A duck that looks like Daffy stars in Wacky Quacky. A cat that looks like Sylvester stars in Up n’ Atom. But the 1948 short Lo the Poor Buffal is based around wholesale pillaging.
Remember how Yosemite Sam would say “I hate rabbits!”? In this cartoon, Buffalo Billingsley says “I hate buffalos.” Remember how Foghorn Leghorn would copy Senator Claghorn and remark something like: “There’s one thing, I SAY, there’s one thing I hate. Weasels. Weasels, that is!” In this cartoon, Billingsley says “I hate buffalos. I SAY, I hate buffalos. Buffalos, that is.”
But that’s not all. Remember how Elmer Fudd substituted the letter “w” for the letter “r”? Guess what the buffalo in this cartoon does.
Writer Cal Howard seems to have decided the purloining was enough to make audiences laugh. There isn’t one real joke in the cartoon. Oh, a rock deflates like a tire when hit by an arrow. But it’s like the cartoon is one long set-up with no payoff. Even the last line is the same as the first, just substitute “vultures” for “buffalos.” The most amusing is something audiences won’t have caught—Howard names Billingsley’s jeep “Calvin.”
The real irony is I’m pretty sure the “Foney Fudd” is played by Dave Barry. That’s the guy who played Fudd in the wretched Warners short Pre-Hysterical Hare some ten years later. My guess is Jack Mather is the Indian whose design appeared earlier that year in Topsy Turkey (Barry is in that cartoon, too).
The score is by Darrell Calker, and sounds just like the stuff he was writing for Woody Woodpecker cartoons around the same time, complete with peek-a-boo clarinets.
The cartoon was backlogged for release after the Screen Gems studio closed for good.
I think that Dave Barry did the Indian's voice as well. Please explain the joke about a jeep named "Calvin"? Thanks, Yowp.
ReplyDeleteMy guess, Mark, is Cal Howard named the jeep after himself.
DeleteMany of the early Color Rhapsodies seem like Fleischer cartoons gone wrong (although some could outdo Fleischer when they put their minds to it); many of the 1940s Color Rhapsodies seem like Warner Bros. cartoons gone wrong.
ReplyDeleteColumbia cartoons, mostly Scrappy and Krazy Kats with occasional B&W prints of Color Rhapsodies, were shown on TV in the San Francisco Bay Area (on KTVU) through 1963-1964. In the shameless cartoon gag theft department, I remember one "last gasp of Screen Gems" Color Rhapsody, SHORT SNORTS ON SPORTS, a CROSS COUNTRY DETOURS style spot gag cartoon, which featured a bit with a narrator gushing about and the athleticism, grace and coordination of champion swimmers, followed, after a long pause, by a crocodile saying (in an Eddie Anderson voice), "mmmmm mmmmm coh-oh-d'nation." Such was the end of the Screen Gems Studio. It would not surprise me if both the narrator and the gator were voiced by Dave Barry.
ReplyDeleteWriter Cal Howard and director Alex Lovy carried a couple of ideas from this cartoon over 20 years to their Warner Brothers-Seven Arts release HOCUS POCUS POWWOW. We see "Lo, The Poor Indian" go on a "warpath" (a treadmill this time, to save on animation).
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