Hello again my friends and happy Saturday morning. You know what that means? More classic cartoons.
Chuck Jones was of course a legendary animation director best remembered for his Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies of the 1940's and 50's. However he would return to the Looney Tune characters, making a new series of Looney Tunes shorts, under his Chuck Jones Film Production company. Sadly most of these cartoons don't show Chuck at his best. They are entertaining but feel underwhelming when compared to what he did with the characters in the past. There was however one of this cartoons that I would consider a classic in its own right, Chariots of Fur (1994). This is an excellent cartoon by any standards and easily one of the best post golden age Looney Tunes. This was a rare later film, where he actually directed characters he created, in this case the Coyote and Roadrunner. So enjoy this great cartoon.
Bimbo is probably best remembered today as the Boyfriend of Betty Boop. However before Betty got her own series, Bimbo starred in a series of Talkartoons by himself. One of the best of these films was Swing You Sinners (1930). With a darkly surreal sense of humor, fast pace and jazzy musical score this cartoon present everything I love about the Fleischer Brothers cartoons of this era. Notice how different Bimbo's design is here compared to how he would look in just a year or two. It is much cruder and less cute. He certainly looks more like a dog here. However this design has a charm of its own. It is important to note that the Fleischer cartoons of this ear were made for a mostly adult audience and there is no mistaking this film for a kid's cartoon.
We follow that with another spooky themed pre-code cartoon, Spooks (1931). This is a Flip the Frog cartoon and not to be confused with the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon with the same title from a year earlier. I think this is possibly the strongest Flip cartoon and I wish his other films could have also been at this quality. This is an atmospheric, often funny and just creative cartoon. Naturally being an Ub Iwerks cartoon this is also a film with excellent looking animation. Being a pre-code cartoon this film features a gag of a skeleton dog looking like he is going to pee. A few years later such a joke would be impossible. Another impossible joke later would have been Flip essentially asking his host where the bathroom is. This cartoon was directed by Ub Iwerks, who had earlier been the main animator for the most famous skeleton cartoon of all time, The Skeleton Dance (1929).
Our last cartoon, Double Dribble (1946) is a bit of an oddity. It is one of those great Goofy sport cartoons from Disney. However it is directed by Jack Hannah instead of Jack Kinney. Hannah mostly handled the Donald Duck cartoons, though he would occasionally direct a Goofy cartoon. These Goofy cartoons though were not sports cartoons as that remained Kinney's department. This cartoon and (if you consider it a Goofy sports cartoon), A Knight For a Day (1946, interestingly the same year) were exceptions as they were directed by Hannah. Hannah was probably the second best director of fast paced slapstick cartoons at Disney during this time (after Kinney of course) and he does a great job with this next short, making a very funny cartoon.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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