Some Cartoons For Saturday Morning #16

Happy Saturday Morning my friends. You guessed it, now is the time for more classic cartoons. 

We begin with an excellent Popeye cartoon from the Fleischer era. This cartoon is another one the deviates from the story of Popeye and Bluto fighting over Olive. However this cartoon still features Popeye and Bluto fighting. This cartoon features one of those great 3d backgrounds that appear in multiple Fleischer shorts of this era. For those of you unaware of how this was done model sets were built and the animation cels were placed inside. The look is amazing and is something no one has ever quite captured before or since the Fleischer cartoons. It is also important to remember in these Fleischer shorts Dave Fleischer is credited with directing, he was really more of a supervisor. What most people would consider directing was done by the first credited animator, which in this case is Seymour Kneitel. According to Jerry Beck's audio commentary for this film, future Looney Tunes writers, Warner Foster and Tedd Pierce worked on this cartoon. 

  Next up comes the last Looney Tunes cartoon made in black and white. By this time there had already been color Looney Tunes. The first color one, The Hep Cat (1942) came out a year earlier. Both cartoons show a change that had recently taken place in the Looney Tunes series and that was to feature non-reoccurring characters. It used to be that Looney Tunes always had reoccurring characters while its sister series Merrie Melodies did not. This cartoon would later be remade as the Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, I Taw a Putty Tat (1948), which even kept the same house address. So enjoy, Puss Gets the Booty (1943).


Just as The Pink Panther character first appeared in the animated opening credits to the live action feature film, The Pink Panther (1964), the Inspector first appeared in the opening credits for that movie's sequel, A Shot in the Dark (1964). The character was somewhat based off of the main character of both movies, Inspector Clouseau. Other characters from the cartoon series would be based off of characters from the live action film series. The Inspector's assistant Deux-Deux would be based off of Clouseau's assistant Hercule, from A Shot in the Dark while his name would come from a murder victim from that movie. The Inspector's boss would be based off of Clouseau's boss Inspector Dreyfus. The highlight of many Inspector cartoons was the villain. These were very imaginative and fun villains and this cartoon offers an especially good one. So enjoy The Shooting of Caribou Lou (1967).

   
  Last up comes the classic Goofy cartoon, How to Be a Detective (1952). This cartoon was directed by Jack Kinney, one of Disney's wackiest and cartooniest short directors. His films were always full of wild and crazy cartoon humor and this cartoon is no exception providing many great laughs and a perfect ending.



-Michael J. Ruhland