An example is Cagey Bird, a 1946 release directed by Howard Swift, with animation credits going to Grant Simmons and Roy Jenkins. There’s a take by Flippy the canary I really like, and a couple of desperate escape scenes by the cat that are good. Here’s one toward the end of the cartoon. The cat keeps going higher and higher (managing to stay in mid-air through it all) to avoid a dog’s clamping teeth. Finally, he zips out of the scene. I really like the exaggerated size on the dog’s teeth.
Sid Marcus’ storyline is okay but it needs some punching up. It’s like a Warners cartoon with half the reactions and characters that couldn’t think of anything to say. When Bugs Bunny plays “Doctor Kilpatient” to try to “cure” Elmer Fudd, it’s funny because Bugs says and does funny stuff. The cat as the doctor in this cartoon just doesn’t say a lot and you keep waiting for a punch-line that doesn’t really come. Eddie Kilfeather’s music simply becomes loud and fast during the chase scenes. It has absolutely no subtlety.
Frank Graham plays the dog and I think possibly, maybe, Stan Freberg is voicing the cat. Their talents are wasted, as are Simmons’ and Jenkins’. Simmons soon beat it over to MGM to animate for Tex Avery, before a short stop at Lantz and then as co-head of his own studio with Ray Patterson and Robert Lawrence. Jenkins later ended up at Disney (I wonder if he worked at Swift-Chaplin first) before a stint with Lantz in the early-1960s.
I've seen a couple of those Screen Gems cartoons. They're just painful.
ReplyDeleteJudging from the numerous stretches of the cat on twos, someone at Screen Gems must have been injected with some sort of Pat Matthews serum.
ReplyDeleteThey did get better at mimicking the Warners' house style by the mid-1940s, but even the best of the Screen Gems cartoons, like "Flora", threaten at times to wander off into the weeds, either because they can't think of anything for the characters to do, or like some of the early 30s Fleischer cartoons that were assigned by animator, they do some bit that has no connection to what came before or after it.
ReplyDeleteLike The Fox & The Crow, Flippy would live on in DC comic books, where he and the cat would be called "Flippety & Flop."
ReplyDeletePrompted by this, I actually watched it for the first time. Decent animation, but I have to agree: the music adds nothing, and the gags simply don't work. I think Art Davis did the doctor thing much better in "Odor of the Day."
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the Columbia studio per se nor the music director... It's the studios's poor choice of directors, as neither Howard Swift or Bob Wickersham (despite their Disney animator backgrounds) would EVER be able to be a top-flight director like the long departed Art Davis. As the quasi-Schlesinger remake of the studio by Ray Katz and Henry Binder got going (and Sid Marcus was firmly back in the director's chair) the cartoons improved markedly.
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