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.
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