Every studio experimented with different formats in making cartoons. 1939 is a really interesting year in animation history. Gulliver’s Travels became a huge hit at the end of the year, Pinocchio was finished at the end of the year, with Fantasia also being nearly done.
Warners continued to refine their own brand of comedy while MGM struggled between comedy shorts (The Milt Gross, plus the Captain and the Kids shorts) and, later in the year, Harman/Ising’s Disney-esque films. The Fleischers remained strong in the Popeye cartoons and meandered between solid and wobbley films with the later Betty Boops and the Color Classics. Back on the east coast, Paul Terry’s Studio, comprised of seasoned New York animators, had a pretty fascinating year in terms of types of films. Some shorts were the standard animal outings with fair to spectacular production qualities (Their Last Bean, the Ice Pond, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Nutty Network, The Three Bears, The Orphan Duck). Their overall look and story elements fall between a cloying Disney-esque approach, Fleischer’s Color Classics and WB’s Merrie Melodies. A whole series of one-shot black and white shorts feature human characters (Nick of Time, Frozen Feet, The Golden West, The Prize Guest). Gandy Goose and Sourpuss get their own shorts that land somewhere between a Warners and a little more Disney-esque in approach. I find all pretty interesting, and have found I’ve rarely gone back to watch the one shots. So, when Tommy Stathes lent me this short a few weeks back, I was pleasantly surprised – so here it is!
The Prize Guest (1939) plays like a one or two-reel comedy short more than a cartoon in many ways. Directed by Mannie Davis and written by John Foster, the short features a hotel detective tasked with following a mysterious, magical guest who can defy gravity as well as make his dog disappear at will.
It’s a beautifully layed-out picture featuring some beautiful shots of New York Skyscrapers. Terrytoons don’t often get noted for their backgrounds, but they really should since there’s so much beautiful layout and painting work in these shorts.
Now, it’s not a ‘top’ cartoon by any means, but a very enjoyable little outing nonetheless.
The short repeats a gag from Foster’s earlier Van Beuren cartoon Trouble featuring ‘Tom and Jerry’. The print here has a splice at that gag, so here is another print of the same cartoon to watch that scene
Here is the print we’re posting, featuring the original titles. Thanks again to Tommy for the lend – and 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.
John Foster certainly kept at least a memory catalog of his old ideas from Van Beuren when he returned to Paul Terry’s services. It becomes obvious as this film progresses to its conclusion that he is reworking ideas from Tom and Jerry’s “Trouble”, and that Mr. ? is in really none other that Joe Spoof, whose slow-motion landing from a dirigible disaster spoofed lawyers Tom and Jerry but good, without a word of explanation as to how he accomplished it. Oh, well, I guess a good magician never reveals his secrets.
Ever since the silent film era, John Foster had often tended to reuse ideas and gags he had already used in other cartoons; this was undoubtedly one of his biggest flaws.
It’s a great pleasure to see “The Prize Guest” with its original titles, not to mention the opening minute of footage that was cut from TV prints. I love the shoe shine boy’s line: “Nothing ever happens in the Grand Hotel!” — one of many memorable quotes from the eponymous 1932 film in which Greta Garbo famously declared that she wanted to be alone.
Thanks, also, for providing a link to an alternative print of the cartoon. The splice in the denouement creates the unfortunate impression that the crowd is attacking Question Mark for no apparent reason.
The Grand Hotel’s desk clerk bears some resemblance to Paul Terry. Since he ultimately fires the house detective Mr. Canfield, it would appear that he’s the boss of that establishment as well.
Terry was making cartoons with expertly drafted New York city backgrounds, and high-rise hotels in dizzying perspective, way back in the silent era with entries like “Subway Sally” (1927), which can be seen on Cartoon Logic’s indispensable collection of Aesop’s Fables, Vol. 1.
The line early on “Nothing ever happens in the Grand Hotel” is a direct reference to the famed 1932 MGM feature “Grand Hotel,” the line being delivered (a few times) by Lewis Stone’s character Doctor Otternschlag.
What a surprisingly good, nonsensical Terry short!
No other animated characters move or pose like a Mannie Davis animated character.
The exceptional quality of this cartoon proves that Mannie Davis was an accomplished artist and that he was at least as talented as his brother Art Davis, if not more so. It is clear that he could have achieved great things in the field of animation had he not been managed by mediocre people like Paul Terry.
The only period when he was free to do as he pleased was under the direction of John Foster and later Gene Rodemich (the music director at Van Beuren Studios) in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, this period of freedom and experimentation came to an end when Hiram Brown Jr. was appointed commercial director of the studio; he was a completely incompetent fool and owed his appointment solely to the fact that his father was the principal shareholder of RKO.
Hiram Brown made a series of decisions that literally destroyed the Van Beuren studio; his most disastrous decision was to fire all of the studio’s directors so he could appoint George Stallings as head of the studio. Stallings was a good animator, but he lacked Mannie Davis’s directing talent, and the Cubby Bear and Little King cartoons he directed were all extremely poor, despite the improved quality of the animation.
Here is an excellent article on the life of Mannie Davis: https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2024/11/mannie-davis.html
The name “Terrytoons” was pretty enchanting to me as a child. I loved the Mighty Mouse Playhouse and Heckle & Jeckle, which were very popular in the early 60’s.
As others have mentioned, the “Prize Guest” definitely has a similar vibe to “Grand Hotel” and also its 40’s follow-up “Weekend at the Waldorf.” If I were designing this cartoon I might make the Question Mark Man a little more mysterious and the house detective a little more sympathetic. But overall it’s a delightful cartoon.
It’s a rare day when I can say that I’m entertained and even impressed by a Terrytoon, but this one did both. I tend to identify their output with those musical Mighty Mouse cartoons with the godawful operetta-style scores— music that’s so corny that it probably sounded outdated even in the early 1900’s ragtime era when it was briefly popular (for whatever reason). But it apparently reflected Paul Terry’s musical taste, such as that was.
This short is a very different animal, and it’s too bad that the Terrytoons didn’t continue in this vein. Pure surrealism and absurdism rule here, for example, the little dog that can appear and disappear at will— exactly like Eugene the Jeep in Popeye, who came a long a few years later. So many great visual gags here make no sense because they don’t HAVE to, those things that can only be done in animation! The character designs are excellent, too. Not to mention that some of the backgrounds employ three-point perspective, which is very hard to pull off successfully unless you’re an exceptionally talented draftsman.
The only similar Terry short that I can think of is Heckle & Jeckle in “The Power Of Thought,” produced long after this one, in color. I wonder if any of the same people worked on it? Maybe so, since many of Terry’s staff members seem to have stayed on there for most of their careers, despite the low pay. As Terry himself said, “Walt Disney is the Tiffany’s of the cartoon business, and I’m the Woolworth’s.” He paid his people accordingly.
Mr. Stanchfield, you came up with a prize rarity here, and believe me— any cartoon that can improve my opinion of Terrytoons IS a rarity!
The Fleischers had already introduced Eugene in ‘The Jeep’ the previous year. I notice this short has the same gag where Mr. ? does the ‘ding! ding!’ pantomime before levitating up through the building as the detective chases him up the stairs just as Popeye did in the Fleischer short.
Your’re right about Eugene. He appeared for the first time about a year before this cartoon was released, and I thought that it was the other way around. I really need to do my research BEFORE I post a comment, and not afterwards! So the dog’s “disappearing act” in this one was borrowed by Terrytoons, “Borrowed” is of course the polite and diplomatic word here…
Long before creating this cartoon, John Foster and Mannie Davis had already produced a number of cartoons with a gloomy and surreal atmosphere while working for Van Beuren in the early 1930s, including the films “The Haunted Ship,” “Gypped In Egypt,” and “Stone Age Stunts”—all three released in 1930—are fine examples of what the Van Beuren team was capable of when freed from the constraints imposed by Paul Terry.
Honestly this one was just alright. Not really the best Terrytoon though….