The thing I enjoy most about the early sound Terrytoons is the next unexpected amusement aspect of them. By the late 30s and into the 40s, a huge aspect of that quality wasn’t present in Terrytoons, and those are the films I think we’re all more familiar with since there’s a lot of Castle films prints of later titles. So, if you don’t go into an early sound Terrytoon with an expectation of what it will or won’t be, you’re in much better shape to be delighted by some aspect of the film.
I like almost everything about Club Sandwich. The cartoon seems to be set in France – but why, I have no idea. The opening starts with a song (in English) sung in a low voice by a mouse doing much more dancing than the soundtrack, revealing we’re in a mouse nightclub in Farmer Alfalfa’s wall. The farmer’s cat, who sleeps next to him, decides to break up the party, with pretty good results, save one muse who stands up to him. The cat knocks him out, leading to a tirade by his very vocal french girlfriend mouse. He socks her repeatedly, leading the boy mouse to report to the mouse French scout that “He hit a women he did!”. This leads to an all out mouse-war on Farmer Alfalfa and his cat. While I don’t think they exactly deserve the devastation rained upon them, it’s a pretty entertaining beating.
Our own Devon Baxter posted some breakdown sheets from this cartoon some years back. It’s fun to see who animated what on this little short.
While this isn’t a top cartoon in music, story or animation, it’s a pretty enjoyable little outing, especially if you like 30s cartoons with extravagant fights at the end. If I was asking anyone to reevaluate the early 30s cartoons from this studio, I’d maybe start with this one, and continue on to several others from 32 and 33. What ones would you pick?
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.
By the time of the Mighty Mouse cartoons, the Terrytoon mice and even the cats had a distinctive Terry look to them. In this cartoon, the characters seem somewhat derivative of Disney. The male and female mice bear more than a passing resemblance to Mickey and Minnie, and the cat looks quite a bit like Pete. One difference from most of the Mickey Mouse cartoons is that in this short, the mice are generally shown as mouse size–which if I recall only occurred in one or two of the early Mickeys. Farmer Al Falfa doesn’t get to to much in this cartoon except react. Thanks for sharing! As you indicated, this cartoon is very watchable.
Because his cat hit a woman, Farmer Al Falfa is ultimately dragged off by a skeleton mule, presumably into Hell, like a scene from a Bruegel painting. There’s a lesson in that for cat owners everywhere. I’m thinking of my neighbour across the street, whose cat treats my front lawn as its own personal litter box. Where’s a skeleton mule when you really need one?
If I were to ask anyone to reevaluate the early sound Terrytoons — or, to phrase it differently, if I were to recommend some of these cartoons to someone who had hitherto found little value in them — I would start with “Farmer Al Falfa’s Ape Girl”. Pre-Code cartoons don’t get any pre-Codier than that. I’d also recommend some that showcase the wonderfully grotesque animation of Bill Tytla, namely “Bluebeard’s Brother”, “The Mad King”, and “A Mad House”. Then there’s the whole Fanny Zilch melodrama series. Of the early cartoons with culinary titles, “Hawaiian Pineapple”, “Popcorn” and “Razzberries” are standouts.
A big impediment to the reevaluation of early Terrytoons is that many of them are unavailable online, or are only available in grossly truncated television prints. As long as this situation persists, the most enjoyable Terrytoons will simply be those that can be viewed in complete, high quality prints.
I have to say, that was an odd Terrytoon. As for early 1930’s Terrytoons t recommend, I say “Razzberries” with the delivery monkey that keeps scaring animals by razzing them with his little horn.
These days, it’s getting hard to find the television print of this film, which was retitled “Dancing Mice” (which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6wQdEWjWxY&t=50s Any need for the retitling seemed inexplicable, as all the early Terry episodes went through a “food” period where a different edible provided the title, even if the punny connection to actual subject matter of the film was oblique, and it seems that CBS couldn’t figure the connection between “Club” sandwiches and a night “club”. At least they might have tried the title “The Night Club” instead of something so generic as the new title chosen.
The TV print is worth seeing for several reasons. First, to provide missing footage to fill the many splices in the nitrate British print. It sure helps to hear the entirety of the “Good Evenin'” performance instead of having half of it missing (although the TV sound is nowhere near as crisp, lacking particularly in bass tones). It is next interesting to compare frame ratio. The TV print is cropped to Academy ratio, while the British print is in the appropriate for its time Fox Movietone frame. This leaves a LOT of visual missing on all sides as it turned out (quite notable on the singing sequence for cutting off top and bottom of the iris circle in which the mouse sings). I once combined the prints on a video editor, placing TV print within British print, to emphasize how much was missing. This makes us realize how much we obviously have NOT seen of early Terrytoons from the library of CBS prints, and is justification enough for someday breaking out the negatives from UCLA’s holdings to remaster these films at original size.
But there’s more. The TV copy is interesting for a typical example of CBS censorship. The network, frequently but inconsistently having an adversity to screening early skeleton gags (for example, apparently removing titles from the library like “Golf Nuts” and “Popcorn” for such reasons), excises the rather cruel gag of blasting the mule with a cannon into a skeleton, cutting out footage of the aftermath of the blast. (The gag wouldn’t have seemed so inhumane by early cartoon standards, except that the mule was already cheerful and helpful to the mice before being fired upon – so why blast a willing ally?) Yet, for once, the editors didn’t quite butcher the ending into oblivion, in that they only shortened rather than removed the final shot of Farmer Al being dragged away to horizon – even though the skeletal mule could still be seen for a brief instant if you carefully study the frames.
Then, perhaps the biggest reason of all to check out the TV print – and the biggest mystery. Two shots of the TV version do NOT MATCH the British nitrate. At about 1:05, a shot of a mouse couple riding up to the night club entrance in a shoe limousine appears. However, the British print depicts the scene against an exterior background of the countryside, suggesting that the entrance to the club is in Farmer Al’s exterior wall. But the TV print shows the limousine driving through Farmer Al’s living room! One might at first suppose that CBS re-animate the shot to cover over some nitrate deterioration in the negative, and made some kind of continuity blinder – but this can’t be the explanation. CBS in fact reanimated several scenes of other films to compile the syndicated leaders for the Farmer Al Falfa show – and they easily look redrawn, with thicker outlines and simplified backgrounds. The alternate version of this shot, however, looks as smooth and fine-lined as the British version, and appears to reuse the background seen in the goldfish-bowl dive sequence earlier – so appears to be from the same vintage as the British version. A second shot-variant appears in the TV print at approximately 3:43, where Farmer Al swats at mice appearing from various holes. In the British copy, Al’s movements closely synchronize with the timing of the appearance of the heads of various mice. However, the TV print shows Al’s same movements having no synchronous reaction to any mouse in particular, as the mice are continuously in movement in repeating running cycles from hole to hole. The British version again seems the superior shot, with more natural action, while the TV version harkens back to the old techniques of constant continuous motion found in the early Aesop’s Fables. So what happened here? Perhaps when the TV version was mastered, the original negative could not be found or was deemed to be in inferior condition, and a workprint was selected to provide the TV edition. This would surprisingly suggest that tight-fisted Terry actually took the time and expense in the early days of the company to authorize a few reshoots of scenes to improve quality and/or continuity! Unthinkable, yet possibly true!
A final note. The British print – the only one with an end-card – displays a title setup matching the earliest titles in the Terrytoon library – before the association between Terrytoons and Educational Pictures. Its production order, however, suggests that it was released right on the cusp of signing with Educational. So, was the original released with Educational logos? If so, this might suggest that, at least for a time, Terry continued to use the pre-Educational title setup for end cards on release of prints to overseas markets, where Educational itself did not serve as distributor. Thus, the end card seen on the British print may not be authentic to the American issue – and only have appeared in the British market.
The issue of changing titles becomes more convoluted when other languages are involved. In English, the title “Hot Turkey” makes sense for a cartoon set in the Middle East, but the pun just doesn’t translate. The French distributor of the early Terrytoons decided that the unnamed mouse star was named “Placide” and retitled the films accordingly; thus “Hot Turkey” becomes “Placide au sérail”, or “Placide in the harem”. However, whoever wrote the German subtitles for these films obviously took “Placide” literally to mean the adjective “placid”, so the German title of this cartoon is “Ruhe im Serail”, or “Quiet in the harem”. I haven’t seen a subtitled French print of “Club Sandwich”, but I strongly suspect that its title would come out as “Placide at the cabaret” in French, and therefore “Quiet at the cabaret” in German — quite ironic for a cartoon about a noisy cabaret that keeps Farmer Al from falling asleep.
The differences may be due to the need to produce a negative to ship out to a foreign market. I’m not certain when dupe negative stock became available, but I’m fairly certain that it was not at this early date. There are numerous examples of silent and early sound productions in which the takes which appear in European prints are notably different to those in domestic US.
Nice use of Auber’s “Fra Diavolo” overture in the final scene.
I don’t remember Terrytoons this old on TV. The very few I’ve seen can be amusing. As an adult I don’t watch Mighty Mouse, or Heckle and Jeckle. What I find, by just putzing aorund on the internet was Gandy Goose and Sourpuss. I was astonished how good they were animation and character wise. They were once very popular, but now seem forgotten. I don’t remember any Gandy cartoons being part of the Saturday morning Terrytoon packages on national TV, or even locally. I do remember being jealous of my cousins who had a toy drive-in setup that showed Farmer Alfalfa cartoons.
You know, I am actually starting to like these janky and sloppily-animated Van Beuren/Terrytoon shorts, the more posts of them I see!
Mass quantities of early 1930’s Terrytoons:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWSS9jAokHa4j8rpancsu3yr7Sykdx93K