I’ve been really soaking in getting a bunch of films ready for broadcast as of late, and making really good progress doing so. This particular film we’re working on cleaning up a bit right now, and since it’s in the queue I thought it would be a good one to share this week.
I really do love cartoons, and as I’ve been getting older I’m more and more appreciative of the little things in a lot of not-so-great animated films. I especially enjoy a lot of Terrytoons for this reason. If the internet had been around when I was a kid, I think I would have had a very different version of tracking down animated films to see and collect.
When I was 14 or so, I went to a film show and bought a bunch of cartoons from a dealer named Frank Bueno. Frank wasn’t always the most fair of collectors, and even though things didn’t always work out so well, he did do me a solid by selling me a bunch of 16mm cartoons for a few bucks each. It was a huge education in seeing films I had only seen in filmographies, and a lot of those were really beat up old rental prints. Among those (in a much worse print than this) was His Off Day (1938). Castle released the cartoon as “Tricky Troubles” to the home movie and non-theatrical market.
I’ve always been a little bit steamed about the cartoons that Castle and Official Films chose to release . It seems like it’s pretty random since there’s some pretty good ones next to a lot of not very good ones. This particular film isn’t among the better, but it does have some merits.
Watching Terrytoons from this era, production-wise, is sometimes like looking at the evolution of other studios through many years of production and animation quality all rolled into one film. There’s pretty primitive stuff early in the film, and later better animation by our usual Terrytoon hero animators. Still, it’s odd to think this was out at the same time as the Popeyes, Oswalds, Mickeys and Warners cartoons- the quality of the overall animation is just at a much lower level mixed with some very nice work at times- but it all looks like work from 1936 or earlier if it was outside of Terry.
In this nearly plotless short, Puddy chases birds, plays with a ball, plays with Kittens, is confronted by cows from 1932 Terrytoons, is kicked out of his own house by perhaps the poorest-voiced Stepin Fetchit stereotype, then spends the rest of the cartoon with an Italian stereotype organ grinder and his monkey. That’s the plot.
While it isn’t premium entertainment, there are some really fun and well-animated shots in this last part of the film. I especially love the Monkey drawings and animation- lots of appealing poses and drawings. I recognize some of the scenes by Carlo Vinci, one of the finest animators at the studio for many years of course.
I’m happy they made these little films, and they’ve been enjoyed by tons of people through the years. If you haven’t seen this one, I hope you folks enjoy it!
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 guess that in recent years 1930s TERRYTOONS have become so much easier to find at film shows and such. I wonder what the inclusion of such short films on the MeTV TOONS channel will have on the availability of such films on the collector market. Time will tell. As usual, every studio had their own “pups“. When I hear a cartoon like this from the 1930s, of course, I think of the two unnamed pups that were part of the “happy harmonies“ series at MGM. They were somewhat plotless as well, but with the dogs terrorizing something within the cartoon. In their debut, “two little pups“, they spent the whole cartoon terrorizing a hen on a farm. In the second cartoon, “pups picnic“, they spend most of the time trying to dodge a fox hunt going on, but then again, why would a family go picnic in where there’s all kinds of bullets flying and horses galloping through the picnic site? I guess nobody question such things back then. Then again that’s why I like 1930s cartoons. Animation was still a kind of “new thing“ back then, but by 1938 most Studios had main characters going on and they were always trying them out. As I said, before I like one shot cartoons, and I’m sure if I’d ever seen this one on television, I probably liked it as well. If the TERRYTOONS cartoons ever become part of our home media libraries, we will know much more about these cartoons because they will become more widely available and talked about often. In the meantime, thank you for this short. Good luck on restorations of your own.
Poor Puddy, nobody wants to play with him. It’s an unremarkable cartoon, but it’s great to see any Terrytoon from the 1930s in such fine condition.
“The organ grinder man is coming, he sings for you a canzonetta….” The canzonetta was a form of Italian vocal music that originated during the Renaissance and flourished through the Baroque era. Unlike the madrigal, which could be either secular or sacred, the canzonetta was invariably secular and generally humorous in tone; typically it would have what we’d call a “punchline” just before the final chorus. Claudio Monteverdi wrote several books of canzonetti in the late 1500s before distinguishing himself as the first great composer of opera. In modern Italian, the word is used to describe any lighthearted song; one might translate it as “ditty.”
By 1938, Stepin Fetchit’s career was in decline. He made only one picture that year, as opposed to four the year before and no less than eight in 1935. That one picture was titled, not “His Off Day”, but “His Exciting Night”, starring Charlie Ruggles as the victim of a series of practical jokes on the night before his wedding. As in the cartoon, Fetchit plays a lazy butler.
I hope the recently announced Famous Studios blu-ray from ClassicFlix/Cartoon Logic is the start of a reassessment of Paramount’s rich Golden Age Animation library. A Fleischer or Terrytoons release next would be nice – using the Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored project restorations, some of which were posted on YouTube. Same for a possible future Terrytoons best-of compilation with such masterpieces as Flebus, The Mouse of Tomorrow among others. I wrote here before (back in 2023) about how the Terrytoons are a masterclass in profitable mediocrity, no offense intended, it’s a valid approach to a business, although it may degenerate to a soul-crushing process.