a small carpet along the way. The carpet becomes airborne as they exit the building, and Flip yanks one end of it out from under Coo-Coo, depositing him suspended on the end of a palace flagpole. Flip and the girl kiss, and wave goodbye to the camera, as they fly off on their magic carpet. In a coda, the black slave seen at the beginning of the film rings the gong again to bring the story to a close, but strikes it too hard, knocking the washtub off its mounting and onto his own head.

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Beau Bosko (Harman-Ising/Warner, Looney Tunes (Bosko), 7/1/33 – Hugh Harman, dir.) – 1933 wasn’t a bad year for Harman-Ising, or for Bosko. It seemed as if a bit of effort was made to vary up the subject matter of the Bosko cartoons, placing him into some new settings (even if derivative of work from competing studios), and often with some touches of improvement in animation quality (such as use of some gray-shading on cels for several animated effects). There is also occasional use of more complex line work, such as here, in the form of a commandant decorated on every available inch of his uniform with medals – a gag which would be repeated and embellished upon a few years later by Frank Tashlin in “Little Beau Porky”. Still, though, story development remains a bit weak, with a decent start but a somewhat disappointing payoff, leaving the film, and the series as a whole, still shy of producing any certified classics.

This rarely-screened installment appears to mark the first animated lampoon (at least the first surviving one) of the foreign legion epic. Bosko had already appeared in some service comedies, but in the setting of World War I. This time, he becomes international, in the service of France. Not that there is much of any difference in barracks life. A bugle call of Reveille is sounded to awaken the men (the bugler playing the entire tune in one long exhale, while the trumpet bell bends like human lips to “mouth” the individual notes as if it were speaking). But it seems no one in the ranks will listen. They all continue to snore soundly. One portly pig in a lower bunk of a triple decker bed raises his two upper-deck comrades up and down along with their mattresses every time he inhales air into his fat tummy. A tough mug with a ship tattooed on his chest blows wind into the ship’s sails and propels it through the tattooed water with every breath. The sergeant finally has to storm into the bunk room, and shout “Hey” to get the troops to open their eyes. In one of the best gags of the film, the awakened soldiers unexpectedly react like grade school children, greeting the sergeant with the ritual expected of students in a classroom – a singing of a chorus of “Good Morning To You”! (although another tough-looking legionnaire indicates what he really thinks of Sarge after the line “We’re glad to see you” – a gesture of wanting to cut the sergeant’s throat). In a lonely corner of the barracks, unnoticed by everyone, still sleeps Bosko. While the other soldiers scramble around in a mass clothing pile for their respective uniforms and exit to the parade grounds, Bosko’s uniform, hung on a wall, takes on a life of its own, groups itself into a position of military attention, then notices that Bosko isn’t inside them. The clothes, without their owner, attempt to shove and nudge Bosko in bed to awaken him, but obtain no response. Finding another bugle upon the wall, the uniform places the mouthpiece of the instrument against the sleeping Bosko’s lips – allowing him to play his own Reveille to finally awaken him. Bosko’s uniform still behaves in a military manner, racing out to join the troops as soon as Bosko is awake – leaving Bosko to dash out on the parade grounds in his nightshirt. But the uniform, once in Bosko’s proper place in the ranks, opens a drop-seat in the rear, so that its owner can leap inside as he joins the scene. Just to be tidy, Bosko, once dressed, opens a panel in the backpack of the outfitted soldier ahead of him, revealing a small sink and mirror inside, with which Bosko washes his face to make ready for the assembly.

The commandant emerges from his quarters, and signals for Bosko. Bosko presents himself before him, and attempts a salute – which comes out more like thumbing his nose at the commandant in a razzberry. The commandant hands Bosko a poster, and issues special orders: “Get this man.” The poster depicts the Desert Scourge – one Ali Oop (no, not the caveman). Since when do legionnaires get assignments to capture a bandit chieftain single-handedly? Harman must think he’s still directing Bosko in the Mounties in “Big Man From the North”, where he was similarly ordered to “Get your man”. Off into the desert charges Bosko on a camel, but not before stopping at an oasis for the camel to get a drink. The camel sucks the watering hole dry, leaving a solitary fish doing the breast-stroke on the bare sand. The fish complains at the camel taking all the water, so the camel spits back just enough for the fish to submerge in, as the fish waves the camel a “thank you”.

Now we get to clearly see why this film was produced. We are suddenly shifted to the locale of an Arabian bazaar (probably the best background painting in the film), and a series of shots with the locals that makes us know in an instant that Harman and Ising are trying to copy the same setup as the bazaar sequence of “Mickey In Arabia”. That cartoon, and its unusual shift to adventure, obviously had its influence on the industry – explaining why H-I suddenly decided to shift its own leading character into more adventurous locales. The trend would continue later with Jack King’s Buddy pictures, and even a few Porky adventures. So Disney again was shaping a sub-genre for the industry. At the bazaar, Bosko takes time out from his duties to meet his girl Honey, who makes her most provocative pre-code entrance ever, in totally transparent face veil and equally transparent harem pants – revealing she is wearing no panties underneath! This is attire for a respectable girl to wear in public? What is left to the imagination? Even Betty Boop wouldn’t be so daring! Worse yet, even the face veil serves no purpose, as Bosko merely pulls a string, parting the veil in the middle like a curtain, so he can steal a kiss.

Enter Ali Oop and a small group of his riffs, on a raid of the town. Ali tosses an entire armful of swords at Bosko and Honey all at once. Our hero and heroine duck behind some pottery, allowing the swords to pass and lodge in a wall, forming a gleaming metal staircase for the two to climb up into the balcony of an upper-story apartment. Bosko uses a revolver with an ammunition-belt attachment to fire like a machine gun out the window at the bad guys. A three-way pottery chain reaction is set up by the shots, causing one earthen jar to fall upon one of the riffs. He keels backwards, the jar on his head causing a row of jars on a ledge behind him to topple like dominoes. The last jar in the row lands on another riff, who also keels backwards, knocking an even bigger earthen jug off a balcony, to clobber a third riff in the street below. Bullets penetrate three jugs above another riff, showering him with water. The riff grabs hold of one of his confederates, and opens the second-man’s garments into an umbrella of fabric to position above the dampened riff. Ali himself shoots from a palm tree, the recoil of his rifle spinning him repeatedly around the tree trunk (another gag which I believe was reworked by Tashlin later). Bosko shoots back, felling a cocoanut from the tree onto Ali’s cranium. Ali falls to the ground, bounces, then lands, dazed, upon the bed of a wheeled cart. Bosko conveniently finds inside the room from which he is shooting a wall rack full of long spears. He takes down, then launches, the spears out the window. They land in a neat, tight circle around Ali, lodging in the wooden bed of the cart, to serve as prison bars. Bosko and Honey emerge safely from their building fortress, and, with the aid of Bosko’s camel, drag the cart and Ali back to the legion fort, while Bosko and Honey share another kiss. Kind of a sudden drop-off for the story, a bit like the abrupt question-mark finish to “Ride Him, Bosko”, almost as if to unapologetically say, “We just ran out of time – and ideas.”

• “Beau Bosko” can be viewed on DailyMotion.

NEXT WEEK: More mummies, sultans, legions and deserts!