A flower (is it a red clover?) puts on a bluebell for a hat.
Look! It’s Harpo Marx!
Naturally, he has to play a spider web as a harp. And there’s a harp on the soundtrack playing “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.”
Norman Spencer’s usual back beat woodblock is part of the arrangement, while J.S. Zamecnik’s "Traffic" shows up when the snail starts running to when the watermelon juice puts out the fire. Spencer even treats us to march-tempo versions of the title song.
Oh, and an inside joke as the end of the cartoon!
Whether cartoon writer Tedd Pierce liked the ladies more than Harpo did on screen is open to debate.
Way back yonder when I was kid, whenever one of these terminally dull 1930s Merrie Melodies musical extravaganzas invaded that afternoon's BUGS BUNNY AND FRIENDS, it was a signal to me to flip channels for ten minutes to see how Colonel Hogan was making monkeys out of the Germans that afternoon on channel 9, or what rescue attempt Gilligan was ruining over on channel 5. I think if I'd been programming BUG BUNNY AND FRIENDS for that station, I'd have avoided a lot of that 1930s MM deadwood like the plague, but whoever did program the show only seemed to have the rule that the third of the three cartoons they aired was always a Bugs Bunny. For the first two cartoons, it was anything goes. Some afternoons you'd come up a winner and there'd be two good cartoons preceding Bugs. Other afternoons they'd make you sit through THE CAT CAME BACK and I'D LOVE TO TAKE ORDERS FROM YOU to get to Bugs. Certain cartoons would show up over and over again, quite inexplicably, until you started to hope the print would get shredded in the projector. I remember LITTLE DUTCH PLATE playing again and again. It certainly couldn't have been out of viewer requests. BILLBOARD FROLICS was another. "Not THIS again?!" Oh, what we had to put up with.
ReplyDeleteI go back a little further. In the 60s, at least two stations I could watch ran Warners cartoons during the day but only one (which we got with a special antenna) broadcast these mid-30s ones. The best part to me was the jester at the opening and closing, and reading the copyright date to see how old they were. Billboard Frolics was the only memorable one solely because I knew the products.
ReplyDeleteTedd Pierce was apparently around then so I don't understand why the stories were so weak and uninspired. Tom Armstrong and the other writers settled for merely amusing at best. Fortunately, Tex came along to slap the Schlesinger studio's collective face and say "Let's make people really laugh."
When I think of Warner cartoons from the '30s I think of cartoons that have the cast either singing and dancing or engaged in supposedly amusing vignettes for the first two thirds of the running time before everyone joins together to rout the villain, who has usually kidnapped one of the nondescript female characters. There probably aren't as many of those as I think there are but sometimes it can seem like every other cartoon Warner made into the mid-late '30s stuck to that formula.
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