Tuesday 15 April 2014

The Dancing Monkey

John Irving Pettybone wants to find a place to conduct his Dixieland record. He puts it inside an organ grinder’s box.



Suddenly, the organ grinder’s blasé monkey jumps into an insane dance. Here are some of the drawings. You can see the organ grinder’s reaction.



This is from “Dixieland Droopy” (released 1954). Tex Avery used the same kind of gag later in “Cellbound.”

Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah are the animators in this cartoon. I suspect Lah, who did the great possum dance in “Impossible Possum,” was responsible for this one, too.

1 comment:

  1. Avery's only real CinemaScope cartoon (well, real-er than the two remakes done after he left the studio -- though it was during the period when MGM was releasing in both widescreen and the standard Academy ratio, so as with the early Tom & Jerry widescreens, extra care seems to have been taken not to use the wider edges of the screen for anything but backgrounds and brief entry/exits into scenes).

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