It’s probably hard for us all to remember the time when Duck Amuck actually thrilled us on every level… Overexposure (WB49, the old Buffalo WB network affiliate, played this at least once a week) and academic slobber easily destroys the enjoyment of any film, and this milestone definitely has suffered for it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Yeah, it’s brilliant, but I have to go another ten years without seeing it again to appreciate it.” Fortunately, this doesn’t ruin the fact that there will always be kids green to this cartoon, and love it, for years to come… Wouldn’t it be cool to have that innocence again?
Small and Tall
Someone posted the complete version of Professor Small and Mr. Tall on YouTube (the version for the syndicated Totally Tooned In! package removed the foreboding scene of the gay ghost as Hitler shooting himself).
The short has a lot going for it as far as laughs (more than what Leonard Maltin says anyway, whose panning of it has been burnt into everyone’s memory for thirty years), but at the same time, when you look at it from a technical standpoint, the short is sort of a mess. For starters, the animation is pretty bad. Obviously, John Hubley and his crew were excited over the stylized animation that Jones was establishing in his 1942 shorts at Schlesinger’s, but it looks like they either didn’t have the time or money to perfect doing it themselves. The animation tries to pop/settle from pose to pose, but it just ends up looking stiff. It also looks as though the characters were designed without much thought of how they’d play out in animation.
That’s par for the course with the 1940s Columbia cartoon output though. Some of the animation can be on the level of the average Warner short (when Emery Hawkins, Don Williams, Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, or NY import Morey Reden are behind it); a lot of it is as bad as the average Terrytoon or worse. A very schizophrenic studio for sure.
You can see a much funnier and better animated UPA cartoon that tries this style, The Miner’s Daughter at Kevin’s site.
Filed under classic movies
Now in Low-Rez Action!
I posted about my discovery of the special opening to How to Play Football a few months ago, but now you can see it here as it actually plays out.
Filed under classic animation
