You know, at some point, if we’re showing a cartoon a week, we’ll eventually do *all* the Screen Songs, but I’d love for really nice versions of them to be released before then, hopefully! For now, we’ve got whatever old prints that show up for most of these- sometimes in Kodachrome, sometimes in Eastman color that’s faded, and, on great occasion, in Technicolor. Wish a Polacolor print would actually surface. I wrote an article back in 2013 here called ‘Hitting the Sauce’ that mentioned this film, but I’ve never posted it myself until now.
First, in the usual Thunderbean news:
The little Thunderbean team is chugging away as the Rainbow Parade volume 2 starts getting closer to being ready to get out the door. We’re down to four films in progress now out of the 13. I was syncing some of them while taking a break from other stuff and am very happy they’re looking so great- it will be the best we see them I think. We’re also wrapping up the work we’ve done on a really excellent set that you all will know about soon (not one of ours), working on a bunch of behind the scenes stuff, trying to get out east to do a major scanning session, and waiting for the two first T-shirts to be finished while we’re dubbing the newest group of special sets.
The usual hectic summer but I’m happy to be getting back things after an accident slowed me down a little. It’s taken nearly two weeks to get things moving back to normal here, but I’m confident and happy we’re moving closer to finishing the current goals. It’s pretty heavy lifting until the end of the year, but I think we’ll look back after this period at all the things and smile. I’m doing a lot of work that gets pretty serious but trying to be less serious while it’s in progress. In the end you hope the seams don’t show at all, but rather just the hard work the filmmakers did in the first place.
And now, some saucy singing: The Little Brown Jug (1948)
You know, I have to imagine that no one thought it was inappropriate to have a whole cartoon about cute, drunk characters and not much else – then having the audience sing to celebrate. I’ve had several prints of this cartoon over the years, with none of them being much better… they were all reddish as this one is. I’ve done a little bit to pull it back, but the blues are pretty gone from this particular print. It was on one of the special sets a while back, but I thought I’d pull it out because I was remembering how much I like the animation in the sing-a-long part of the film, especially the happy little jug.
When I think about how many people, including artists that worked at the studio, noted that Famous had ‘a professional product’ this is one of the cartoons I think about. It breaks no ground, but is exactly what it needs to be as a little piece of entertainment. I don’t think this is anyone’s favorite cartoon, but I find the design and animation, especially the sing-a-long, to be really fun.
Have a good week all and watch some things you enjoy!
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.
Wow, I dimly recall actually seeing this on television back when I was a kid! I thought it was funny then and I think it’s funny now! Great choice for the week, and I’m so happy to hear that there’s progress at your little company getting all these cool DVDs and Blu-ray out there. Thank you for all you do. Wee-gup!
By today’s standards it might seem inappropriate for a cartoon to portray drunkenness in a humorous light, but when “The Little Brown Jug” was made Prohibition was still a fairly recent memory. The social consequences of it were bad enough that I doubt anyone would have wanted to listen to bluenoses pontificate about the evils of alcohol. If people had a few drinks and got silly and uncoordinated, it was something to laugh at. When I was a little boy I laughed at Otis Campbell staggering into the jailhouse on “The Andy Griffith Show”, and I laughed at Lucy getting drunk on Vitameatavegemin. Then after I spent a few years playing music in bars, I got really sick of dealing with drunks, but that’s another story.
It occurs to me that this cartoon is of approximately the same vintage as “PM Picnic”, with its cast of cute woodland animals promoting the whiskey with that clear, clean taste.
I, too, hope that a better print of “The Little Brown Jug” turns up someday. Do any other two colours clash worse than hunter green and fuchsia?
My father hated it when old movies, TV shows or comedians (e.g. W.C. Fields) made being drunk look funny; he had grown up with alcoholic relatives and would say “There’s nothing funny about drunks!” whenever something like this aired. When they showed the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence from “Dumbo” on TV, he said with disappointment, “I’m surprised Walt would put something like that in a kids’ cartoon.” He did like Otis, though.
The “lovable drunk” seems to be a trope that has largely faded from popular culture.
Drunken chick hatchlings. Hee-larious. Fleischer at his worst never sank that low.
As flawed as Fleischer cartoons are (sorry, East Coast fans), Famous feels like they are punishing you for laughing at cartoons by making it as unfunny as possible. I never want to hear someone call Tex Avery “anything for a gag” again, because he never stooped so low.
I really enjoyed this cartoon, particularly the upbeat theme music.
On a completely different note, I’d like to draw your attention to a little-known Van Beuren cartoon about bootlegging during Prohibition: “Horse Cops” (1931). I consider it to be the most bizarre cartoon ever produced by VB, and it really has to be seen to be believed. What’s more, it features animation by the legendary Les Elton, best known for making “Monkeydoodle” also in 1931. Unfortunately, the only available copy of “Horse Cops” is incomplete because it has been censored, the short film lasting just four and a half minutes whereas, according to Harrison’s Reports, the cartoon is supposed to last 7 and a half minutes.
So I’ve come to ask you if you could publish a complete copy of this cartoon on this site; I know I’m asking a lot of you, as you’ve got a lot of work to do at the moment, but I think “Horse Cops” is a real gem of animation that deserves to be recognized for its true worth.
Horse Cops, funny enough, isn’t one I’ve ever scanned. I’ve meant to for many years, and will at some point for sure…
I hope one day, we’ll get to see that lost Screen Songs cartoon, Readin’, Ritin’ and Rhythmetic!
One notable embarrassment of this film is the slightly-off colors on a select number of the cels during the “singing jaws” animation of the song’s choruses. The flashing one-frame changes in shades should have been corrected had the studio had proper budget (or competent manpower) for final checking, especially in a piece of animation that is repeated at least four times in the film. By verse three and four, the eye is involuntarily waiting for that inevitable color blink at the same spots in the action. removing all illusion of watching a “moving drawing”. The same kind of problem happened in a higher-budget production at MGM, Tom and Jerry’s “The Cat and the Mermouse’, where someone in ink and paint seemed intent on sabotaging one sequence, including one mispainted cel within each of three back-to-back repeating cycles. Blink, blink, blink. Of course, by the time of H-B’s low budget television animation, such cycle errors were common – especially noses not painted in.
Characters wearing checkered clothiing were always a problem. Don’t be too harsh on the gals in Paint – they did their best and got paid poorly.