A fun Carlo Vinci walk cycle? Check.
Cymbal clash after a character crash-lands? Check.
Drum thump sound after a character falls? Check.
Terry Brake Squeal™? Not this time.
Terry Splash™? Check.
Phil Scheib running music with saxophones and strings? Check.
Oh, and we can’t leave out...
Crazy Jim Tyer straight-ahead animation? Double check.
This could describe dozens of Terrytoons but the one on the list today is Papa’s Little Helpers (1951). Papa hooks up a wire to a TV antenna but those scampish Terry Bears have plugged the other end into an electrical socket. What wags! You know the end result is tailor-made for Tyer’s type of animation.
Doug Moye is Pa Terry Bear. I wish he would have been given more grumbling dialogue. Is Dayton Allen doing the other voices?
There’s an enjoyable inside joke in the last background painting. The Bear family gives up on TV, and with great satisfaction lope to a theatre where Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons are playing. No doubt 20th Century Fox patted Terry on the back for that ending.
This was sort of Chuck Jones' Three Bears cartoons meets MGM's Captain and the Kids efforts, depending on whether the Terry staff could figure out a way for the imps to innocently sabotage their father, or if they would deliberately do it. The latter might have spawned two comic strips and a short-lived theatrical series, but after a while you just wanted Papa to catch the two brats and spank the tar out of them.
ReplyDeleteI don't know the cartoon (okay, so shoot me), but I bet these individual drawings are funnier than the finished scene.
ReplyDeleteYou omitted the Crumpled Aluminum Can from your checklist.
ReplyDeleteYou know, until you mentioned it, I didn't realise that's what the sound was. (I guess aluminum was easier to get than tin during the war years).
DeleteI shouldn't really call it the "Terry" brake squeal. It's from a record; Jack Benny used it on his radio show.
Just speculation on my part, but that's what it sounds like to me.
Delete