To me, Columbia cartoons are the gift that keeps on giving, because by the time I get back to watching one of the ones I saw a while back it’s almost a new cartoon again!
But First: This week in Thunderbean!
Things are somewhat on track in the dubbing lane here. We’re working on prepping the current special sets, and are excited to get them out the door. Mid Century Modern 3 is finally going out to replication, and the pieces are coming together very nicely on Rainbow Parades, volume 2. So, basically, very little new news I can share in a few weeks of a lot of things happening – more on all that soon, I promise!
Now, onto our cartoon:
I hadn’t seen Scrappy’s Boy Scouts in a while. This particular print is one of two I own: this one is a nice sharp Official Films original. The other is a print with the original Columbia titles and end titles, but suffering from Vinegar Syndrome. I’m hoping to scan those opening and closing titles soon before it’s too late, but haven’t just yet.
Columbia’s talent pool of animators show off some very nice work in this somewhat extravagant short (for a Scrappy). Scrappy is the head of his scout troop, with poor not-quite up to the task of being a Boy Scout. Oopy goofs off with his dachshund dog friends (I sort of wish they were in more cartoons – the dynamic is pretty cute as an idea I think). In the end, Oopy and his 3 dog ensemble save the day during an especially tough storm that makes the world seem like a pretty unpredictable place, and Oopy does the Boy Scout pledge.
I think it’s a really nice little film in support of the scouts. The animation and posing is fun, and the action scenes are dynamic and well staged near the end of the picture. I especially like the moving skies in many of the shots and effects. It’s not in anyone’s top 10 cartoons, but it’s a pretty good effort in many ways. As in other cartoon from Columbia around this time, you can see they’re spending extra money to make them a little more extravagant.
In the 16mm print with original titles, the first shot has the characters in silhouette over a moving background while the title is on screen. At the end the film the Columbia logo frames the last shot of the ‘real’ scouts around a fire. I’ll be working on finally getting it scanned.
Have a good week all, and happy September!
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.
So if a storm comes up while you’re camping, you should launch a dachshund at a target, and if it hits the bull’s eye, the sun will come out? Funny, I don’t remember reading anything about that in my Boy Scout Handbook. It didn’t teach us how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, either.
That’s the Boy Scout Oath (not “pledge”) Oopy recites at the end of the cartoon. The Oath refers to the Scout Law, a string of twelve adjectives (“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent”) that Boy Scouts are expected to live up to but seldom do. My own memories of Scouting mainly involve playing scatterball, listening to dirty jokes, and getting yelled at by everyone else’s dad.
The boys in Scrappy’s troop all wear flat-brimmed campaign hats, the official headgear originally sanctioned by Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell. By the time I was in Scouts, this had been replaced by military-style rectangular garrison caps, later to be replaced, in turn, by red berets. Everybody hated the berets. We used to fling them around like frisbees. That’s all they were good for.
Unlike Scrappy’s troop, mine never went camping without adult supervision, and at least one of the dads would have checked the weather forecast beforehand. I don’t recall any rainy campouts, though I do remember quite a few really cold ones. Why not go camping in Michigan in the middle of winter? It’ll make a man out of you, kiddo! Now grab a shovel and go dig a latrine in that frozen ground!
I hated Boy Scouts.
Of course, the quintessential Boy Scout cartoon is “Cave Scout Jamboree”, in which the Flintstones’ and Rubbles’ camping trip in secluded Shangri-La-Dee-Dah Valley turns out to be the site of an international Scout jamboree. But they stick around and make the best of it, ultimately leading the assembled Scouts in a multilingual rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”. Bill Hanna, a dedicated Scoutmaster for many years, was especially proud of that episode. I wonder if he enjoyed yelling at other people’s kids. Maybe he pretended they were animators.
“…the use of this film is absolutely prohibited in Great Britain for any purpose whatsoever….” Lord Baden-Powell would have been miffed about that.
I think one issue with using “the Boy Scouts” in a cartoon or movie or TV show is that “Boy Scouts of America” is a privately-owned organization, which has no doubt trademarked or copyrighted its name, images, etc. That’s why so many movies, cartoons and TV shows invent thinly-disguised versions of the Boy Scouts if they don’t want to apply for permission (for which they may have to pay to avoid infringement), or if they intend to do something parodistic or potentially derogatory about the Scouts.
Interesting… that seems to be one of the worst sounding cartoon soundtracks I’ve ever heard! It sounds like a record that’s been played 1000 times. And I doubt if Dolby noise reduction could help much. I’m thinking only an AI sound program could salvage this one. (Not that I know anything about AI, or if there is currently an AI system that could help with this. But surely someone’s working on one?)
Can’t wait for the big news you keep hinting at Steve!!!!
At least some of the scanners Steve uses these days read all soundtracks as stereo, which, played as-is, heightens the noise floor and generally creates weird-sounding results compared to a proper mono transfer. As is the case here, Steve doesn’t always down-mix them to mono before sharing them.
That other VS print might have a better soundtrack. But, wow, this is maybe the best-looking Official Films print I’ve seen in 45 years of film collecting!
Thanks, Steve. Some frame-grabs of this short’s original titles have been online [link] for many years. My understanding is that they were sourced from some old DVD compilation of Scrappy cartoons, but I’m not exactly sure where said DVD was obtainable let alone if it even still is at this point. I’ve been wanting to see this in motion for a long time, so it’s great to hear you have a print and plan to scan it.
Credit where credit is due belongs to Art Davis for the direction and likely, in part if not in full, the writing, this being after Marcus and Davis began directing films separately (but evidently still sharing the same unit of animators). Study this stuff and the stylistic relationship with other Davis films such as Let’s Ring Doorbells, and difference from Marcus films like The Bird Stuffer (to cite examples from the same period), becomes evident. Although it isn’t easy to get right sometimes thanks to the Mintz studio’s intentionally cryptic credits, I favor talking about these films more in terms of being the work of their directors and artists, and less as being products of a studio/”Columbia”. Charles Mintz was roughly as involved in these productions as Leon Schlesinger was in his, which is to say, not very much, and it’s that level of creative freedom he afforded his directors that makes his studio’s output so interesting to me even as uneven as it is in quality.
By all means get that other print scanned ASAP! In addition to having the original opening and closing titles, perhaps it could be used to fix the couple of bad splices and improve the soundtrack for a possible “semi-official” Scappy release!
Once again, memories of Captain Satellite on KTVU-2 Oakland, running pre-UPA Columbias. I vaguely recall this one, mainly for the final shot of the scouts around the campfire. Even on an ancient set with fuzzy reception, it registered as different than the rest of the cartoon and was therefore Significant in ways unexplained. I took it to mean this cartoon was somehow an official Scouting thing.
The great thing about Columbia cartoons is that they were out of circulation for years; TV stations rarely played them, possibly because there were no enduring characters (it would have been nice if Fox and Crow had appeared in “Roger Rabbit,” but by then they’d been completely forgotten, and Scrappy had been scrapped). So to come across them so long after one’s childhood animation indoctrination is a special treat, a sort of Where have you been all my life? Making new friends and new discoveries is what makes aging bearable.
A young Emery Hawkins does some brilliant animation towards the beginning of Oopy trying (and failing) to lead a troop of Dogs.