It’s a short one today as I’m working on some big things here — and I’m looking forward to talking about that soon! I really owe this space a much longer article sometime soon… and will before too long. But, it seems like a good week to talk a little about one of my favorite Cubby Bear cartoons – The Nut Factory!
I was really enjoying watching some Van Beuren Cubby Bear cartoons tonight; it’s such an interesting period in the studio’s history. Layout and story work is improving rapidly on the Cubbys, and there’s a really great contrast between the work of various animators and sequences. The story work, the gags, the funny designs and animation are all so much fun. While I don’t think the Cubbys rise to some of the best of the 30s cartoons, they’re still some of my favorites.
It had been a little while since I looked at any of them, but earlier today, as I was copying over a lot of the masters from the Blu-ray, I watched The Nut Factory, and found I was laughing and enjoying so many of the scenes.
In this short, dentures are vanishing at an alarming rate from the “Old Ladies Home”. Cubby, who is Sherlock Holmes, is called over to help solve the problem. Cubby ends up walking out the back of the home into a haunted house, meeting ghosts and skeletons, as you do when in a haunted house in a 30’s cartoon. With a little cleverness, Cubby discovers the real culprits- and returns the hundreds of dentures. In the process, he wears several disguises for no reason at all, and since he’s Sherlock Holmes, at one point after an encounter with ghosts, he says “Quick! The Needle, Watson!” a reference to Holmes’ Cocaine addiction in the novels.
The Cubby cartoons are almost all as free-wheeling as this one is, with humorous moments throughout, and a pretty stark contrast in qualities of animation. The best animation in the film is bouncy and well-drawn, and really stands out from many of the less well executed work. While the production values never reach the slickness of the Fleischer product, there is sometime sweet about a scrappy cartoon studio producing such an odd combination of ideas as in this film.
This is from the now out of print Thunderbean Blu-ray of Cubby Bear cartoons. We hope to have it back in print soon!
Have a good week everyone!
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.
“Quick, Watson, the needle!” is a line associated with Sherlock Holmes, but like “Elementary, my dear Watson,” it never actually appears in any of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. The line originated in the 1906 Victor Herbert operetta “The Red Mill”, about a couple of con men who impersonate Holmes and Watson. It became a popular caption for cartoons in magazines like Judge and may have inspired the advertising slogan “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” — referenced here when Cubby’s sidekick revives him, not with a cocaine injection, but with bug spray.
There are quite a few glaring layout and inking errors in “The Nut Factory”, which is not surprising given the detail and complexity of the animation. Be that as it may, “The Nut Factory” would have to rank #1 on anyone’s list of cartoons about denture-stealing squirrels. Or did Screwy ever swipe Meathead’s false teeth? I wouldn’t put it past him.
If it wasn’t for you and your terrific work with your staff, I would never have known about the cubby bear cartoons. They are wonderful indeed. I especially like when Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising visit to almost create a Cubby bear cartoon that would be in line with the MGM happy harmonies they would create a few years later. From the information you give in this very short post, I doubt that is one of these cartoons that you mention here, but OK, you know I always have to give Hugh and Rudy and honorable mention somewhere. Sooner or later, someone will get to those happy harmonies, and we will have a beautiful collection of those. Anyway, I look forward to next week or whenever you spill the beans on projects completed and ready to be sent. I especially look forward to those “special” discs.
The Nut Factory has a unique and bizarre premise, which puts it toward the top of the Van Beuren list.
The frame grab above reminds me of Carlo Vinci. I don’t suppose anyone will try to sort of the animators of these cartoons.
It’s a real shame, because I would have really appreciated it if someone had come up with an animator breakdown for the Cubby Bear series.
I list VB as bottom of the barrel in the scheme of things but I really like the Cubby Bears, at least for charm alone.
In fact, VB doesn’t deserve to be ranked at the bottom of the list of studios, because it was a major studio on the New York scene, along with Fleischer and Terry Studios.
One of Manny Davis’s last cartoons at VB, Davis was later fired along with his co-workers Harry Bailey and George Rufle for union activities. Van Beuren’s dismissal of these key animators led to a complete reorganization of the studio, resulting in the discontinuation of the Tom and Jerry and Aesop’s Fables series, while the Cubby Bear series was taken over by Steve Muffati.
Your restorations are a 9 out of 10, even if they were source from prints with lots of splices
I’m a fan of the blend of the primitive, the strange and the WHAT??? in the Cubbies and the VB Tom & Jerry series. Since such films as BABY FACE, THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE, Wheeler & Woolsey in SO THIS IS AFRICA and CONVENTION CITY would disappear after strict enforcement of the Production Code, beginning in July 1934, it is no surprise that the more bizarre and outrageous wings of the 1929-1933 cartoon universe (Fleischer’s, Van Beuren, Mintz, especially with Dick Huemer on staff, and, early in talkies, Lantz) would promptly vanish along with them.