As we get into the period I’m covering here, from 1938 to late 1940, the Lantz studios were doing OK but not great. They’d retired Oswald, but hadn’t really found a character to replace him that would be popular and possibly sell some merchandise. So a lot of the cartoons in this period feature characters that appeared in only a few cartoons as ‘tests’ to see if they would catch on with the moviegoer. With one exception, they didn’t. And even the exception would only be a ‘minor star’.

First, though, we’ve got another Hollywood caricatures parody, this one revolving around the opening of the Hollywood Bowl. Note that the Bowl had already been around for 16 years when this cartoon aired, so I can only assume they meant for a new season. In any case, half the cartoon is an excuse to see celebrity caricatures. The impersonations have gotten better since Wax Works, though we still aren’t anywhere near you average Warner Brothers cartoon. They still can’t do a Groucho voice, for example. The ‘plot’ involves Leopold Stokowski attempting to conduct Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, with some magic gloves playing all the instruments. This leads to some very intriguing, arty sequences, which sadly also show the art limitations at the time – Lantz’s group can’t draw hands well. Disney had similar issues 3-4 years ago. When it becomes clear the symphony really is unfinished, Stokowski storms off, and we get a bunch of stars finishing the show off – Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and Martha Raye among them. We even get Jack Benny at the violin. Quite an interesting cartoon, if only to show how well Warners’ celebrity cartoons hold up compared to their rivals. It’s also the last B&W; cartoon I have on DVD – everything from now on is in color.

The first of our three attempts at cartoon stars here is L’il Eightball, a young black boy with a deep voice (well, deep for a boy as young as he’s supposed to be). A Haunting We Will Go is his final cartoon, so clearly he didn’t work out. It’s a very well-made cartoon, especially if you like ghosts. A ‘child’ ghost is enjoying going around and scaring various animals, but comes across our hero, who says that he doesn’t believe in ghosts. L’il Eightball is a bit racist, what with his jive talking and ‘hyuk hyuk’ laugh, but compared to other black characters of the period, he’s really fairly harmless. The ghost takes him to see his ghost father, who gets together with his pals to scare the child. They do this mostly by shaking him up, with lots of ghost tricks and reality-bending mind games. Windows roll up into the wall, shadows become nets, etc. At first holding out, L’il Eightball finally ends up getting scared out of his wits – though denying it to the end. Incidentally, he was voiced by Mel Blanc, who still freelanced at this point.

We then get Life Begins for Andy Panda, which is, quite naturally, Andy’s first cartoon. After Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy, Andy is Lantz’s best knows star, and this short makes his birth – literally, it begins with the forest creatures congratulating the pandas on their new baby. (The title, by the way, is not a parody of the movie Life Begins for Andy Hardy. That movie came out 2 years after this cartoon.) Andy quickly grows to about 6 months old, to become a mischievous and curious toddler, who drives his father crazy with constant questions. Then he tries to go out of the forest, and his father yells at him, saying if he does that he’ll “wind up in the newsreel!”. Of course, telling a toddler not to do something never works out. Andy runs off, and when his father tries to catch him he is captured by a tribe of pygmy African hunters. These caricatures, unlike L’il Eightball, are as bad as they sound, being a bunch of racist African ‘unga bunga’ types, all interchangeable. The other forest creatures, as well as Andy’s mother, hear about this and run off to the rescue. Sadly, Andy still wants to be in the newsreel. This is a decent short, but I don’t like Andy as a precious l’il tyke.

However, it’s magical compared to the next cartoon. Scrambled Eggs stars Peterkin, a cute boy satyr (yes, you read that right) who is playing his flute in the forest and looking for mischief to cause. He is distracted by a bunch of birds of various types in the tree above him, all of whom are waiting for their eggs to hatch. (We even see a woodpecker couple, though we don’t get Woody just yet.) Peterkin decides to have some fun and switches all the eggs, so that the sparrows have a blackbird egg, etc. This leads to all the parents fighting and storming off (as the dads think their wives have cheated on them), leaving all the babies behind. Oh well, so much for sympathetic parents. Peterkin isn’t much better, as he’s presented as cute and adorable and twee in the worst kind of Disney imitator way, and you just want him to get his ass kicked. It’s sort of fun seeing the bratty little babies demanding food and water and entertainment, but really, this is a giant drag. This was Peterkin’s only cartoon, and I can see why.

In the meantime, Andy Panda had done better than the other short-lived characters, and returns in the aptly titled 100 Pygmies and Andy Panda. It’s not as good as the other Andy cartoon I saw, sadly, and features, as you can no doubt guess, the same racist African hunters, this time with a Witch Doctor added. Andy has gotten a magic wand in the mail, and is enjoying using it to make bunnies appear and torture his father. However, the witch doctor’s magic mask now says that Andy is more powerful than him. (Man, imagine if Andy had gone for the sea monkeys instead. We’d have no cartoon!) The witch doctor goes to confront Andy, who quickly conjures up some shoes to literally kick his ass. So the witch doctor calls in the titular 100 pygmies, who chase after Andy and corner him. They grab the wand, but use the wrong magic words to activate it, and end up trapped in the middle of a live-action city street, running away from cars. (The city street is in black and white, but this cartoon is in color, making it even more jarring and weird.) This would thankfully be the last appearance of the pygmies (who’d also battled Andy and his dad in a fishing cartoon earlier in the year.)

So Andy’s doing OK, but not terrific. Lantz would continue to try new one-shot characters with him, however, In fact, in his next cartoon we’ll see Andy and his father battle a particularly obnoxious woodpecker…

Ready for 5 more Walter Lantz cartoons he created for Universal Pictures, these five ranging from the years 1934 to 1936. Four of the five are very similar, and very much what one expects when told they’re watching a 30s cartoon trying to imitate Disney. That fifth one, though… it’s different, I’ll grant it that.

Jolly Little Elves is an interesting cartoon for many reasons, none of which relate to the action on screen. It was Lantz’s first color cartoon, and also his first cartoon not to star a regular character such as Oswald and Pooch. It was a straight up attempt to try to do a Disney Silly Symphony (the line would be called ‘Cartune Classics’, and it had a much higher budget than usual. And for a 1934 cartoon, it actually looks well animated and designed. It uses the 2-strip Technicolor technique, as Disney owned the rights to 3-strip until 1935. This means that the palette looks a little drab, with lots of red and blue but little richness. As for the cartoon itself, it’s a Shoemaker and the Elves cartoon. If I just tell you nothing but that, you’d be able to write 3/4 of the gags seen here. There’s little to no irony or surprise, as you might see in a later Warners cartoon with the same subject. It’s just cute shoemaking, along with some choruses of Dunk Dunk Dunk (Oh How I Love To Dunk Doughnuts). However, this was what folks wanted from a cartoon in 1934. It was nominated for an Academy Award (it lost to Disney’s The Tortoise and the Hare), and Disney was reportedly worried he’d have serious competition. No worries there, though – the Cartune Classics ended up being rarities, as Universal couldn’t afford too many of them.

Lantz fell back on the old standard for his second color cartoon – celebrity caricatures. He also threw in Oswald as well, though Oswald plays a smaller role. Toyland Premiere’s premise is that Christmas is coming up, and to get kids jazzed up for it they’re throwing a big parade in New York City – sorry, a city somewhere that is unnamed – followed by a party at Macy’s – excuse me, City Department Store. I get you don’t want to alienate your non-NYC viewers, but sheesh, be less obvious. After some brief Santa angst when moths eat his suit, and a few cute parade shots, we’re at the premiere, which features Johnny Weismuller and his wife Lupe Velez (he’s doing Tarzan, but that’s clearly Velez rather than Maureen O’Sullivan), Shirley Temple, Laurel and Hardy, Frankenstein’s Monster (Karloff, presumably), Eddie Cantor (in blackface throughout), and Bing Crosby (whose vocal imitator gets the speech right, but not the singing). Laurel and Hardy dominate the 2nd half of the cartoon, which features them trying to get at the cake before it’s divided up. Unfortunately, the end of this cartoon is cut in all available prints, so the obvious end gag (Santa blows so hard on the candles the cake lands on Laurel and Hardy) is missing. Shane, as it means a weak ending to a fun cartoon.

Candyland is next, and I’m already starting to get my fill of cutesy. After seeing several ethnic stereotype babies going to sleep, we focus on the one baby who isn’t, a little Italian kid. You can tell he’s Italian (or at least a recent immigrant) as his father is yelling at him right out of the Chico Marx school of dialect. Atsomatta, you no sleep? No, he’s not sleeping, as he wants candy. So the Sandman takes the kid from his father (who happily lets him go off with no word about where they’re going – he could be going to Happy Cartoon Torture Land for all we know), and kid and dog end up in Candyland, the magic factory where candy is made, ruled by The Candy Man. Candy making gags follow, similar to the shoemaking gags 2 cartoons ago. There’s some very odd perspective here, as the kid and dog are clearly bigger than the elves making the candy, but as we normally just see the elves by themselves (they look like old men), when combined there’s a visual dissonance. In the end the journey is nightmarish, as the king decides to give the kid castor oil. In the end, he’s crying again and Italian dad is back where he started.

Springtime Serenade is technically an Oswald cartoon, and it’s in color (rather washed out color – this isn’t a great print, though they did their best to restore it). Oswald has a wife, and for once she’s actually a rabbit. Makes a change from all of his cat and dog girlfriends of yore. The sun is shining, the trees are blooming and spring is in the air. All the cute l’il animals are frolicking and being cute, despite the annoying old German groundhog telling them he sees his shadow, so winter isn’t over yet. They ignore him and go about their spring cleaning for most of the cartoon. As they finish and Oswald open his summer resort, winter returns, and they all rush back inside. Easily the dullest cartoon of the five I viewed.

And then there’s Puppet Show. We’re back to black and white for this one, and it again stars Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. By this point, however, Oswald had lost his ‘inkblot’ design, and become a white Easter bunny type rabbit. The basic plot of this cartoon is that Oswald is presenting a puppet show, which features him manipulating several puppets in song and dance. What makes it odd is that the puppets are live-action, and over half the cartoon is just live-action sequences of various puppets doing a vaudeville routine. The rather fey emcee introduces an Arabian snake charm dance (with a very buxom puppet doing the dance instead of a snake); two Latin dancers; and a black torch singer with her piano player, singing as two other black puppets dance. Oswald is at this point bothered by a rather persistent bee, who first gets the puppets all tangled then stings Oswald, who falls to the ground and gets knocked out. We then switch to animation full-time, as the now-animated black dance puppets come to life, and one decides to strike off on his own. The other puppet chides him, noting that they can’t do anything without someone pulling their strings. The first puppet wanders off, at first sort of sliding but once he gets a bunch of balloons attached to him more freely. He arrives at a toy department, and wants to be one of the others. The other toys permit him to try out for their toyland gala, but when one of his balloons pops, it becomes clear that he’s a horrible, disgusting puppet. The toys decide to show him what happens to those who try to get above their station by sawing him into firewood. Oswald, thankfully, wakes up at this point, and finishes his live-action puppet show. If you think that the 2nd half of this movie sounds like it has hideously creepy racial subtext, you’re absolutely right. I doubt it was intentional, but the black puppet being jeered and then tortured by the toy mob is just mind-boggling today. Still, it was easily the most interesting cartoon of the five I watched, if perhaps not for the right reasons.

Next time we’ll see Lantz retiring Oswald, and trying to find a new cartoon star in Andy Panda.

Time to settle in with five more Walter Lantz cartoons he made for Universal in 1933 and 1934. This batch of 5 is better than the preceding batch, though it still shows the major weakness of Lantz’s studios at the time: dull lead characters, poor voice acting when they’re not singing, and an overuse of dream sequence endings.

Of course, it’s not like they could afford top of the line. We’re in the midst of the depression, where you make do with what you can get. The first cartoon I viewed today, Confidence, is pure New Deal propaganda, with as much subtlety as your average editorial cartoon. (Indeed, Depression is depicted as a flying vulture/cloud thing with ‘DEPRESSION’ written across it, almost exactly like an editorial cartoon.) Oswald the Lucky Rabbit owns a chicken farm, and the happy animals sing and dance and then go off to lay eggs. Sadly, the depression cloud thing slouches through the farm, and suddenly the animals are falling over half-dead and all the chickens act drunk and dazed. Oswald screams for a doctor, in a weird montage sequence where we see people rioting at a bank and on Wall Street, as well as hiding money under a mattress. Oswald goes to a doctor, but the doctor points out that for this problem, Roosevelt is who Oswald needs. Oswald flies to Washington via a self-made plane, and marches right in to Roosevelt (oh, those were the days), asking what is needed to help his farm. Roosevelt (in a good caricature but a horrible voice – get used to that) marches out from behind his desk and tells Oswald that confidence is what’s needed! Confidence for the purposes of this cartoon being something that Oswald can inject into people with a glue gun. For those noting Roosevelt bopping around and dancing here, this was at a period where his physical capabilities were still very much a secret to the average American. Oswald goes back to his hometown and injects confidence into everyone. They start returning all their money to banks, and the chickens and animals are happy again. Very much of its time, but entertaining nevertheless.

The next cartoon, King Klunk, is probably the highlight, being a great parody of Universal’s classic King Kong, which had come out earlier that year. It starred the Oswald clone Pooch the Pup, which was odd considering Lantz was also cranking out Oswalds. Pooch’s voice is a bit deeper, but otherwise he is essentially Oswald as a dog. He even gets Oswald’s dog girlfriend from other cartoons. Pooch and his girl are in Darkest Africa trying to photograph the giant gorilla. After a few somewhat racist native caricatures (after seeing Buddy of the Apes from Schlesinger’s studio, trust me, this one is pretty tame), The gorilla arrives, and rejects the native girl he’s being offered as a sacrifice. He decides to grab Pooch’s girl and eat her, but then Cupid arrives with a well-placed arrow and makes Klunk fall in love with her instead. Most of the rest of the beats of the movie are here. The gorilla fights a dinosaur, and is defeated by Pooch, who drags it back to New York (they spend the entire trip back making out in their boat, while the gorilla walks behind them on the ocean floor). Eventually the gorilla captures Pooch’s girl again and goes to the Empire State Building, where Pooch, having commandeered a plane, sends him hurtling to his death. Watch for the surprise cameo by the native African girl for the end gag.

Another parody follows, though this one is a lot less connected to the movie it’s a takeoff of. She Done Him Right is a spoof of Mae West films, with Pooch’s girlfriend given a much bigger bust so she can be a parody of Mae West. Pooch himself is no Cary Grant, though. He goes to see her show, which consists of a long performance of the Cab Calloway classic Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day, itself a sequel to the original Minnie the Moocher. It’s strange seeing a Calloway song in a cartoon sung by neither Calloway (as in the Fleischer cartoons where he featured as himself) or a Calloway caricature (as in Schlesinger’s films). Still, the girl singing it does a very good job, showing why Lantz tries to have song and dance rather than dialogue – the spoken stuff is wretched. Eventually the girl’s sugar daddy tries to make off with her and Oswald – sorry, Pooch – rescues her, in an ending that seems very tacked on. I think they’d have done better trying to parody the actual film She Done Him Wrong, but not only was it a Paramount film, rather than Universal, it was also hugely controversial at the time.

Back to Oswald (She Done Him Right was the last Pooch cartoon) with The Merry Old Soul, the first of two cartoons in a row revolving around celebrity caricatures. This one begins with Oswald getting a tooth out at the dentist’s. The tooth is proving stubborn, so Oswald gets anesthetic the hard way – via a mallet – and the dentist tries again. Unfortunately, they’re interrupted by the news on the radio that Old King Cole is depressed. We see the king, looking sad and droopy, with his lame jester trying his best to cheer him. Oswald knows better, though, and goes around grabbing a bunch of Hollywood stars. We see Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo (and her feet), Ed Wynn, Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, and the Marx Brothers. The whole cartoon eventually degenerates into a giant pie fight, which cheers the king right up, despite his getting hit with pies himself. The jester gets rather jealous of all this, and kidnaps Oswald, taking him to the dungeons and hanging him by his neck. Of course, this turns out to be the signal for it to be All Just A Dream, as Oswald is still getting his tooth out. This cartoon was good enough to get Lantz’s first Academy Award nomination, though it lost to Disney’s Three Little Pigs.

Lastly, we have Wax Works, a somewhat lesser attempt to do a celebrity caricature cartoon, also starring Oswald. He owns a Wax Museum here, and late one night a penniless mother leaves a baby on his stoop. (I note the wax museum has a night bell. I hope that’s for deliveries, as I can’t imagine someone needing to view wax figures at 2 in the morning.) Oswald is reluctant, as a swinging bachelor, to take care of a baby (actually pretty much a toddler after the first 2 minutes or so), but takes him in anyway. The kid gets up in the middle of the night to get some water, and starts wandering around the museum, and the statues decide to come to life and have a party. Notable here is a Groucho caricature who has one of the worst voice actors I’ve ever heard. Not only does it not sound like Groucho, they aren’t even trying to! This is a shame, as one of the jokes involving him is a takeoff on the Marx Brothers Broadway musical I’ll Say She Is!, a takeoff on Napoleon. Eventually the kid get taken into a basement where he’s menaced by various Universal horror monsters, who turn him into wax (the wax toddler sculpture is actually a bit creepy), then go after Oswald, who has finally woken up. Again, the voice acting for the Universal monsters is just wretched. However, all is well, as Oswald wake up – for real this time – to find it was… sigh… all just a dream.

None of these were fantastic, but none were quite as dull as some of the Oswalds I reviewed last time, and in general I enjoyed these. Definitely find King Klunk if you can.