Some Cartoons for Saturday Morning #246

 Hello my friends and happy Saturday morning. Once again it is time for some classic cartoons. 

Today's cartoon selection begins with a classic Looney Tunes short, Eatin' on the Cuff or The Moth Who Came to Dinner (1942). This cartoon was included in Jerry Beck's book, The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes and has become a favorite of some cartoon buffs. The oddball nature of this short becomes obvious from the very opening in which a live action piano player begins to tell us the story. The actor used here is silent era veteran Leo White, who will be familiar to a lot of my fellow Charlie Chaplin fans. However, the voice we hear is not that of Leo but rather of Mel Blanc, who voiced countless characters in the Looney Tunes shorts. It is easy to see why Looney Tunes fans love this short so much. It is a fast paced and crazy short with a wild anything for a laugh attitude. It should come as no surprise that the film was directed by Bob Clampett, whose work was often wild and energetic even by Looney Tunes standards.  It also features some excellent animation such as Virgil Ross' scene of the bee and the spider's duel and Rod Scribner's animation of the spider's huge nose emerging from her wig (a dirty joke that would have only been attempted in a Clampett cartoon). A reviewer for The Film Daily stated, " This cartoon is interesting chiefly because it veers away from the usual formula for this type of short."

Now we join our good friend Dinky Duck in Wise Quacks (1953). 

Up next comes The Queen of Hearts (1934). This film is from Ub Iwerks' series of ComiColor cartoons. These were a series of 25 color short films that featured one-off characters in plays on classic fairy tales and other stories. The series ran in movie theaters from 1933 to 1936. While the series has been written off as one of the many copies of Disney's Silly Symphonies, it has a strange, bizarre quality that heavily differentiates itself from that series. 




Next we join our good friend Cubby Bear in Sinister Stuff (1934). This short film is a delightful take off of old melodramas. These types of parodies were very popular in cartoons at this time and parodies of melodramas would remain a mainstay of cartoons for quite a while. Think of Mighty Mouse and even Dudley Do-Right.  




Now it is time for a commercial break. 





Ted Eshbaugh is an animation director with a cult following among film buffs. Watching his films, it is easy to see why. His cartoons often have an irresistibly bizarre sense of imagination. To anyone who likes their cartoons more than a little off the beaten path, these films fit that bill perfectly. Up next is one of my favorites of his films, The Snowman (1932). This cartoon also benefits from a musical score by Carl Stalling, who did music for many of the best Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies as well as Disney's earliest sound films. 






It is now silent movie time, so enjoy Ko-Ko the Barber (1925).

Up next is Tweety's first appearance in a cartoon, A Tale of Two Kitties (1942). Sharp eyed viewers may notice that Tweety is not yellow in this film, but pink. Since he was a newborn baby bird, it made sense for him not to have feathers. According to director Bob Clampett, he based the character off of a nude baby photo of himself. Tweety already has his famous line, "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat." According to animation historian Jerry Beck's book, I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety, This line also originated with Bob Clampett when in the mid-1930's he wrote a letter to a friend on MGM stationary. Next to Leo the MGM lion, Clampett drew a small bird with a word balloon with "I think I taw a titty-tat." Instead of Sylvester Tweety is here pitted against two cats named Babbit and Catstello. As should be obvious by the names, these cats were a take-off on the infamous comedy team Abbott and Costello, who had just made their movie debut just a couple years earlier in One Night in the Tropics (1940). The voice of Catstello was provided by the man of a thousand voices, Mel Blanc (who also voiced Tweety) and Babbitt was voiced by writer Tedd Pierce. A reviewer in Showman's Trade Review was very impressed with these voices stating, "Either the famous comedy pair furnished the accompanying dialogue themselves or the impersonators are the last word in perfection." Though they would not catch on the way Tweety did, these characters would reappear in other cartoons. Some of these cartoons would even feature the duo as mice instead of cats. They would appear with Tweety much later in a 1998 episode of the TV show, Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. This cartoon was reissued to theaters in 1948, the year Abbott and Costello made their most popular movie, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).  

What better way to end our cartoon selection than with a Jack Kinney directed Goofy cartoon. So enjoy How to Play Football (1944). 

Thanks for joining me. Come back next week for another selection of animated treasures. May all your tunes be looney and your melodies merry. 

Resources Used

100 Greatest Looney Tunes edited by Jerry Beck

Walt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: The Genius of Ub Iwerks by Don Iwerks

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety by Jerry Beck