Your Saturday Bowl of WTF: Polly Wants a Doctor
Welcome to another edition of Your Saturday Bowl of WTF! Tonight’s main course is yet another gem from the Columbia studio’s 1940s library, Polly Wants a Doctor. Watch as the [Nazi sympathizer] Polly engorges himself on scrap metal prepared by an overly-pleased-with-himself goat (possibly Pervis’s gay cousin). As proven by earlier entries, it looks as though the staff at Columbia were having real fun with coming up with these oddities while forgetting that it was their job to entertain the audience. I still love ’em though. Things like Polly’s dance crack me up, because it looks so stupid, it’s funny. This cartoon was written by Dun Roman, who also directed the WTF masterpiece The Herring Murder Mystery at Columbia around the same time (later writing for Jay Ward’s shows).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbz1NZRY4A&hl=en&fs=1]
As weird as their cartoons were, Columbia’s stuff was still pretty well-crafted.
Hard to believe that Polly would be pro-Nazi when the cartoon is produced by Dave Fleischer. =P
Also, notice the error as Joe the Goat is ripping out pages from the calendar. The numbers scatter all over the place!
It’s a shame that none of Columbia’s animated output is available on DVD (or ever will be, by the looks of it). I’d buy it. I think they’re great.
“Is that fresh?”
“Fresh? June this year!”
This one is just plain good. Six and a half minutes very well spent. Nice to see a good copy of it too, compared to the rather poor VHS bootleg I have.
Lots of inventive gags with likable creatures (now that Polly is past his Nazi phase from that earlier cartoon), all centered around the plot of two characters having dinner. Now you know where Louis Malle got the idea for “My Dinner with Andre”.
BTW – Who the hell is Pervis?
Pervis Goat is the fellow who appears in the Toby the Pup cartoon “Halloween”. The name is my own invention.
It’s really hard not to feel a little sorry for all those hard working animators and layout people that made such a bad production look so good. The Columbia story people seemed to be suffering from some kind of identity crisis, their cartoons never have anything resembling a coherent point of veiw, it’s no wonder their stuff is largely forgotten today. But watch this cartoon without sound and just marvel at the great animation. There isn’t an animator alive today that can even come close to what these guys routinely put out.
Imagine a goat who will eat everything in sight (as in Daffy Duck and Popeye), but is a gentleman about it.
The only worthwhile gag in this whole effort was the “Fresh?/This Year’s Calendar” joke. At least the voices weren’t so bad.
Being a Columbia product, I wonder… Did unfunny cartoons like this actually play on the same bills as the comic genius of The Three Stooges?
Urgh, what story direction. When the goat first invites the parrot to dine, the goat is voiced and animated in a manner that clearly suggests (particularly around 1:56) he’s got an evil ulterior motive.
When I first saw this cartoon years ago, I presumed the goat was tired of scrap metal and was scheming to eat the parrot (maybe fattening him up a little, first). Odd, but not surprising from the team that would later create COCKATOOS FOR TWO.
Yet instead of playing out the goat’s motive, the story crew just forgets about it. Great animation and nice designs can’t make up the difference.
John A! Great post. Always felt the same. Wonderful animation went into the trashcan. :(
And that can be said about the wonderfully looking, but forgotten Ising and Harman cartoons at MGM as well.
D(h)ave – I guess his ulterior motive is that he’s using the parrot as his guinea pig, rather than just being hospitable?
By the way, it’s fairly common cartoon logic for a character to swallow an appliance and then take onthe characteristics of the appliance. But how often does a character take on the characteristics of a vehile being *spoken about* on the appliance he swallowed?
Spectre: “How often does a character take on the characteristics of a vehile being *spoken about* on the appliance he swallowed?”
In DONALD’S OSTRICH, Hortense the ostrich swallows a radio. Inside her, it broadcasts a live report of an auto race, and the bird reacts by zooming around the room like a car.
I’d be averse if I didn’t mention the rather similar idea in BAD OL’ PUDDY TAT where Sylvester swallows Tweety and Tweety begins pretending he’s riding a train. That’s all it takes for Sylvester to start chugging around like one—even against his will.
I’ll still take a cartoon like this over a Disney short directed by Charles Nichols anyday, but then, comedies that are either genuinely weird or hilariously funny entertain me.
This one features some very cool animation, that goofy dance segment in particular, but has in common with other Columbias the essential loss of a story thread. They get off on a tangent and never return. It doesn’t happen in two other equally odd but imaginative WTF Columbias Dun Roman worked on, MAGIC STRENGTH and THE HERRING MURDER MYSTERY.
Now, just forgetting about story and character motivations altogether does not pose a problem in the free-associating cartoons of the early sound era (such as several of my all-time favorites from Fleischer and other studios: SWING YOU SINNERS, etc.), but doesn’t quite work in these 1940’s films. There’s a choice of establishing immediately that the cartoon is going to totally break the fourth wall from start to finish – or stay with the characters and even a loose story structure. Don’t think it’s possible to go both ways.
Tex Avery tried to break the fourth wall in his Screwy Squirrel series, but didn’t like the results and chose to kill off his “star” in LONESOME LENNY. He only broke the fourth wall in isolated individual gags afterwards.
The dance sequence struck me as the best part of the cartoon. I thought the run-along-the-fence footage was more to say “We can do perspective shots, too” than anything else. It doesn’t add anything.
Unfortunately, the cartoon is pointless. It’s built like a silent cartoon; here’s a premise, now lets toss in some stuff. There’s no plot. If that’s the case, the gags had better be funny and build to something, but that doesn’t happen here.
In fact, what does the title have to do with the cartoon? Doctor? WTF!?
Jim – You hit it exactly! This is a silent cartoon merely updated with inconsequential dialog (the calendar gag would have worked as a title card) and standard issue 1940s Hollywood-style animation. The lame China gag at the end is just like how a Colonel Heeza Liar cartoon would have ended in 1917!
Jim B.: How many silent cartoons have you seen? Does the count reach 400-500?
Ray G.: How many Heeza Liar cartoons have you seen?
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