Lantz's Monkeyshines Don't Shine

Walter Lantz tried out three monkeys in four cartoons before naming them and putting them into their own series in 1936, starting with Turkey Dinner. It was followed with Knights For a Day (1936), The Golfers, House of Magic, The Big Race, The Lumber Camp, The Steel Workers, The Stevedores, The Country Store, Fireman’s Picnic, The Rest Resort, Ostrich Feathers and finally The Air Express (all 1937).

Joe Adamson’s book on Walter Lantz and his studio revealed the Meany, Miny, Moe cartoons were budgeted at $8250 each, which was $250 more than the Oswald cartoons. Some scenes featured all three monkeys and that took extra time and expense to animate than a solitary rabbit. Almost all the monkey cartoons went over budget, some by close to $1400. Lantz was known for his economy, so the 3 M’s disappeared from his roster.

(It’s no wonder Lantz had to keep down expenses. His agreement with Universal at the time was once each cartoon recovered its cost, the two would split the incoming profit, with Universal getting 75%).

House of Magic will remind some cartoon fans of the short directed by Chuck Jones at Warners where two dogs sniffed around the house of a magician (Prest-o Change-o, 1939). In this cartoon, the monkeys take refuge in a magic store during a rain storm.

Here’s one of the gags. One monkey eats a “magic banana” (magic mushrooms would have been banned by the Hays Office). It keeps growing back. You can see the (literal) punch-line coming.



Lantz joined with Victor McLeod (who went on to live action) in writing the story, with Jimmy Dietrich leaving Lantz after scoring this cartoon.

Jeff Lenburg’s book on the Lantz studio gave another reason for the demise of the Meany, Miny, Moe series. It says that Lantz “discontinued production...after three of the last four films...garnered mostly unfavorable reviews as ‘aimless and lacking in entertainment appeal’...Walter confessed, ‘There just wasn’t much else we could do with the characters.’”

Lantz kept replacement characters on the screen in the hope of sparking a winner. Baby-Face Mouse (Sniffles before Sniffles), a pair of human 1890s melodrama stereotypes (which Terrytoons was already doing) and Li’l Eightball (the less said, the better) were all given tryouts before Lantz scored a bit of success in 1939 with Andy Panda. Andy had a fairly solid ten-year-run and gave birth, in 1940, to a duck-in-a-woodpecker suit as writer Bugs Hardaway might put it. Woody Woodpecker kept the Lantz studio afloat to the very end in 1972.