Can You Guess the Gag?

Puny Express was the first cartoon Walter Lantz made after his studio shut down for a period around 1949-50; the Hollywood Reporter of August 9, 1950 said Lantz was hiring animators, painters, inkers and background artists to work on shorts under a new contract with Universal-International. The same publication reported on December 8th that Puny Express was being delivered to Universal that day. It was released January 22, 1951.

Lantz brought back animator La Verne Harding and scenic painter Fred Brunish, and used stories that Bugs Hardaway and Heck Allen had in the works before the shutdown. Dick Lundy said he timed this cartoon as well. If so, the pace is a lot quicker than what he was doing pre-shutdown.

The cartoon doesn’t feature the fine acting you could see in the late ‘40s shorts released by United Artists cartoons courtesy of Fred Moore, Ed Love and Ken O’Brien, or the quirky action of Pat Matthews. There isn’t really time for it anyways. It’s, more or less, a chase cartoon. Woody Woodpecker is hired as a Pony Express mail deliverer. Buzz Buzzard is the villain trying to rob him (and, judging by wanted posters, kill him).

Lantz made the characters silent in the first few cartoons of his new Universal release because, Associated Press columnist Gene Handsaker reported, it saved $1,500 per session on redubbing for international release. (Of course there was another way around this—hire your wife to play the starring character. It’s keeping the money in the family). The lack of dialogue is awkward in a couple of places in this cartoon. At the beginning, Woody is getting bounced around by the pony he’s riding (but not in the rest of the short). He stops and looks at his behind. He really should say something in reaction here but just carries on again. Later, when Woody tries to convince the pig running the express office to hire him, he gesticulates. Why doesn’t he just tell him instead of playing charades? This kind of thing works well with Felix the Cat and others in the silent era (a time when Lantz made his first cartoons) but it just doesn’t fit here. And how I miss the evil growl that Lionel Stander gave to Buzz in the ‘40s.

Hardaway and Allen aren’t above pulling off old gags. One is when Buzz screeches to a stop at a railway crossing. He looks both ways. You know exactly what’s going to happen.



There’s a “horned toad” pun that reminds of me something Tex Avery would use (see the school crossing gag in Lucky Ducky). But the short just kind of ends. Woody and Buzz go back-and-forth grabbing the mail bag. There’s no plot resolution and not much of a build-up. There’s an explosion, Woody grabs the bag and runs off into the distance along the railway tracks. The end.

There are some good designs. Buzz has a comicly annoyed black horse that uses a fly swatter to get rid of flies. Again, the movement is not elaborate but the scene plays well enough. In fact, Woody got a new design. His “hair” resembles a pompadour instead of being straight back, so the old opening animation by Emery Hawkins had to be replaced. It would be modified again in the next short, Sleep Happy, with Woody pecking out his name.

In addition to Harding, Lantz re-hired Ray Abrams, formerly of Tex Avery’s unit of MGM and an earlier Lantz animator, and brought in Don Patterson (1957 photo, right), the older brother of MGM animator Ray Patterson. Don had been employed at Metro until the Lah-Blair unit was disbanded in 1948; his whereabouts before he was hired at Lantz are unknown but he likely was at a commercial studio (he and Ray Patin had an animation school in 1933 based out of Patin’s home). Others came and went but these four stuck with Lantz through the 1950s (Harding and Patterson were hired by Hanna-Barbera at the end of the decade).

Among the talent lost during the shut down was musical director Darrell Calker. Lantz brought in Clarence Wheeler, who had scored a number of shorts in the '40s, including George Pal’s Puppetoons. He began in radio in Chicago in 1932 with Variety calling him “an unknown musical arranger.” Some of his scores for Lantz were fairly inventive. He opens and closes this cartoon (excluding the titles) with a self-composed theme.

It’s not a bad cartoon overall. Lantz produced some solid shorts in the ‘50s but their numbers evaporate as time goes on.