Goats Don't Make Good Kites

Tex Avery’s Southern wolf returns in Billy Boy, where he spend the cartoon trying to get rid of a baby goat that eats everything.

The cartoon motors through a bunch of gags, some better than others. In this one, the wolf ties Billy to a kite and sends him aloft.



Whether the idea was the wolf was going to let go of the kite string, I don’t know. In any case, the goat eats the string and floats down in the shape of a kite. The wolf is whistling but there’s no whistling on the soundtrack in this scene.



“Hey, Billy,” he calmly says. The goat stops chewing and looks up at him. “Break it up, son.” (The line was used in the first Southern wolf cartoon, The Three Little Pups and to better effect).



Walt Clinton, Mike Lah, Bob Bentley and Grant Simmons animated this cartoon, with Ray Patterson borrowed from the Hanna-Barbera unit. It looks like Joe Montell painted the backgrounds. Lah, Clinton and Montell ended up at the Hanna-Barbera studio, along with a close proximity of the wolf’s voice (which became a hound’s voice) provided by Daws Butler.

You can hear the soundtrack without Daws at this link.