Happy Halloween everyone!!
The Toby the Pup cartoons are a favorite elusive thing of mine, and other people for sure! The series, helmed by animator/ fdirector Dick Huemer, has remained elusive in its full form for many, many years. There were 12 in the series all told, and over the years, once in a while, one of the missing ones will peak its head out. I’m always looking myself.
I wrote a little article on the cartoon back in 2018, but it was *after* Halloween by a bit. Now, six years later, Thunderbean Thursday is on the correct day, so it seems like an excellent choice for this year!
Here’s what I wrote back in 2018:
Hallowe’en (1931) is my favorite of the currently available shorts. It feels like several cartoons sort of wrapped into one.
Toby’s behavior is reprehensible at the beginning of the short, kissing everyone and assaulting a friendly looking elephant before being slapped into shame and respect by his girlfriend. His attempt to redeem himself by playing the piano and performing inside a pumpkin seems to win over his all-animal audience, before ‘Hell’s Bells’ send all the guests into a state of fear at the impending ghost and Skeleton invasion. Any and all story sense in thrown out the window in this final section, and, in best Fleischer tradition, that’s a *good* thing. There appears to be a small section missing from the short near the end, leaving us to wonder what gag was excised.
This cartoon is a fitting predecessor to the ‘Scrappy’ shorts, featuring the unmistakable Columbia-esque animals (looking very much like they do in the Krazy Kat shorts from the same period). Even though the cartoon makes very little sense story-wise, it doesn’t really need to; the animation timing and posing puts over the gags just fine. Columbia’s abilities as a studio seem to take pretty big leaps during this period, especially in character personalty and gag timing. I especially enjoy the cartoons that Dick Huemer directed at Columbia through the early 30s.
The cartoon is also unusual in that, near the end, it features the earliest ‘smear’ frame I’ve seen in a sound cartoon, in the sequential frames below. I find the timing of this particular animation in that shot and this film) really fun and interesting:
So, here is Hallowe’en. It is featured on the Grotesqueries Blu-ray, from Thunderbean and Blue Mouse Studios.
Hopefully there will be a complete Toby the Pup Blu-ray some day, and I’ll be properly dressed for the occasion when that happens. Have a good week everyone!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
I love the Toby the Pup cartoons, even if Down South is my favorite Hallowe’en is the second one.
I hope new Pups will surface in the future, happy Halloween to everyone!
Halloween wouldn’t be Halloween without Toby the Pup and his umbilical hernia. I can remember when his only known cartoon was a fragmentary print of “The Museum”. I live in hope that his other lost films will someday come to light, but we’re very lucky to have as many of them as we do. I’ve read that a print of “The Fiddler” has been unearthed in France just this year; can anyone verify this? That’s one I would really love to see!
For those of you planning your Halloween cartoon viewing, may I suggest the often overlooked “The Witch’s Cat” (1948), which begins and ends with a lively ditty by Terrytoons composer Phil Scheib. This is not only the earliest Halloween song I know of, it’s also the only one predating the rock and roll era:
“Come along! Come along and join that happy throng!
It’s a Halloween parade!
A gay affair with Jack-o’-lanterns everywhere.
Join the masquerade!
By the light of the moon, we’ll sing a merry tune
As we dance upon the green.
Come along! Come along and join that happy throng
On this joyous Halloween!”
Catchy, isn’t it? Happy Halloween!
That’s Toby the Pup? I thought he was an all white dog with a totally different body design in the cartoon about the museum! Shades of a reverse change as compared to Oswald the Rabbit’s different designs?
(Though I guess I don’t really know which design came first at this point. And who knows, maybe I’m totally misremembering anyway?!)