Gallopin Gals

“Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket,” Joe Barbera remembers Fred Quimby telling him after the first Tom and Jerry cartoon, “Puss Gets the Boot,” was made in 1940. So Joe and Bill Hanna toiled away on some decidedly lesser offerings until, as legend has it, Interstate Theatre booker Besa Short asked the mucky-mucks at MGM when her theatres were going to get more cat and mouse cartoons. That’s when the mucky-mucks told Quimby to tell Joe and Bill to stick to the cat and mouse.

Four non Tom-and-Jerrys were made by Hanna and Barbera in 1940-41; the first was credited to Rudy Ising. The second was “Gallopin’ Gals,” featuring female horses with huge mouths making catty comments while a derelict mare beats them all to win the big race.

There are no animator credits, so I can’t tell who use who drew these. One horse has a shiny nose; the other has mascara running.



The clutzy, mute derelict, Maggie, has hay-fever, the narrator tells us. Multiple heads after a sneeze.



The cartoon’s an interesting footnote in the careers of Hanna and Barbera, but I can’t see the characters as more than one-shots.

Sara Berner gets to try out a few impressions and her Brooklyn accent playing some of the horses. You can hear Elvia Allman as well. A few of the horses, including a blonde, are voiced by Blanche Stewart, who was on “The Bob Hope Show” at the time where she and Allman played Brenda and Cobina; characters who sounded like they had horse-faces, too. I can’t place the narrator, but he sounds familiar.