Thursday 20 June 2013

Hey, Taxi

If I had a choice of one Droopy cartoon to watch, it’d be the wonderful Western “Drag-a-Long Droopy” (released 1954). The gags keep coming one after another and they’re funny even if you’ve seen the cartoon a thousand times and know they’re coming.

Here’s a favourite. Droopy jumps from the second storey of a saloon onto his burro and escapes from the wolf.



The wolf tries it and misses the horse.



He moves the horse to where he missed. He now lands where the horse was before.



He solves the problem by suddenly hailing a cab.



Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, Bob Bentley, Walt Clinton and Mike Lah get on-screen animation credits.

3 comments:

  1. This scene reminds me of a 50s Walter Lantz cartoon, the poses especially, but the main difference is that MGM animation will ALWAYS be smoother than 50s onward Lantz, in fact in the CinemaScope years, there's a huge benefit in not having Les Kline ruin every scene he touches.....

    And defiantly after this cartoon, Tex Avery returned to the Lantz studio briefly, and shockingly Don Patterson as a director is INDEED equal to Tex Avery as a director, AWESOME!!

    Asim.

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  2. My favorite scene here is the idea of the bull running up to the rancher's house and basically doing a Lassie impersonation of trying to bark out (or in this case, bah and moo out) the problem, before giving up and yelling at him in English (though admittedly, if you didn't grow up with Lassie TV and movies in constant rotation on television, the gag source might be a little less apparent).

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  3. JL, the only thing that's not strong to me is the ending but there's so much fun packed in this. I love moo-moo-moo-baa-baa-baa because it's just so silly but makes sense.

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