Radio Ruckus

Sonny isn’t impressed with snoozing dad listening to Mendelsohn’s “Spring Song” on the radio and changes the station to get a screaming-type Gangbusters show. Suddenly dad isn’t sleeping any more. Here are some of the drawings as he jumps from his chair. Some are animated on twos, others on threes.



The kid isn’t happy.

The animation’s reused in the same scene when an off-screen phone rings.

This is some of the gentle humour in the propaganda cartoon Meet King Joe, an industrial short by the John Sutherland studio. This was one of the Sutherland cartoons that MGM put on its release schedule after disbanding its Lah-Blair unit, no doubt in a cost move.

The Sutherland cartoons were slickly made. There are some stylised backgrounds in some scenes; building outlines over a flat colour. Former MGMers like George Gordon and Carl Urbano were at Sutherland when this was made but there are no credits on the short. Bud Hiestand is the narrator but I don’t know who is voicing Joe, though it’s a Hollywood radio actor.