A-Peel-ing Dance

A mouse dancing with a banana peel? Sounds like something from an early ‘30s cartoon where everything inanimate came to life. But it’s not. It’s from the 1956 Cinemascope cartoon Muscle Beach Tom. There’s no reason for the peel to be dancing, which is fine by me. The animation’s pretty attractive.



On the other hand, we have 1940s incidental character meeting 1950s incidental character. The designs for Butch and the girl cat don’t seem like they belong in the same cartoon.



Ray Patterson has his own animation studio now, so Lew Marshall has replaced him in the Hanna-Barbera unit, along with Irv Spence, Ed Barge and Ken Muse.