No Mutton fer Nuttin’ is a fairly historic cartoon for numerous reasons. It’s not only the very first entry in the Noveltoon series, the first short featuring Blackie the Lamb (Famous Studios’ first attempt at the wiseguy animal character), but it’s also the first in a long line of “animals being mean to each other” (as one of my more underachieving readers put it) conflict films that became Dave Tendlar and his unit’s trademark. None of these films ever really succeeded in making it an art like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng did, but they are far more intriguing than they’re given credit for, and create a specifically different vibe. They should not be cast off solely as “interesting failures” (like a lot of Screen Gems and Terrytoons).
There are points of near perfection in this cartoon, with the kinds of gags you wouldn’t see at another studio, like the overlong underwater hotfoot, or my favorite, Blackie using his last smoke to burn down Wolfie’s house. It’s a great scene, because the focus of it is clearly Wolfie’s stupidity, singing and sharpening his knife while his house goes up in smoke and becomes a pile of smoldering ashes (even made more hilarious by the fact that we don’t have any stock “burning building” sound effects on the soundtrack).
I love the animation and drawing style of the films Famous did during WW2. It’s not quite what would become the Famous house-style, because it still has lingering traces of the old, blockier Fleischer drawing style (see the cat in Cheese Burglar for the epitome of this). Like an orphan searching for an identity.
Famous also had some really nice color styling too, something the studio is never given credit for, primarily because nearly all of the copies going around are taken from red/reddening (“menstruavision”) TV prints. Seeing this copy mastered from 35mm was a revelation, and makes me uneasy that few of my copies of other 1940s Famous cartoons look this good.
MUTTON CUM
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(I wonder who among us has made the racial connection that a lamb named “Blackie” is carrying dice…)
This is one of those Miami-New York hybrids, that maintain a sense of west coast pacing/gag timing that Fleischer/Famous really got good at from 1942 on (Dan Gordon’s work? No director credit hints that he started it before leaving the studio), and sort of frittered away little by little over the next six years, as the designs and drawing got better looking, while the pacing and unique looks, walks and reaction takes mostly fell by the wayside.
The voices also are interesting here — Famous’ voice work by the 1950s was respected much more than their animation, but here you’ve got Arnold Stang in the wolf’s role and whomever handled Billy the Kid in “The Hungry Goat” as Blackie, which seems like it may have been one of those cartoons voice-tracked in both Miami and New York. If the cartoon had been done a year later, you probably would have ended up with something closer to the eventual Herman and Katnip, with Sid Raymond using one of his memorably dumb voices for the wolf and Stang in Blackie’s role (or — given the ongoing dice gag — they might have recruited Jackson Beck and Blackie would have ended up with Buzzy’s Eddie Anderson voice.)
Wonderful color… incredibly likable cartoon. Had Famous stayed on the level of this and CILLY GOOSE, they might have come close to recapturing something like the early Fleischer sound-era insanity with a more modern mood.
In hibernation on lots of writing projects… back to real life sometime soon.
I was really surprised to hear that Blackie *didn’t* have a “Rochester” voice.
Nice cartoon. Enjoyable, but not hilarious.
Three more good Famous Studios cartoons from this period: “Her Honor The Mare”, “The Marry-Go-Round” and “Moving Aweigh”.
The issue with Famous Studios was not whether the animators could survive without the Fleischers’ influence, which they immediately answered with some particularly inventive cartoons, but how they could have made better cartoons in a more viable creative environment.
I wish these were available on an official Paramount DVD collection. The animation is quite nice and these are very underrated cartoons.
Since I rec’d the DVD of ’40s Famous cartoons you made for me, I’ve watched this particular cartoon probably 25-30 times. It is a true gem. It’s sharply timed, funny, creative, clever and surprising. As well, it’s one of THE nicest examples of 1940s studio cartooning.
The character designs, poses, staging, background and, as you note, the use of color, are all top-drawer.
I agree: the slo-mo underwater hotfoot is one of the most original gags in ’40s cartoonery. I find the airbrushing on the surface of the water, as Wolfie bursts up into dry land, nothing short of amazing.
As with CILLY GOOSE, everything works perfectly in this cartoon. At this time, Famous could boast a product as good-looking and high-quality as MGM or Warner Brothers. I wish they’d been able to sustain the unusual vibe of their 1943-48 cartoons. (I use that cutoff date because of the transition from Little Lulu to the Hell-spawn that is Little Audrey.)
I still like a lot of Famous’ output, into the 1960s, but the ’43 to ’48 material is one of the great bodies of animated work, and the singlemost neglected set of cartoons of their time.