ReFrederator Blog

Man! And they wonder why I love 1930’s cartoons!

We pull down the curtain on our On with the Show Week with a 1933 RKO/Van Beuren opus that actually commemorated the real life opening of the Radio City Music Hall. The theater in the cartoon is called the Roxy, a tribute to one of the Music Hall’s founding fathers, S.L.”Roxy” Rothafel (who, all you trivia-hounds, is, I THINK, caricatured as the fat cat in the control booth!)

Anyhoo, the short in question is an unholy mess, busy beyond words, sloppily animated, not so much “written” as dreamt up and, for my money, absolutely wonderful! It’s so full of stuff! We get grand opera, Santa Claus, a cast of thousands, bosom jokes, at least two on-screen decapitations and the whole affair ends with a giant, leering close-up of our star, the ever-bland-and-just-a-little-creepy Cubby Bear! (Cubby looks a lot like Mickey Mouse after ear reduction surgery [Read more…]

Lest we forget, funny paper hero Popeye was first introduced to movie audiences in a Betty Boop cartoon. Two things happened next: the really ugly, bulgy limbed sailor became, against all odds, an animated idol, and Betty’s job description was immediately expanded. Ms. Boop was now occasionally called on to chaperone other comic strip types in their bids for film stardom. So-o-o-o-o, today we get “Betty Boop and the Little King.”

Funny thing though. The Little King had already had his own cartoon series over at RKO/Van Beuren studios a couple of years earlier than this 1936 film. The RKO boys had bent over backwards trying to imitate New Yorker cartoonist Otto Soglow’s French curve drawing style (successfully) and wispy humor (a little shaky there.) But now the tiny monarch was on the Paramount ranch, and Max Fleischer was having none of that minimalist crappola — L.K. is plopped into a three dimensional world and [Read more…]

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Bugs Bunny certainly is an equal opportunity wisenheimer. His most famous adversaries may be sawed off runts (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian and various other Napoleonic nudniks) but he takes on the big guys as well. The bulky magician in “The Case of the Missing Hare” towers over the resourceful rabbit, but he simply proves to be a bigger target for public humiliation.

This is a vintage Chuck Jones cartoon, which means (A) our peace loving hero is decisively and explicitly provoked — the offending schnook gets exactly one lick in before all of-course-you-know-this-means-war heck breaks loose. And (B) there are lots of carefully calibrated camera angles and crazy, stylized backgrounds. In fact the P.O.V. gets more dramatic and scenics more simplified as the film progresses (check out how they actually change the big color block backgrounds in the middle of the same scene by the end of the cartoon!)

We had a [Read more…]

On with the Show Week, and we raise the curtain with “Hamateur Night” a Tex Avery cartoon made just about the time Tex Avery was starting to get really Tex Avery-ish. A bunch of performers, some animals, some human, do their stuff, get gonged, are dropped through trap doors, but return to compete for ‘best of show.’ All very, very silly, and most of it very funny.

Reach over, turn up the volume and listen to the voice artists. When “Hamateur” was released in 1939, I think Warner Brothers was beginning to ‘get it’ on funny recording sessions. Not only is Mel Blanc front and center, knocking himself out with eleventeen wildly different characters, but there are some unusually strong supporting voices too. Cliff Nazarro and Avery himself were doing a lot of the funny stuff in front of a mike for this one. I don’t know who or how they did the voice [Read more…]

Our final Good Sport Week installment has Little Lulu teeing off in “Cad and Caddy.” She hires on as caddy to this really irritable golfer — funny thing is, the guy is the spitting image of Lulu’s own Pop — well, except for the mustache (this duffer has a kind of a Fu Manchu job going for him.) What’s up with that? Jackson Beck supplies the blustery voice for the old hothead, and even gets to croon a couple of bars of “It’s a Hap, Hap, Happy Day.”

As so often happens in the Lulu oeuvre, lollypops play a pivotal role in our little narrative. What else? Seymour Kneitel directed this colorful 1947 epic (hey, he directed the Popeye cartoon we posted yesterday too!) And, as usual for this series, a catchy Winston Sharples score.

We throw the spotlight on a bunch cartoons having something to do with stage performances on Monday. And you don’t even [Read more…]

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Today’s Merrie Melody,”Sport Chumpions”, looks for all the world, to be a spot gag film — no plot, no funny animals, no big pretenses — just a string of goofy jokes, all having something to do with athletics. But in its day, I would guess “Chumpians” was supposed to be a pointed satire of the inane ‘general interest’ short subjects audiences sat through while waiting for the main attraction.

Director Friz Freleng uses unusually realistic animation to set up his gags, and his frame of reference is pretty specific in a couple of sequences. The character in the archery skit, for instance, is a parody of a real personality — Howard Hill. The real life Hill starred in an endless series (A WHOLE SERIES!) of color shorts, all of which consisted, pretty exclusively, of “The World’s Greatest Archer” shooting arrows into different kinds of stuff! Needless to say, a lot of [Read more…]

A crazy 1940 Terrytoon today. “Billy Mouse’s Akwakade” — and first of all, there is no Billy Mouse. The title references an attraction at the 1939 World’s Fair, “Billy Rose’s Aquacade”. Very big deal, and yes, Johnny Weismueller was part of the show at one time (hence all the Tarzan jokes.)

As to the cartoon — what can I say? Dozens of synchronized swimming little girl mice, electric razors and vacuum cleaners, both in dangerous proximity to a very full bathtub, cat and dog chasing floating bubbles containing water and rodents — this one is just nuts, in a laid back, Paul Terry kinda way! Eddie Donnelly directed it, with no small debt to Busby Berkeley. Love that ubiquitous one size fits all water sound effect!

We’ve got more shorts about sports coming your way this week!

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Dave Kirwan

It’s Good Sports Week at ReFrederator, and we’re off to a running start with today’s entry, “Porky’s Prize Pony”. This is one of those classy, pre-war Chuck Jones’ jobs with very elegant character animation (all fussy details, like those little chin shadows and such.) Our pal, Porky Pig is front and center, but the real star here is the horse-hero, a character who has more than a passing resemblance to another Jones creation, Conrad the Cat.

For your free subscription to ReFrederator, click
here, or visit iTunes!

Dave Kirwan