My cold dead heart will always be warmed by the antics of the Fox and the Crow, the character team the Columbia cartoon studio accidentally got right. About half of them are forgettable, but ones like Mysto Fox (unfortunately I’ve only ever seen B/W prints of this one circulating; I’m sure a splicey Kodachrome or Tech print is out there in some OCD case’s basement) are in the other half that are either just good or great. Frank Graham’s voice work plays a huge part in these characters’ appeal, and they are probably the most under-appreciated performances in cartoon history. Columbia cartoons can be called lots of things, but derivative isn’t one of them. How many other cartoons ended like this?
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And yeah, that totally kicked Presto‘s derivative ass.
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).