Tuesday 19 May 2020

A Drive With Woody

Woody Woodpecker is in a car singing his original theme song in The Loan Stranger (1942). He opens The Screwdriver (1941) the same way but the animation and the song lyrics are different.

In the short, Woody flies for a bit and pops out of different parts of his car.



Some people bash these early Woodys but he’s still fairly expressive to me. He knocks on his head when he sings “Knock on wood.” We even get some perspective animation when he sings “So are you!!” and points at the theatre audience.



Frank Tipper gets the animation credit. He left the studio during the war. Alex Lovy is the director (Tipper and Lovy were related for a time through marriage).

1 comment:

  1. The problem with the early Woodys was the same problem as with the early Daffys after enough of them were made, in that you couldn't get inside his head for motivation on why he was doing what he was doing. It just meant without a really strong story hook, all the narratives just sort of blend together (which is why Culhane was able to re-do "Pantry Panic" only a few years later, because starvation gave Woody a motivation the audience could connect with).

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