Contented Cows

The Carnation Milk people weren’t the only ones with contented cows in the 1930s. The Charles Mintz studio had them, too. Here’s a cow delighted to be milked by Oopy in Technoracket. (Note the cow is wearing shoes).



Everything on the farm is fine until Scrappy reads a paper crowing about the wonders of technology. “You’re fired!” he says to the animals and Oopy with a wave of his hand, and brings in mechanical animals and workers.



The mechanical cow gives milk—right in the bottle. It’s amazing! It’s technology!



Crazed, destructive, dystopian robots? Think that’s an original idea in overly post-produced, CGI-laden feature films today? Pah! It’s here in a 1933 Scrappy cartoon where Oopy, angered at his summary dismissal, destroys the robot control panel and the mechanical men run amok, including chasing Scrappy with axes.

Sid Marcus came up with the story, which is pretty inventive, and Art Davis gets the animation credit.

Sorry for the contrasty, fuzzy screen grabs. It’s all I can find on the internet.

I had never heard of Scrappy until I read Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic soon after it was published. I (and likely many others) learned much about Scrappy cartoons thanks to a great pair of articles in the wonderful magazine Animania (né Mindrot) some 35-plus years ago. I have a lot of fondness for that pre-internet era where some terrific, studious researchers (many still around today) dug and dug and found out information about cartoons that people take for granted today. Back then, I never would have dreamed of ever seeing obscure cartoons like Scrappy whenever I wanted to in my own home.

Harry McCracken, among many things in life, has chronicled as much as he can about Charles Mintz’s beloved Scrappy so we all can learn more. He has reprinted those Animania articles on his website and you can find them right here.