Scrappy owns this week’s cartoon showing, but first, here’s some limited Thunderbean news!
The last week of school here has owned most of my time, but I managed to get Aesop’s Fables, Volume 1 off to replication. The last stages of the project involved lots and lots of little tweaks that happily have made the whole effort just a little better, and I’m glad the master stuff on those hard drives are going on the shelf and making room for the other projects. It will be back from replication in the next few weeks and when it is I’ll post about it, but for now, here’s the just finished cover by Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider with a little help from me:
Work continues on Flip as the last commentaries arrive and the gallery and menus get finished. It’s the priority and will hopefully go to replication in the next few weeks, finally. Several other sets are in cleanup with more films coming back weekly- and as soon as I’m able to wrap my head around all this I’ll be getting more stuff scanned to finish these things off. This week, Stop Motion Marvels and Tom and Jerry had materials coming back looking pretty spiffy. As break begins we have pretty grandiose plans to accomplish..including lots of the specials sets getting off the books, setting up the small Thunderbean team to tackle lots of the project work and looking through more original camera materials and other master materials to complete several sets.
But the heck with all that, let’s watch a Scrappy cartoon!
Scrappy in Camping Out (1932) is as happy of a cartoon as one could ever hope for. Scrappy and his kid brother are basically adults in this picture, as they are in others, but it’s easier to accept Scrappy working in a pet store than driving a car, but here he is.
This film is chock full of gags, including a fairly long scene with Scrappy and Oopy’s Pluto-esque dog battling birds, surprisingly speaking at the end of the sequence. This scene is followed by what I think of as a perfect moment in any cartoon: Scrappy and Oopy, at night, enjoying themselves beyond their own understanding while cooking hot dogs, listening to the radio and playing the banjo. Even the hot dogs are happy to be cooking. Oopy loses their dinner to some lucky Owls, but instead of being angry, he roasts their feathers off with some clever fire maneuvers. This sequence is followed by a musical sequence of everyone dancing during the daytime somehow. As the cartoon starts to approach the 600 foot mark, their poor dog is terrorized by a well- prepared mosquito (a familiar scenario even in modern times here). The pest is dispatched by Oopy with his cork gun, and everyone celebrates more than anyone ever has over a mosquito’s grave.
For my money, this is a nearly perfect Scrappy cartoon. It’s not a masterpiece, but isn’t trying to be. It’s just an enjoyable little short with odd gags and really fun animation. I can’t help but smile while watching it, and I hope it brings a smile to you too. Have a greta 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.
Scrappy needs to have a vet look at that lump on top of his dog’s head. Maybe it’s just a lipoma, but you never know.
Lovely cartoon with the Not-Yippy dog that appears in some Scrappys. Not that funny in my opinion, but the music easily makes it worth watching, and prevents the feeling of the cartoon dragging. Super excited for Fables V1!
That Scrappy cartoon was fantastic! Hilariously happy. I love it.
I’m a big fan of that period when everything had to be done to the beat, so that helps.
It’s interesting how subjective humor can be. I can see how someone would find it not that funny as there weren’t so many jokes, I suppose, but the whole thing had a sly self-awareness that I found irresistible. But I’m also a sucker for dialogue-free cartoons. For my taste, they are eminently more rewatchable than shorts that rely on verbal humor. Verbal jokes are funny to me a few times, while nonverbal humor never gets old. (I do however love funny sound effects. The timing is crucial.)
Another cartoon had a sack take form on the screen of Scrappy’s experimental television. Opie shouts “What’s in the bag?” and the word “NUTS” appeared. Enter squirrel to haul away sack. Don’t know if that was a familiar bit, or just a means of getting away with the word NUTS.
The squirrel and his nut sack also appeared in the Scrappy cartoon “The Happy Butterfly” (1934).