Friday 24 January 2020

Wooden Shoes Are Xylophones

Jerry’s magic pencil can create all kinds of things, even if they don’t make much sense. Then again, Pencil Mania is a Van Beuren cartoon, so it doesn’t have to make sense.

Jerry shaves wood off his pencil to create wooden shoes. Then he grabs Tom’s hat (and pulls his nose for no particular reason), touches it with the pencil and out come some kind of bird.



The birds play “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” with their bodies. The shoes sound like xylophones. The birds, for added Van Beuren incongruity, wear hats and smoke cigars.



“Rag Doll” by Nacio Herb Brown opens this cartoon when Tom and a cow whose portrait he is painting are dancing. The cow vanishes very early in the cartoon.

John Foster and George Stallings get a “By” credit with the music, as usual, under the superintendence of Gene Rodemich.

2 comments:

  1. I think my buddy top_cat_james mentioned 4 years ago that "Rag Doll" was the song with the cow.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hxdmJpnq_J8

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  2. I suspect he did. There's a reference to the name of the song in another post about this cartoon. Evidently my memory's going.
    Thanks for posting this note.

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