As the story goes, Warner Directors Chuck Jones and Writer Michael Maltese were meeting to discuss storylines when Executive Producer Eddie Selzer, a dour and humorless man by all accounts, intruded. “I don’t want any gags about bullfighting, bullfights aren’t funny!” he thundered. Having issued this decree, Selzer walked off. Jones and Maltese grinned at each other and set to work on the 1953 cartoon Bully for Bugs, featuring Warner’s biggest star as a bullfighter.
Did Selzer care that bullfighting has a long history in classic animated cartoons, and every studio of note produced at least one film in the genre? Notable bullfighters included Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, Goofy, Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Gandy Goose, Droopy, Heckle and Jeckle, Casper, Mutt and Jeff, Tom and Jerry, Oswald the Rabbit, Flip the Frog, Happy Hooligan, and the Pink Panther. Pardon me, Mr. Selzer, but nearly major cartoon star would beg to differ! This two-part study will cover all the films Eddie Selzer would have refused to make.
Let’s begin way back in 1918 with Throwing the Bull, a movie released by Hearst/Vitagraph and directed by Gregory La Cava. The star was Happy Hooligan, created by Frederick Opper. This cartoon may no longer exist, but it may have been the first bullfighting cartoon ever released.
Four years later, in 1922, two other silent stars, Mutt and Jeff, attempt to win a $10,000 prize by defeating a “mad bull.” Jeff manages to do so, but we never see how!
Bull-ero was directed by Frank Moser as a Paul Terry-Toon. This is the first cartoon featuring a gag where medics catch matadors thrown out of the arena on a stretcher. (I will note gags familiar to all bullfighting cartoons as we continue).
1928 saw Oswald the Lucky Rabbit star in the sixth Walter Lantz cartoon, Bull-Oney, after he was appropriated from Disney. This cartoon is lost, but we do know that Walter Lantz and Tom Palmer directed. We also know that it involved a bullfight featuring Oswald.
Disney entered the ring in 1929 with El Terrible Toreador, directed by Walt Disney (who also provided voice work). This early Silly Symphony featured a saucy waitress who caught a tip flipped into her bodice, and oh, yes, a bullfight! The bull, looking much like Clarabelle Cow, gets into a boxing match and then a game of pat-a-cake with the matador. They both do a twee dance together before things get serious, and the matador, in a somewhat discomfiting scene, pulls the bull inside out, ending the fight.
1933 spelled the end of the road for Ub Iwerk’s Flip the Frog, but Flip did manage to star in a bullfight cartoon in his final year. Bulloney was directed by Iwerks for Celebrity Pictures. Matador San Pedro Caramba believes himself to be the best at everything, including romance. Flip wishes he could be the same. When a cute senorita (animated by Shamus Culhane) prefers Flip to San Pedro, he is persuaded by buddies to kidnap Flip and toss him in the bull ring. Bull clobbers matador, and Flip is next up. He ties fircrackers to the bull’s tail to enrage it, and the fight is on. Flip fires the bull from a cannon (!), causing the bull to utter “Damn!” The bull releases an entire herd (we’ll see this in other toons) but Flip runs them into a livestock train. Behind the train is a group of docile cows, btu Flip flees them in terror.
On to 1935 and another Terrytoon directed by Frank Moser, The Bull Fight, starring Puddy the Pup. Puddy serenades a cute señorita on a balcony before they depart for a bullfight, where a bull is seen training for the fight. This is the first cartoon featuring the gag where the bull uses a grindstone to sharpen his horns. He also wears pants and a belt throughout the picture! Also, a first gag: The bull gathers speed with train sound effects. And another: The bull has a cheering section. Puddy ends up in the ring, and the angry matador releases a herd of bulls. Puddy, swinging the bull by the tail like a bat, hits all of them out of the arena. (Spoiler for Part 2: This scene would be repainted and reused for the 1946 Mighty Mouse bullfighting cartoon Throwing the Bull).
1937 brings the first Warner Bros cartoon to the ring. Picador Porky, directed by Tex Avery, brings Porky Pig to the role of toreador. Sort of. This cartoon represents Mel Blanc’s earliest work for WB (though not as “Porky”). Porky (the obese version) and two scruffy buddies roll into a riotous Mexican town on the day of a big bullfight that awards a 1000-peso prize to the winner. Porky and pals disguise themselves as a toreador and a bull, intending to fake a fight. When the real bull is released, funny Avery gags, including the bull chasing Porky around the frame of the film, enliven things. Porky’s pals re-emerge to clobber the bull, but in the end, it’s the bull who gets the prize!
I’ll be back with Part Two of this series tomorrow. Hold off trying to second guess all the bull fighting cartoons after 1937 for twenty-four hours. We’ll see Gandy Goose, Mighty Mouse, Droopy, Woody Woodpecker, and, yup, Porky Pig again as they tackle ferocious bulls and woo lovely senioritas!
Martin Goodman is a veteran writer specializing in stories about animation. He has written for AWN and Animation Scoop – and lives in Anderson, Indiana.
A very interesting topic. There have been many cartoons made about bullfighting, including some bona fide classics.
“El Terrible Toreador” was conceived as a parody of Bizet’s “Carmen”; Carl Stalling and Walt Disney thought that a comic take on a famous opera would be a good subject for a Silly Symphony. They were wrong. It’s one of the worst in the series, down in the dregs with “The Merry Dwarfs”. “Bulloney” is a better cartoon in every respect, and my favourite among today’s offerings.
I can think of a few other early cartoons that are worth mentioning here.
In “Felix the Cat as Roameo” (1927) — not to be confused with Felix the Cat in “Romeeow” (1929) — our feline hero fights a bull in order to impress a pretty Spanish pussycat. Because, why else would you do it?
Before “Bull-ero” and “The Bull Fight”, there was “Spanish Onions” (1930), Paul Terry’s third Terrytoon with sound. The mouse hero serenades his sweetheart with what may be the first cartoon song about bullfighting:
“Maquita, I love you!
I love you, Maquita!
Oh, come to the bullfight with me!”
When the star bullfighter, billed as “The Matador from Brooklyn”, chickens out and hightails it back to Flatbush, our hero steps in and saves the day. The gag where a bull sharpens his horns on a grinding wheel, later seen in “Bully for Bugs” and other cartoons, makes its debut here.
A later Silly Symphony, “The Water Babies” (1935), has a bullfighting scene: a water baby matador uses a red flower petal as a cape while battling, not a bull, but a bullfrog!
I LOVE “El Terrible Toreador” and “The Merry Dwarfs”. It’s Ub for me, see.
According to Jennifer Griffin (here: https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-life-and-death-of-looney-tunes-producers-schlesinger-and-selzer/), granddaughter of Eddie Selzer “I think it was my grandmother who told me Grandpa Ed’s statement was “A bull and a bunny aren’t funny” and that alone was hilarious to the artists. If it wasn’t grandma it may have been Chuck’s wife who mentioned it at his WB memorial service (sorry, it’s kind of a blur, grandma and Chuck passed somewhat close together and a lot of old stories were being shared around that time).”
In addition, it’s likely that Chuck Jones’ story is somewhat embellished. He claims that this incident occurred AFTER Sahara Hare even though the production code for this short is LONG before that short.
“As the story goes”. By this, I meant the anecdote may lack veracity and could be an embellishment. by Jones. I wasn’t there, so I have to depend on the existing documentation. In other words, “As the story goes”.
Well with Chuck Jones, “story” is being polite.
Just wanted to provide some facts. 🙂
More on the bullfighting theme:
“Puss in Boots” (Walt Disney, Laugh-O-Grams, 1922): A young man is in love with a princess, but her father the king doesn’t approve. The feline with the fancy footwear advises the young man to curry the king’s favour by winning a bullfighting contest.
“Alice the Toreador” (Walt Disney, Alice Comedies, 1925): This time it’s little Alice who enters a bullfighting contest (for the money, not for love). When she finds an old bull so broken down that one of its legs keeps falling off, and it has to be wheeled around on roller skates, she thinks the contest is in the bag. But then her rival, Terrible Tom from Toronto, substitutes a ferocious bull straight from a billboard advertisement for chewing tobacco. Quick-witted Julius the cat comes to the rescue.
“Tuning In” (Van Beuren, Aesop’s Sound Fables, 1929): The livestock show their appreciation for Farmer Al Falfa by giving him a new radio set. Al is so taken with the bullfighting broadcast that he decides to set up a bullring on his farm. Using a wooden switch as a sword and a pair of long Johns as a cape, he torments one of his milk cows until she flees over the horizon. But when the bull finds out what happened, he sets out to get revenge. There must be a moral in that somewhere.
To quote the film, Aesop said that “A tombstone has a good word for a man when he’s down.”
I don’t know how that relates to the cartoon, but perhaps the Fable writers were wiser than I.
There are at least two toons where the bull is the hero.
What? No Mexican Joyride? I am shocked and appalled!
https://youtu.be/cgkjES77aZc?si=zdGCQF24quJmo4Ua
I think think of a few more bull-fights for the docket…
“The Cow’s Husband” (Bimbo, 1931) isn’t a highlight. Rather lacking in comedic material, it devotes considerable time to a rotoscoped song sequence, as well as making the bull a more sympathetic player. He wins, and winds up at a kosher butcher.
“Tuning In” (Fables, 1929) has a bit more substance. Farmer Al listens in on a bullfight, clacking a pair of ducks like castanets to the music. When the broadcast finishes, he flies outside with inspiration, making-believe matador with a young cow. However, is he sore when old papa bull comes along to give him a kick in the pants!
I’m sure, with the sheer number of silent Fables, that a few others battled some steers. Hell if I can name ’em.
“Chilly Con Carmen” (Oswald, 1930) puts the rabbit in a love triangle with Kitty and a big hippo. When toreador Pete comes to town, though, they both rush off. Pete is less macho than his appearance gives off, and he’s knocked out of the ring in no time flat. So in jumps Oswald to bully the bull. Said bull is left being stabbed in the rear, while the love triangle remains unresolved, as Kitty and Oswald are carried off.
Considering the time, this may be very similar to the earlier Bull-Oney… or it could be wildly different. Who knows.
Two different silent series tackled bulls in 1925: Mutt and Jeff (Mixing In Mexico, as mentioned above) and Alice (Alice the Toreador). Alice has trouble from the outset… her $10,000 requires one to “bring your own bull”. They drag in a bum steer, hoping for easy dough, but a rival cat (“Terrible Tom”) switches him out with his own wild guy. However, Alice’s was no idle ox; when provoked, Tom is kicked well out of the stadium. Julius manages to remove the wild bull’s skin (!!!) and has Alice give the “bull” a real row. The plan almost works… but in the end, they’re left pelted with fruit.
Other odds and ends include the lost “Colonel Heeza Liar, Bull Thrower” (1924), Bob and Tom McKimson’s “The Bull-Slinger” (Monkey Bizness, 1930; may or may not have been released) and the unproduced third Romer Grey cartoon, “Binko the Toreador” (1930 or thereabouts).
Long before Art Clokey and Will Vinton, the first stop-motion animated film to use modeling clay was “Long Live the Bull!” (Plastic Art Productions, Ralph Wolfe’s Mud-Stuff, 1926). In sunny Barcelona, a man called Bologna serenades a señorita who rejects him unless he can prove himself to be as courageous as a bull. So, after taking a correspondence course in bullfighting from the Seville Institute of Arts and enlisting the help of a cooperative bull, Bologna stages a bullfight for the señorita’s benefit. The clay modeling and animation were done by Chinese-American artist Joseph Sunn of San Francisco, who made this film and two much shorter ones all in the same year. Definitely a landmark in the medium, though at fourteen and a half minutes the film is a bit of a slog to get through.
I suggested bullfighting as a potential topic on the very first Animation Trails column back seven years ago. Every cartoon studio did ’em, and its used well into the TV era.
Still more on the bullfighting theme:
“The Bull Thrower” (Mintz/RKO, 1931) was the final cartoon in the Toby the Pup series. It remains lost, but I live in hope that a print of it might turn up somewhere.
“The Birth of Jazz” (Mintz/Columbia, Krazy Kat, 1932): As Krazy and his plane full of musical instruments are spreading the blessings of jazz across the globe, they pass over a bullring. The bull and the matador pause in their battle and begin to dance.
“A Spanish Twist” (Van Beuren/RKO, Tom and Jerry, 1932): Tom and Jerry are enjoying the entertainment in a Spanish nightclub, but when a couple of bull bouncers try to eject them, the boys handily defeat the brutes. The club owner declares that their talents should be put to better use in the bullring, and in short order they enter the arena in their fancy matador costumes to the cheers of the crowd. But soon they discover to their horror that they have to fight, not just one bull, but hundreds of them!
Surprised you included a Colorized B&W Cartoon.
Yes, it seems the cartoonists of the Golden Age liked bullfights, otherwise I don’t understand why there were so many of them. But anyway, it’s interesting to see how different studios and directors handle the same plot but in different ways.