The plot involves a suburban donkey trying to get a living, recalcitrant rubber inner tube out of the ground to give it to the war-time scrap drive. In this scene, he gets all wrapped up in it and it throws him out of the scene.
The credits say the animation was by Ed Barge, Arnold Gillespie and Mike Lah, but looking at that last drawing, I can’t help but think Don Williams did this scene. Williams was credited in the cartoon put into the pipeline before this (The Stork’s Holiday, Oct. 16, 1943). Director Gordon is not credited either. This short was released January 22, 1944.
I suspect Bob Gentle was responsible for the watercolour backgrounds. Considering there are scenes of Mr. Unnamed Donkey being zapped by electricity, Bob Bemiller could have worked on this one as well.
“Showmen’s Trade Review” critiqued it under the cartoon’s original title Strange Innertube (a nice parody of Strange Interlude, a 1932 MGM feature), calling it “hilarious.” Uh, okay. Evidently Gordon must have agreed as the donkey appears in his next film, The Tree Surgeon, before retiring him. Gordon joined Hugh Harman Productions before being hired at John Sutherland Productions. As for Williams, next stop was the Walter Lantz studio before drawing multiple descending eyes at Warner Bros.
"Strange Innertube" was the title of one of Hal Roach's "Taxi Boys" shorts.
ReplyDelete"Strange Interlude" was first a 1928 play by Eugene O'Neill that was notable for its characters speaking their inner thoughts directly to the audience, something Groucho Marx parodies explicitly in "Animal Crackers" in 1930 when he interrupts regular dialog saying, "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude," and does just that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for more background, Paul. I didn't look to see what, if anything, the MGM movie was based on.
ReplyDeleteIn O'Neill's play, the characters strode downstage to communicate their inner thoughts to the audience (and Groucho parodied this nicely), but in the film version, the actors grimaced toward the camera as their pre-recorded thoughts play on the soundtrack.
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