Some Cartoons For Saturday Morning #37

Hello my friends and happy Saturday morning. Of course you know what that means. It is time for more classic cartoons. 

Old cartoons rarely presented an anti-smoking message, because at this time smoking was just what everybody did. However there is one type of anti-smoking cartoon that appeared in the olden days. This was a cartoon that was against kids smoking. Probably the most famous examples are the Looney Tunes cartoon Wholly Smoke (1938) and the Pleasure Island sequence from Disney's feature length Pinocchio (1940). However these types of cartoons were around much earlier than those films. Such an example is the Dreamy Dud cartoon, He Resolves Not to Smoke (1915). 

Just as the Pink Panther character came out of the opening credit sequence for The Pink Panther (1964), a fellow DePatie-Freleng cartoon character, The Inspector came from the opening credits sequence of that movie's sequel A Shot in the Dark (1964). The Inspector was based off of the main character of these movies, Inspector Clouseau, however he was not quite just an animated version of Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards' famous character. Villains the Mazzi-O-Riley Brothers appear in this opening sequence. They would later be the villains of the Inspector cartoon, The Great De Gaulle Stone Operation (1965). By the way in my mind Henry Mancini's main theme for this movie is every bit as good as his famous Pink Panther theme.

   


It has become an accepted idea that self-referential or meta cartoons are something fairly recent. There is no truth to this. In fact such cartoons date all the way back to the silent era. This was especially true of Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's silent Felix the cat cartoons. One great example of this is Flim Flam Films (1927)




In my mind the best non-Pink Panther cartoon series from DePatie-Freleng was The Ant and the Aardvark. Next comes a typically fun entry, Mumbo Jumbo (1970).




We end with a classic World War 2, Daffy Duck cartoon, Daffy the Commando (1943). This is a fast paced pure slapstick cartoon of the type that was really dominating the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies at this time period. A review in The Film Daily stated "The Technicolor treatment is extra good in this cartoon, which is an ace filler. Leon Schlesinger produced capitally.




-Michael J. Ruhland