1942, and the country is at war! Here at Walter Lantz studios, however, it’s business as usual. Lantz really didn’t do nearly as many wartime cartoons as Warners or Disney, though we will see one here. Instead, he worked on defining Woody Woodpecker further, aging Andy Panda a bit, continuing the Swing Symphonies, and doing the occasional one-shot.

We start off here with the weakest cartoon of the five I’m getting to, Mother Goose on the Loose. It’s the old standard modernization of Mother Goose with gags, this time at least free from celebrity caricatures (Disney’s Mother Goose Goes Hollywood was only 3 years earlier), barring an impersonation of Frank Morgan as the narrator. The cartoon is oddly disjointed, even for a spot gag entry, and halfway through the narration seems to be replaced by a choral singing group for about two minutes. Lots of shots of hot cartoon babes, though, so we get to look at some legs, at the very least.

Meanwhile, Woody appears to have joined the Army. Drafted would be my guess, judging by his sour grumpiness about it. Ace in the Hole deals with his battles with his sergeant, as well as attempts to fly a plane. Given Woody can already fly, I’m not sure why he’d want to fly one of the fighter planes we see there, though I suppose it could be for the thrill. Certainly not for his country, as patriotism is barely mentioned here (I suspect Woody would be a bad example at this point, though he is noticeably less insane in this cartoon). He has a new voice, by the way, Kent Rogers, who also did a lot of work for Warners. Kent is most famous for originating Beaky Buzzard’s voice. Notably, this is the first time we see the cartoon end with Woody losing.

Another Swing Symphony follows, this one nominated for an Academy Award. This cartoon benefits from the soundtrack beginning right at the end and never stopping, so there’s no long pause while the plot gets going. This one has a Latin flavor, with several Carmen Miranda-esque numbers played throughout. The premise has a mouse being woken by a jukebox, and attempting to get it to stop. But then he’s tossed into a bottle of alcohol, and starts drunkenly hallucinating a whole bunch of ghosts and spirits jazzing things up. The pacing is fairly sedate compared to future Swing Symphonies, but the music is well times to the gags, and it’s pretty fun.

I’d mentioned we had a wartime short this time around, and this is it, Pigeon Patrol. It stars Homer Pigeon, another attempt to create a character that didn’t quite work out for the studio. Homer is sort of a hyuck-hyuck yokel country boy who’s trying to court his fickle girl. Sadly, she only has eyes for the carrier pigeon pilots, completely ignoring the fact that he’s brought her a bouquet of corn. (Great gag, btw.) He attempts to join up, but the other recruits are huge, strapping young pigeons, while he is a Charles Atlas before picture. Depressed, he mopes away, but soon sees a Japanese vulture shooting down a pigeon with an important message. (The vulture is bucktoothed and racist, but at least doesn’t speak, so as wartime racist caricatures go it’s pretty minor). Homer seems out of his league at first, but soon shows that vulture what for and wins out in the end! As a reward, he gets his girl and has several kids, apparently in the space of only a few days. Well, I suppose they are pigeons…

Lastly, we’re back to Woody, who is driving along in his broken-down jalopy when it explodes into ruins. Luckily, he’s right next to a shyster loan company, offering him loans if he’ll put up his car. I was amused to see the wolf who runs the loan office say outright, “Aaaah… a sucker!” without e3ven bothering to correct himself and say customer. Clearly this wolf is bad news. Sadly for the wolf, he’s up against Woody, who after a brief one-cartoon break, is back to being essentially nuts. Woody forgets all about the loan, so the wolf goes to collect, but finds the main problem may be getting in the door. Best gag of the picture: “I DON’T LIKE CHEESECAKE!”. In the end, Woody’s playing dead panics the wolf, who tears up the loan.

These cartoons aren’t bad, but I get the feeling that the Lantz studios are spinning their wheels a bit. Alex Lovy has come on as a director, but he’s just too sedate, and doesn’t work well with Woody. What we really need is a new director to come in and shake things up a bit. Hrm. I wonder if we’ll get that next time? ^_-

I guess I’ve found the size limit for post titles, as it won’t let me fit The Hams That Couldn’t Be Cured up there.

As Walter Lantz is starting 1941, he’s been doing cartoons for well over a decade, and is starting to know what his strengths are and play to them. The trouble had been getting a popular, merchandise-driven character once Oswald’s star had faded, and Woody gave him the ticket revenue he sorely needed. More to the point, however, were his connections to the music world. All the cartoon studios did cartoons based around both classical and jazz music, but Lantz’s jazz cartoons are some of the few where you can actually turn off the picture and enjoy the entire cartoon just listening to the hot band playing on the soundtrack.

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company ‘B’ benefits especially from this, as the basic plot involves a drafted trumpet player trying to avoid being killed by the company (who hate to get up in the morning, to quote another Army song) by replacing his bugle with his golden trumpet and jazzing things up. Needless to say, this works out great, and soon the whole platoon is swinging and dancing. The cartoon features an all-black cast, and there are a few gags I’d say are racist, but the overall tone is nowhere near as bad as Lantz’s infamous Scrub Me Momma With A Boogie Beat the year before, and the emphasis is predominately on the music. This is just a regular Cartune for Lantz, but soon he’s have the idea for a new series.

Meanwhile, Woody appeared next in Pantry Panic, possibly the most widely watched Woody cartoon out there as the copyright was mistakenly not renewed, so it fell into the public domain. Mel Blanc had signed an exclusive with Warners, so was no longer voicing Woody – instead it’s a guy named Danny Webb. The difference is minimal, though, and Woody is still just as insane. Winter is coming, and all the birds are going south for the Winter, with the exception of Woody, who notes it’s a lovely day. Winter does indeed come rapidly (in the space of about 5 seconds) and Woody is forced to retreat to his warm, well-stocked home. Sadly, he makes the mistake of mocking the winter winds, who invade his home and steal all his food. With starvation staring Woody in the face (literally), an evil-looking cat shows up, planning to eat our hero. Unfortunately for him, Woody is a) insane and b) hungry, so Woody is just as homicidal towards the cat. After many murder attempts, the two briefly reconcile to kill and eat a stray moose, before going after each other once more. Watch for the sound error in Woody’s last line, which isn’t sped up as the others are.

Lantz realized his jazz cartoons were big sellers, and so created a whole new cartoon series for them, called ‘Swing Symphonies’. The first in this series was a military cartoon (not really Wartime, as this was produced before Pearl Harbor) called $21 A Day (Once A Month), and featured toys in a department store imitating the soldiers and doing their best marching while singing the title song. Lantz knew how to start off a series by now; this cartoon features cameos by both Woody (who gets the toy soldiers to bound around in a goofy walk imitating his own) and Andy Panda (as a bugle boy). There’s no plot to speak of, but the music is terrific.

We’re now into 1942, and what would the Woody Woodpecker series (now a whole five cartoons old) be without a bullfighting cartoon? Nowhere, that’s where! Woody (still voiced by Danny Webb) is the matador, and posters on the walls show his ritual abuse of various bulls in previous matches. This one fares no better, and the cartoon suffers a bit as a result, as Woody, insane as he is, appears to be in control the entire cartoon, with no sense of menace even when the bull is charging at him. Woody by now is not QUITE pure insanity, though, and shows a genuine gift for low cunning throughout this cartoon, but ends things off with pure force, charging the bull himself and ending up with the bull carved into “extra fresh bullburgers!”. Of note, the print we have now may not be the original – an article from 1944 talks about Lantz reshooting 1/3 of this cartoon to remove stereotypical footage of Mexicans at the bullfight.

The second Swing Symphony, The Hams That Couldn’t Be Cured, has far more plot than the first, and indeed takes a while to get going. It doesn’t help that this is another “The Big Bad Wolf tells the REAL story of how the pigs are little hellions” cartoons that Warners had already done so well with The Trial of Mr. Wolf the previous year. The wolf, about to be strung up, tells everyone that the pigs are rambunctious jazz musicians, invading his home (where he teaches classical music) and demanding lessons, then jazzing up his scales and playing so loudly that it eventually blows up the entire house. The wolf actually gets the townsfolk to believe it, surprisingly, as they chase off after the pigs. Naturally, though, the wolf is telling lies. Not quite as good as $21 A Day, but once the music gets started the timing of the violent destruction is well done.

Next time, we’ll get more Woody, more jazz from the Swing Symphonies, and another failed cartoon star in Homer Pigeon.

It’s late 1940, and Walter Lantz has found a cartoon star that does OK, if not great – Andy Panda. Lantz is still trying other stars, though, knowing that Disney and Warners have several established superstars. He’s also helped along by the hiring of WB director Ben “Bugs” Hardaway to write for him, best known for being the creator of a prototype that wasn’t Bugs Bunny, but would, after several years, become a character given Hardaway’s nickname.

Ben was clearly very fond of the screwball rabbit he’d done for Warners, as the first Andy Panda he worked on featured a very similar insane screwball. Only instead of a rabbit, this one was a woodpecker. Andy (who is still a child, but has lost his cutesy widdle voice, thank God, and just sounds like a normal young cartoon boy) and his father are trying to relax at a cabin, but a relentless pecking is driving them nuts. It’s Woody, in his debut, and voiced by Mel Blanc. In these first few cartoons, Woody is less a character than a force of nature, being utterly insane and prone to hysterics. Andy’s poppa, of course, is from the slow burn school of anger, so you can imagine how well they get on. And Andy wanders through trying to put salt on Woody’s tail (my favorite gag is when Woody whips out a mug of beer to salt, then blows the foam in Andy’s face). In the end, the nuthouse comes to take Woody away, but they prove to be just as nutty as he is, gibbering and hopping madly about.

Two cartoons follow also clearly influenced by Warners, this time the Tex Avery school of spot gag travelogue. Both Fair Today (going around a county fair gags) and Hysterical Highspots in American History (newsreel parody of US history gags) are decent enough, but neither really reach out and grab you, and it’s clear that Lantz isn’t as comfortable with the formula Hardaway brought with him, and didn’t take to it like he did the insane Woody. I did note that the latter cartoon had a reference to the (peacetime) draft, showing we’re headed towards World War II.

Knock Knock got VERY good word of mouth, and not for Andy Panda or his pop. Lantz immediately started cranking out more Woodpecker cartoons, with the year 1941 featuring 3 more. I watched 2 here, one being the self-titled Woody Woodpecker, and the other the aptly named Screwdriver. Both trade on one basic plot: Woody is genuinely mentally unhinged. Warners, with Daffy Duck, almost immediately began toning him down after his initial appearance. Woody hasn’t hit that point yet.

In Woody Woodpecker, the forest animals are all half-disgusted, half-terrified of the insane bird, who already has his own theme song (“Everybody thinks I’m crazy! Yes sirree, that’s me, that’s me…”), and the Universal opening already has the ‘ha-ha-ha-HA-ha’ music with the logo. Eventually even Woody listens to their advice, and goes to see a fox psychiatrist. Sadly, the fox is a fox because Ben Hardaway likes bad puns, and is just as insane as the woodpecker. Seeing Woody battle a force equal (well, almost) to his own is a novelty, but you can see why most screwball cartoons have them go up against dumb guys or tough guys rather than equally crazy loons. The cartoon ends, as Knock Knock did, with the fox acting insane and jumping around.

The Screwdriver has Woody in his speed-happy jalopy trying to run from the long arm of the law, and is a better cartoon, inasmuch as the antagonist is a dumb guy (the cop trying to catch him for speeding), and it has more memorable gags. It’s seen far less often on TV, but that’s likely due to Woody’s racist impression of a Chinaman rickshaw driver towards the end. Woody sings a variation of his ‘crazy’ song again, and is still voiced by Mel Blanc. Best gag has him approaching a four-way stop, grabbing the arm of a blonde girl in another car who’s signaling a turn, and spinning her and her car around like a top. After leaving her dazed in the middle of the road, he drives off, commenting “That’s the dizziest blonde I ever went around with!” The cartoon ends with the cop (in jail) having gone insane, gibbering and jumping up and down. For the third Woody cartoon in a row. Get a new ending, guys.

Like Tex Avery with Bugs Bunny at first, Lantz knows he has a superstar at last, but is not quite sure what to do with him other than make the same cartoon with variations. And worse, Mel Blanc is signing an exclusive with Warners, and he’ll need a new voice for Woody. Not to mention the spot gag parodies didn’t take off. Maybe he should try cartoons based more around jazz – that’s worked in the past. We’ll see what he does next time…