I’m cheating just a bit here today — but just sort of! Rather than uploading a cartoon, You-tuber Azi the animation guy has done it for me on this nearly-all Columbia week here on Cartoon Research. So- thanks to him for uploading the scan we did…
…but first—some brief Thunderbean news:
Mid Century Modern 3 is finally back from replication! We’ll start sending the pre-orders at some point next week- and it will be available on Amazon and the Thunderbean Shop after that. We’ll devote this space to the set next week, finally.
In the TB trenches, the team is doing great working on getting the Rainbow Parades, volume 2 set all cleaned up. Despite the horrors of a major hard drive crash, we’re all persevering to the best of our abilities and getting the second half of the series looking really good. I just ended nearly a full week cleaning up Trolley Ahoy, a cartoon with lots of stuff going on all the time— with most of it animated on ones (a new drawing each frame). Digital restoration/ cleanup software is especially brutal on animation since it requires a lot of manual work ‘putting back’ things that the software over-cleaned up— and this one was a bear in ‘put back’. We’re down to a handful of films to finish on that set now, and while I’m now heavily concentrating on bonus materials for the set, our own Devon Baxter is busy on Bold King Cole (from the negative), Becca is struggling through the middle of Molly Moo and Rip Van Winkle (with sunshine maker elves coming out of her ears) and Helge is slogging through Toonerville Picnic, with all the moving trolley shots and water to ‘put back’ making him question his life choices. Neptune Nonsense, in a new scan from the master 35mm print, is the only short not in progress just yet, but will be this week. All this full animation makes me want to watch a Linus the Lionhearted just to get my equilibrium back.The goal is to get this set in the can within another week or two, and onto getting several other titles in the can as well over this summer. Can’t wait. We’ll talk about those other close ones as soon as this set actually exists as a final thing.
AND SO — onto our cartoon!
The Columbia staff must of loved wrestling and boxing since those two things seem to show up in Columbia cartoons more than other studios. Then again, most every studio does have a boxing cartoon. In Man of Tin (1940) our hero is an assistant to a genius scientist who invents a Robot that he seemingly creates to be operated from inside, but then gets upset when the Robot doesn’t function without someone in in. Scrappy saves the day by surprising the scientist and seemingly controls the non-functioning robot that actually seems to be functioning really well when the correct controls are pulled inside. Somehow the scientist, who put a control knob for wrestling inside the robot, now is surprised that the Robot wrestles— and takes him to a wrestling match. Someone the scientist never thinks about Scrappy’s disappearance and subsequent Robot now functioning as it was designed to do— by having someone inside it. When Scrappy tries to get out, the stupid scientist think it’s a heart beating, even though he didn’t design anything of the sort inside his own machine. None of it makes much sense honestly, but heck… it’s Columbia!
Another bonus of the robot that seems to be designed for a small human to be inside it is that it has a magical ability to have the control panel switch over and over to the exact switch Scrappy needs, eliminating all others in the process. This guy really is a genius for making this mechanical marvel, even if all his wants to do in have it wrestle.
Some of the animation is really fun in this film despite the films bewildering story. I like a few of the cycles in the wrestling ring a lot. I think if this film had been made earlier in the series that Oppy would have been involved, adding some much needed humor. There’s a very brief Three Stooges reference when the other wrestler does a Curly-esque reaction.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. We’ve done a lot of Scrappy cartoons here, and I’m thinking of doing a bingo card so we can all start playing Scrappy-tac-toe.
Have a good week all!
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.
It makes sense that there would be a lot of cartoons about boxing and wrestling, as those sports both involve a contest between two opponents. Thus there are only two main characters to be animated, enlivened with the occasional interjection of referees, trainers and spectators. Of team sports, baseball is probably best suited to animation (q.v. the current Animation Trails series on Wednesdays), because the entire play can be broken down into a series of interactions between two players. It’s trickier to animate team sports involving multiple players in complex strategies. Of these, gridiron football works best for cartoons, as it consists of brief bursts of action in between lengthy time-outs. As for fast-paced team sports like basketball and hockey, these are but rarely seen in cartoons.
Thanks for sharing “Man of Tin” here on Columbia Screen Gems Week. But when it comes to cartoons about internally-operated mechanical pugilists, I have to say I prefer Bimbo in “The Robot” (Fleischer, 1932).
It occurs to me that this cartoon, and the Bimbo cartoon, predate Manzinger Z, the first internally piloted robot “mecha” anime, by about 40 years.
That IS Curly Howard’s voice! That “woo woo” was used as a stock sound effect for his films, and they borrowed it from Columbia’s sound department.
At 5:23, Scrappy pulls a knob labeled “Floating Power,” which turns the robot into an airplane. This term comes from the automotive industry. In the 1930s, the Chrysler Corporation developed new engine mounts to isolate vibration, and used the term Floating Power as a selling point in its ads. Readers of the popular magazines of the time would have been familiar with the term.
Among other places, it turns up in “Porky’s Road Race” in Charles Laughton’s car.
There’s also a scene in “Porky’s Road Race” (1937) where Charles Laughton, dressed as Captain Bligh, is driving a car marked “FLOATING POWER”, with an exposed engine literally floating in liquid!
The scientist wasn’t Scrappy’s dad?? Too bad.
“it has a magical ability to have the control panel switch over and over to the exact switch Scrappy needs, eliminating all others in the process”
They could have had there be a switchboard inside, with close-ups to show each switch/button that Scrappy presses, but for whatever reason they didn’t.