A nice variety of cartoon this time, with 3 Woodys, a very weird Andy Panda, and the last Swing Symphony we’ll be watching – there was only one more after this, sadly not on DVD, and after that Lantz turned his attention to classical music for a bit.

We get some classic Russian folk singing in the first Woody seen here, Ski for Two. Woody’s looking for food, as always, and finds a ski lodge that notes it specialized in delicious food. So he hops on a train and heads to far northern climes, then skis the rest of the way (40 miles!), while singing the folk song ‘The Sleigh’, a classic in its day. He also throws in a line or two from Ochi Chyornye to boot. Naturally, this being mid-40s Woody, the proprietor is Wally Walrus, who notes that Woody doesn’t have a reservation. Despite noting that he has tons of reservations – for other inns and sporting events – he gets thrown out anyway. (Great line when Wally calls Woody impulsive. “IMpulsive? I’m REpulsive!”.) Woody then tries to get in by pretending to be Santa. Wally does not do himself any credit by buying this, mostly as it’s only October. In the end though, Woody gets beaten up by Wally when trying to abscond with the food. Most of these Culhane Woodies have 7 minutes of him going insane at people, then briefly getting his comeuppance.

For the final Swing Symphony we get to see, it’s a barnburner: The Pied Piper of Basin Street boasts in its credits that it features Jack Teagarden, one of jazz’s most prominent trombone players of the time, as well as a bandleader. The plot is essentially your standard Pied Piper, with the rats wreaking havoc all over the town. The mayor (a not particularly good caricature of Lou Costello – Lantz still can’t do celebrity impressions that well) is far too lazy and shiftless to do anything himself, but jumps at the chance for a Durante-ish piper to drive the rats out of town. And, of course, then reneges on the deal, paying the piper in peanuts (literally) and throwing him out. So the piper turns into Frank Sinatra and lures EVERYONE out of town – from the high school kids to swinging grannies. (I note that one shot has a guy in a malt shop sharing a drink with identical twin hotties – nice work, kid.) The town ends up on a swing riverboat with Ozzie Nelson and Glenn Miller’s band. The mayor ends up with the rats. Great stuff, and fantastic music.

The next Andy Panda cartoon is rather bizarre, especially in amongst the others in the series. Andy’s been redesigned by Shamus Culhane, and looks more adult but also less like a panda. In addition, he’s apparently gotten a bit psychotic. He’s having his pointer hold a pose while he paints him, yelling at the dog whenever he tries to move. A nagging fly gets the best of the dog, who not only moves but wrecks Andy’s painting. In response, while going to get a new canvas, Andy ties a shotgun to the dog’s leg, set up so that if the dog moves, it will shoot him dead. Yeah. For fans of the cute and harmless Andy Panda, this must have been jaw-dropping. Lantz himself hated it, and the personality and design reverted in the next cartoon. The plot itself is weird even beyond this, as it involves two goony spiders who decide to forgo their usual fly menu and catch and eat the dog. Even for a Culhane cartoon, this one’s nuts, and I’d call it more interesting than good.

Back to Woody and Wally for Chew-Chew Baby, yet another in a progressively long series of cartoons where Woody is obsessed with food. He’s also a deadbeat, so we open the cartoon with Wally throwing Woody out of the boarding house he runs for eating everything and paying nothing. Woody, searching for ways to get food and revenge – in that order – finds that Wally has put an add for ‘female companionship’ in the paper, so dresses up as Clementine in order to get some more food. Another fast one-liner – “Are you refined?” “Refined? I’m 110 Octane!” The usual Woody eating and abuse follows, with some cute cartoon gags such as the stoplight breaking Wally’s fall. In the end, Woody blows Wally up AND gets away with all the food. What a jerk!

He’s even more obnoxious in Woody Dines Out, which takes a break from Wally Walrus for a bit and has Woody battle an evil-looking cat. Woody has more right to be appalling here, though, as the cat is trying to kill him. Woody, desperate for food and finding only closed restaurants, wanders by a place that specializes in “stuffing birds”. Yeah, well, Woody doesn’t have to be smart, he gets by on being loud and appalling. The cat is a taxidermist, who at first thinks Woody’s just annoying, but then recalls he has a flier offering $100,000 to anyone who can stuff a king-sized woodpecker. That’s almost 1.2 million dollars in today’s money, so the cat turns bloodthirsty. He gives Woody a soup laced with knockout drops (“Blackout borscht”), then prepares to slice him up. Woody quickly escapes, and proceeds to abuse the cat mercilessly, mostly with an elevator. In the end, the cat abandons his dreams on money, mansions, yachts, and women, with Woody invading the last one and taking the women for himself!

Some excellent cartoons, with one exception, and even that was bizarre and wrong enough to be interesting. I am hoping that we get something soon other than Woody trying to get food.

It’s 1944, and Shamus Culhane has settled in at Lantz. Which is terrific, as it gives us a run of cartoons that’s the best so far, including one cartoon scholars call the best Woody Woodpecker cartoon ever.

In the first of two Middle Eastern Swing Symphonies for this post, we get The Greatest Man in Siam, a Swing Symphony with lots of hot jazz. The plot has the King announcing that he’ll give his daughter’s hand in marriage to the greatest man, as you’d expect. We get lots of gags about people who say they have various attributes – the smartest man, the richest man, etc. The daughter is a gorgeous harem girl, and one of the reasons these cartoons are rarely seen on TV – she’s almost drawn too sexily, with semi-transparent harem clothes showing off all of the legs and a great deal of the rest of her. In the end, the ‘hottest’ man in Siam comes by and wows everyone with his playing and dancing, and he wins the contest by getting everyone to dance.

And now we get Culhane’s first Woody Woodpecker cartoon. There’s a few differences to note. Woody has another new voice, that if writer Ben Hardaway, and this one would stick with him for the rest of the 40s. As a voice artist, Hardaway is a great writer, but hey, Woody cartoons aren’t known for their snappy dialogue at this point anyway. He was also redesigned to be a bit shorter and cuter, though he’s still pretty wild compared to the 50s version. As for the cartoon itself, it’s been voted one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time. It usually even gets more votes than Warners’ Rabbit of Seville, which is impressive. Woody goes to a barber to get a haircut, only to find the barber’s been drafted. Woody decides to cut his own hair, only to be beset by customers, so he quickly pretends to be the barber. His first victim is a cliched Red Indian, who Woody gives the hot towels treatment to, then eventually tosses across the street to be a cigar store Indian. Then a construction worker comes in and asks for “the whooooooole works”. He quickly regrets this, as Woody whips out the lather and razor and starts singing Largo El Factotum from Rossini’s opera. He also goes even more nuts than we usually see from Woody. He’s positively terrifying in this, whipping around a noticeably chipper straight razor, and generally being almost homicidal. The worker escapes, but returns to toss Woody into a wall and throw the barber pole at him. Words don’t do this justice, you really need to see it.

Remember Andy Panda? He’s still been cruising along with the occasional cartoon. He’s grown up now, mostly, and has lost his father’s presence, but he’s still very much a ‘Porky Pig’ type character, in that he does not actually drive the action. In Fish Fry, he decides to buy a pet goldfish and take it home. Unfortunately, he quickly runs into a mangy-looking cat who wants the fish for dinner. What follows will not surprise anyone who’s watched the average Tom & Jerry or Tweety & Sylvester cartoon, though this cat is a lot more urban than either of those two. Fish Fry does boast a tremendously bizarre ending where, after attempting to run away from a bulldog about 3 times, the cat simply goes insane, leaping about into the distance laughing. It makes no sense in the context of the rest of the cartoon, but is certainly startling, I’ll grant you.

Back in Swing Symphony land, we’re still in the Middle East, and it’s time for Abou Ben Boogie. This one has less plot than the Greatest Man in Siam, but has a lot more hot harem girls wearing next to nothing. My guess is that the first cartoon drew rave reviews from the dads in the audience. At an opium den (another reason this cartoon isn’t seen very often on TV), the entertainment is there to tell us about Abou Ben Boogie, who is known for his hot dancing. He shows up about halfway through, but his attempts to romance the girl seem to be met more often than not with him kissing a camel. In fact, the camel gets more screen time than the girl, and shows that its dancing is pretty hot as well. Another great cartoon, showing that Lantz’s folks had become experts at timing jazz licks to intense animation.

Meanwhile, Woody may be cuter and smaller, but he’s even more of a horrible screwball pest. And now he finally has an ongoing nemesis in Wally Walrus, who is voiced in a heavy Swedish accent by Hans Conried (best known to cartoon fans as Snidely Whiplash). The cartoon opens with a bunch of beachgoers on the boardwalk watching Wally beat the crap out of Woody. He stops to explain how things got this way. Knowing Woody as we do, I think we could have guessed. Wally is trying to relax at the beach, but Woody runs over him, smashes into him, steals his food, soaks him, and then cons him by playing a phony swami. Sadly, in the end Wally does himself in, as his attempts to tie Woody to an anchor and drown him just succeed in destroying the entire boardwalk.

Now that Woody has a new look, new director and a regular adversary, he’s improving by leaps and bounds. And even Andy Panda’s cartoons have gotten interesting, if not Andy himself. Great stuff. Next time, we’ll look at some 1945 cartoons.

Welcome to 1943 at Walter Lantz studios, and we open up with some classic Woody Woodpecker. The Screwball features Woody at a baseball game, and was one of the more commonly aired ‘early Woody’ cartoons when I was a kid. This is your typical 1940s ballgame, which is to say that the field has a mere wooden fence protecting it from the unpaying masses. With lots of convenient knotholes, and one very sadistic cop. I have to say seeing the cop use his truncheon to poke the eyes of all the people watching through the holes made me wince. Sadly, his wooden billy club is no match for our hero, who shortly makes his way into the game. Not that Woody’s home free. The cop is still chasing him, he’s dealing with guys with big hats (and big hair) blocking his view, and he can’t even enjoy a nice cold sody pop. Clearly he has no choice but to go out on the field and play. His screwball is perfect, but he has trouble hitting the opposing pitcher’s slow ball. All in all, a classic ‘baseball gags’ cartoon, with Woody generally acting like his usual jerkass self.

The same cast of Woody and cop appear in the award-winning The Dizzy Acrobat, which features Woody walking around the circus. After abusing a few animals, he tries to walk into a tent, but is stopped by the guard – the implication is you need money, but it reads more like he just doesn’t like Woody. Which, given Woody’s personality in these cartoons, makes total sense. Once Woody gets into the tent, though, it’s pure cop abuse, with him flying into lion cages, hurtling along trapeze wires, and finally riding a tiny bike that throws him into the middle of a shooting gallery. Woody attempts to heckle him from there, but apparently looks too much like a target – the two of them both end up dodging bullets!

Woody pretty much reaches new heights of being obnoxious in the next cartoon, the vaguely wartime-themed Ration Bored. Woody is driving along in his gas-guzzling car, ignoring signs asking whether his trip is really necessary. “Of course it is – I’M a necessary evil!”, he points out. Unfortunately, his car runs out of gas, and the gas station attendant doesn’t buy his use of a child’s ABC book as a replacement for actual A, B, and C ration cards. (Unlike The Screwball, this cartoon hasn’t aired all that often on TV, most likely due to the war references, Woody sucking on gasoline, and the ending.) Woody gets thrown into a car junkyard, and tries seeing if any of the wrecks have any gas in them, and siphoning them by sucking out the gas through a tube. He hits the jackpot with one nice-looking car. That’s because it’s a cop car, though this officer seems more gruff and less dumb than the cops we’ve seen in the previous 2 cartoons. Woody slips right into full heckle mode, and chaos ensues. In the end, Woody rides the cop as if he were a car into a high-test gas tank, blowing them both up. Surprisingly, they both end up in heaven (I say surprisingly as Woody was just HORRIBLE in this cartoon) and continue their chase up there. This was Kent Rogers’ last cartoon as the voice of Woody – he went into the Army, and was later killed in the war.

Walter Lantz, meanwhile, had scored a big coup by getting James “Shamus” Culhane to come on board as cartoon director. Culhane’s pacing, gag timing, and animation all helped improve the cartoons literally from his debut, which is the Swing Symphony Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy!. The first 2/3 of this cartoon is your typical ‘Hatfields vs. McCoys’ hillbilly schtick, with the gags and the song revolving around Mirandy’s completely inedible biscuits (using glue in the recipe might be one reason why), and how they make excellent ammunition when fighting against their neighbors. The pacing here is already a step up from previous Swing Symphonies. The fighting ends with a messenger notes that war has been declared. The two feuding families join up, and use the rock-like biscuits to take out the Axis, including caricatures of Hitler, Stalin and Tojo. Needless to say, that ending is why the cartoon was hard to find on TV.

Finally we have Boogie Woogie Man (Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out), a completely surreal salute to Harlem-style dancing, featuring an all-ghost cast. The ghosts are holding a convention in an abandoned town, lamenting the fact that the old scares just aren’t working anymore, and they need to find some new blood to get everyone back into the haunting business. They’ve invited along 3 black ghosts who proceed to simply walk in and start singing the title song, the implication being that what the square white ghosts need is more jazz and swing. The rest of the cartoon is a combination of hot dancing and creepy ghost horror animation, usually at the same time. It’s riveting, and incredibly well-animated. In the end, of course, the clock warns dawn is coming and the ghosts all disappear.

The arrival of Shamus Culhane has certainly spiced up the Swing Symphonies, but he hasn’t gotten to Woody yet. And whatever happened to Andy Panda anyway? (The answer to that is he’s been appearing all along, just not in cartoons on DVD). Tune in next time for some 1944 classics – including Rossini!