Barney's In The Army Now

Barney Bear spent his entire career in cartoons getting put upon. In “The Rookie Bear” (1941), Barney’s name comes up in the military draft and he thinks he’s going on a holiday when he’s actually been inducted into the U.S. Army (it’s all a dream, with Rudy Ising’s writer providing a twist at the end).

Barney looks around his new tourist digs and backs into a mounted machine gun, which he sets off by accident. Here are some of the drawings. They’re used several times in the scene.



Barney stumbles away and into the next disaster when mortar cannon go off.



The cartoon only bears Ising’s credit, so we’ll leave it to the experts to say who worked on it (note Mark Kausler’s comment about this scene). I understand the narrator is Gayne Whitman, who did narration work for RKO on some military shorts when the war really got going. He also wrote and narrated the Popular Science shorts for Paramount in the late ‘30s. I’ll happily be corrected on that.