Look at the straw hat guy on the far left. He makes a motion with his hands outlining the figure of a curvaceous beauty. It seems everyone in Hicksville thinks Miss Glory is some kind of Jean Harlow-like knock-out.
This is reinforced in the Art Moderne dream sequence.
The payoff is it turns out Miss Glory is a child star with a squealy Berneice Hansell voice and a Jack Benny catchphrase. Play Don!
As you likely know, the art for the dream sequence was dreamed up by Leadora Congdon. You can read more about her in this post.
The lumpy house style of Warners in the mid-1930s is quite a contrast to the angular Art Deco look of the middle of the cartoon, and actually fits the hick-vs.-sophisticate contrast Avery & crew were going for ... as long as you don't think about the end gag's premise too much (the gag seems to make her out as a Shirley Temple-type, but unless Hicksville is so poor they can't afford a bulb for the movie theater projector, everyone would know what Miss Glory looks like. And if she's a radio star, the censors probably wouldn't have looked too kindly on NBC or CBS if they were using a little girl to mouth adult female lines on one of their shows).
ReplyDeleteThey had fun with that dream sequence. From the mouth's point of view, pouring down martinis and belching. Men in tails running to get the smallest glimpse of Miss Glory. Some great art in that sequence.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Errol. I like the way Avery was able to use the art style to set up gags.
DeleteI gather Avery was not really crazy about this cartoon. Then again, it wasn't the narrative style he had adopted at the end of his MGM years.
"Miss Glory" showed what UPA figured out a decade later: if you stylize the characters, you have to stylize the animation to match or it doesn't work.
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