What's on the Tangled TV Set Today?

Tangled Television (1940) isn’t really about television. There wasn’t much on TV in 1940 worth parodying so, instead, about half the cartoon is about tuning in to Africa and Italy instead of a TV show.

Mind you, we do get radio and movie references—Amos ‘n’ Andy, Walter Winchell, Stepin Fetchit, the Three Stooges.

But Africa means it’s time for familiar old stereotypes and, here, the story people combined two stereotypes into one character.

The scene starts with a skull and evil laughter. A sinister native is wearing the skull.

“Sinister?” No, not at all. He suddenly becomes all effeminate, gushing about birds, flowers, life being wonderful (at least the dialogue doesn’t say “gay”). A narrator stops his enthusiastic exhortations and demands to know why he’s so happy. “Oh, I’m just a Good Humor Man,” he swishes, adding in an obligatory “Whoops!” for good measure. He then pushes his ice cream cart out of the cartoon (“Without vanilla, chocolate, tutti fruitsi,” he calls out).

Mel Blanc plays both parts. Sid Marcus moves the camera around a lot as the director of this short, with Art Davis and Herb Rothwill getting the animation credits. Music by Joe De Nat.

Boxoffice called this “First-rate cartoon entertainment.” Kinematograph Weekly out of England declared “Gags ingenious and draughtsmanship clever. Capital short of its type.” It was screened at a showing in Boston called “Eleven More of the Greatest Cartoons Ever.” (One of the others was the 1932 Columbia short The Birth of Jazz, with dancing musical instruments, the Earth bopping to music, and a caricature of New York mayor Jimmy Walker.) These reviewers liked it more than I did. I still don’t get the closing gag involving the motorboat and a hat. You can see an ad to the right for a theatre that ran it.