I was definitely exhausted and confused last week since I showed a Scrappy I already had! This means, officially, I owe everyone a Scrappy that *hasn’t* here. We’ve done a lot of Scrappys over these last 10 years or so, but there are still quite a few to choose from so there will be another attempt soon.
So, after another whole day of putting together student work, I’m all out of Thunderbean Thursday ideas— and don’t want to do one of my ‘work in progress’ posts tonight since I want to out more work into them. So, after some debating, a Mighty Mouse cartoon we haven’t shown (!) seems to fit the bill.
It isn’t as if they’re aren’t interesting animation related things brewing over here. In fact, there’s things on all sorts of fronts I’m looking forward to sharing. As you’re reading this, I’ll be having my last ‘official’ day of the semester at the school, so it’s now a Thunderbean summer for me.
Here’s a print of Triple Trouble – with original titles and end titles too! It does have a splice near the end, and I haven’t looked at another copy to see what isn’t there at this point. I assume the title Triple Trouble refers to the Colonel falling off a bridge on the east river, Oil Can Harry chasing Pearl, and Mighty Mouse tied up and about to be eaten by Vultures. It really does seem that Oil Can Harry *could* have found a place a little closer than a desert to do him in.
I remember seeing this one a bunch of times as a kid — and especially remember Pearl breaking out into a more honkey-tonk version of her song early on in the picture. I don’t think this is top cartoon-making in any way, but there sure are a lot of cool cityscape backgrounds with extreme angles. Oil Can Harry may get hit with more things per shot than any other film. The poor Colonel spend a majority of this film ‘falling’ throughout the film— and I think that’s one of the best gags. There’s something odd about seeing them carrying out a turn-of-the-century operetta in modern New York; somehow it works better with a less-specific era.
The animation in this particular cartoon is sort of all over the place, with a lot of not-so-well animated shots, especially near the beginning. The bulldog cops seem more comfortable in a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon than a Mighty Mouse I think, and there’s some fun Jim Tyler animation in the last quarter of the film.
So, for now— I’m getting some rest and staying away from Scrappy postings, so for now enjoy the merriment of Terrytoons!
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.
At any time when it really seemed possible that we would get a TERRYTOONS collection on any physical format, I think there would have been an entire disc devoted to this superhero and his operatic dramas. I really don’t know how many of them there were, but I remember seeing them on television so many years ago. That was back when we really could find decent prints of “mighty mouse“ and other such characters from the studio. Thank you for this! I enjoy these cartoons on a certain level, but of course not as much as the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons that were being broadcast on local TV. Good stuff, nonetheless.
“Triple Trouble” was released after the Terrytoons strike of 1947-48, but the high quality of its backgrounds suggests that it may have been part of the backlog of earlier cartoons that Terry had been holding in reserve. It’s one of the sillier of the Oil Can Harry melodramas, which is really saying something, and musically it never approaches the heights of “Gypsy Life” or “The Crackpot King”. But it’s all good fun, with great action and plenty of laughs, and it’s nice to see Pearl Pureheart holding her own against the villain for a change. It’s always a pleasure to see a classic Mighty Mouse operetta on Thunderbean Thursday!
Disney fans will recall that “Father, Dear Father”, sung by Pearl in her opening scene, was sung by the Mellomen in the 1941 Mickey Mouse cartoon “The Nifty Nineties” — even though, by the 1890s, it was already a very old song.
The song also turns up in the 1940 movie “Strike Up the Band” with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. It’s one of several old songs in a melodrama parody.
What isn’t there in the splice at the end is the police officers singing “You can (count on him to answer every call)” and then Pearl says “(I) don’t mean maybe” (at least I think she says it).
As I’ve gotten older – as something of a “film historian” – I think of the TERRY-TOON cartoons as being on the level of a movie studio like Monogram or often, PRC in the so-called “Golden Days of Hollywood.” I remember Gordon Sheehan telling me about an animator who was leaving Fleischer’s and told everybody at the studio that he had gotten a job at Disney’s – so “the gang” through him a big “good-bye” party. Little did anyone know – until later – that the animator went to work for Terry-Toons, not all that far away from Fleischer’s. The guy might not have gotten such a lavish party by his friends if he had told them the truth!
I enjoyed MIGHTY MOUSE cartoons a lot on TV when I was a child. Why Paramount hasn’t restored them is anybody’s guess, but Paramount hasn’t done much with their Republic Pictures library either – at least not as much as I’d like. I guess if you don’t figure on a HUGE profit from your investment on maintaining older properties, it’s not worth it! Sad!
This cartoon was kind of a satire of the older MIGHTY MOUSE concept, of keeping the characters in a kind of “Turn of the Century” setting. One should remember that there was a kind of “nostalgia” fad back in the ’30s and ’40s (and just into the ’50s) where people looked back either fondly or with a touch of critical satire – of the 1890s’-early 1900’s era. Just look at W.C. Fields’ THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER or THE OLD FASHIONED WAY as an example. The old play, “The Drunkard” was a huge hit in the ’30s when it was played for parody. We kids who watched the MIGHTY MOUSE cartoons didn’t understand the humor when they later showed up on TV, but I enjoyed the concept – without understanding it.
I so wonder when the Terrys will land on MeTVToons!!!
Anything’s possible if we pray!
Since you say you’ve run out of ideas for posting cartoons, I suggest you post your copy of “A Dizzy Day” (1933), as this cartoon represents a significant step forward in the history of animation.
Not only is it the very first American cartoon to use backgrounds and characters designed in the Art Deco style, but it’s also the very first instance of modernist music being used in a cartoon! It was also one of the last cartoons produced by Harry Bailey before he was fired by Van Beuren for trying to unionize the studio, a firing that put an end to the Aesop’s Fables series.
All these combined reasons should be considered in giving this cartoon a place in your weekly postings.
I have decent quality bootleg dvds of all the Mighty Mouse shorts, some of the earliest Saturday morning toons I can remember. Those MM/Pearl Oil Can operettas with Jim Tyer’s animated bits were real highlights for me.
Who was the ensemble providing the voices for the policemen singing at the end of “Triple Trouble “?