Category Archives: classic animation

Reader Mike Matei asked this toughie: “In The Mad Hatter, how come Woody doesn’t have to pay for the top hat when he goes to the hat store?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST4LwJ-NEik&hl=en&fs=1]

Since all the cartoon geek rage is over lost footage from a Ben Hardaway-Cal Dalton cartoon, I’ll have to be your friendly neighborhood curmudgeon: that unit’s cartoons, on the whole, are pretty bad. I’ll give them that Hare-Um Scare-Um is pretty fun for its artless execution, and that it was basically retooled (rephrase that; overhauled) for A Wild Hare by Tex Avery. But the rest of their cartoons fit the mold of the 1939 season of Warner shorts: auto-pilot. With a few exceptions (Thugs with Dirty Mugs and Porky’s Tire Trouble are the only two that come to mind), it was a very weak year for the studio. It’d be interesting to find out why there was a studio-wide string of mediocrity that year, but it’s probably too late in history to find out (if you need a memory refresher, see how many classics are listed here). It’s very, very telling that Leon Schlesinger immediately gave Friz Freleng his job (and the same exact unit) back after his foray at MGM.

Here is one of those Hardaway-Daltons that was a bane of my youth. Porky the Giant Killer must have been played at least once a week on Nickelodeon (or at least it was on every time I watched it). It’s fairly meandering and unfunny, lacking the charm and fun that even Bob Clampett’s worst Porkys have (and around this time, a few of Clampett’s worst were indeed made). I sent a disc of this and other cartoons to Mike Kazaleh awhile ago, and he tells me that Rod Scribner animated the scene with the bottle nipple.

No Brave Little Tailor this be, says I.

[dailymotion id=x94lpg]

Starts at around 5:31. I’m ashamed of myself (and everyone else) for not thinking of putting up framegrabs of Mama Bear shooting aimlessly at Papa Bear with the moose-head during the election. I love how her and Junyer’s first instinct is to kill the moose. This cartoon is the medium at its best. There’s no need to elaborate because it speaks for itself. It makes me cry that cartoons will never be this good again.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L46AzjwwDPo&hl=en&fs=1]