Friday 15 January 2021

Let's Steal This Idea

Warner Bros. had gophers. Disney had chipmunks. So it was that Paul Terry decided to have beavers. Terrytoons’ version of a pair of animals vs dog appeared in Beaver Trouble (1951).

The dog notices the beavers carting away his logs for a dam. There’s no huge take. The dog’s eyes grow wide and he has an odd leap to get out of his doghouse.

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Carlo Vinci gives the beavers a jaunty walk cycle, while Tom Morrison’s story is more Disneyesque than a Chip and Dale short. The dog can’t bring himself to shoot the thieving rodents, and they can’t bear to see him shiver in the cold over the winter, so they make him an honorary beaver and they trot off toward their lodge in the background as the picture ends.

Connie Rasinski is the director. Phil Scheib has variations of the same two bars of music through the whole cartoon (including a minor key version). Fans of the Terry Splash, Cymbal Crash and Drum Thump will be pleased watching this one.

1 comment:

  1. Dimwit was such a mentally unarmed adversary it would have been hard to have anything but a Disneyesque ending here with it being close to satisfying, compared to Donald with Chip & Dale, where the duck's nastiness then justifies what he ends up getting (Avery and Maltese sort of ran into the same problem when they paired Bugs & Willoughby in "The Heckling Hare", where the extended fall gag masks the fact that Bugs emerging totally triumphant over such a low brain-powered foe would have felt like the rabbit punching down 2-3 weight classes).

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