How Now Singing Cow

Ub Iwerks’ Jack and the Beanstalk hewed to the Disney formula of songs and animals (birdies fly around in the opening scene with trees on overlays in the foreground).

The studio’s writing staff tried to get some humour into the opening song after Jack’s mother cries. The lyrics are a little mild, but it is a Disney imitation, after all.

Mother: We haven’t any food and we haven’t got a cent
Jack: It’s weeks and weeks since we paid the rent.

Pan to a shot of a picture on the wall of eaten food. Pan to a cat.



Cat: Meow! I’m hungry! I’d like a little fish.

Cut to the fish. He’s not skin and bones. He’s just bones.



Fish: Now look at me. I’m not your dish.

Cut to a cow. The designer’s done their best by coming up with bent blue horns and having a spider live underneath it. It has the Iwerks tear-drop eyes (Flip was drawn the same way sometimes).



Cow: I must have some hay but I ate it all up.

Cut to the spider. I can’t really tell what he’s singing but it ends “since I was a pup.”



Jack and his mom agree to sell the cow. The characters are happy.



I like the dancing beans and the singing purse and some of the designs (like the mysterious blue guy who sells Jack the beans). Carl Stalling (uncredited) has the beanstalk growing in time to the beat of the music in places. And there’s some imaginative (for 1933) dissolving where drawings remain in place while the backgrounds and characters fade out and in.

This was the first of the ComiColor cartoons produced by Iwerks. Unfortunately, they were released on a states-rights basis and not a major studio which could have pumped in the capital needed to make colour shorts during the Depression. The series finally petered out in 1936 and the cartoons found their way into the home film market.