Punny! Punnn-y!

The purpose of the 1938 Warner Bros. cartoon You're An Education is two-fold:

a) to see how many songs can be fit into one animated short
b) to see how many obvious visual puns can be fit into one animated short

I counted 25 different melodies in this cartoon, most used as musical puns. Carl Stalling didn’t have to think hard to come up with tunes to accompany very short scenes about Hawaii or Scotland (Canada is represented by “The Maple Leaf Forever”).

You want obvious puns? Here’s a string of them involving food as an Aunt Jemina-type chorus sings the Warren/Dubin title song.



They’re HUNGRY! Get it?

Now they get food and utensils.



Boxoffice magazine sure liked this cartoon better than I do. Its review of November 26, 1938:

A flight into fancy by the cartoonists that pays swell dividends as entertainment. Done in an ingenuous and brilliant manner, the action takes place on various travel folders. As the action shifts from folder to folder, appropriate music accompanies the change. On top of that, there is a villain who steals a large diamond from the Kimberly mines and is chased through all the foreign cities. It rates as one of the best animation job turned out by this studio.

The trade publication reported on October 22nd that Leon Schlesinger had shipped this cartoon to Warner Bros. exchanges (it was released on November 5th). At the time, Schlesinger had 26 cartoons in some phase of production. Maybe exhaustion due to a heavy release schedule is why director Frank Tashlin and writer Dave Monahan churned out the most corny gags and treated them with a total lack of irony.

Ace Gamer was the credited animator before this was turned into a Blue Ribbon re-release in October 1946.