First we get a whole routine of stenographer/secretary Maisie racing around her home to get ready for work. She slaps on ghoulish make-up which disappears (other than rouge blotches) in the next scene. To beat the “racing” scenario into us, Mel Blanc is heard giving a race track play-by-play.
But this isn’t what the cartoon is about. Maisie races to work, sitting at her desk just in time. Other than Blanc and all the running around, there’s no real reason for the urgency. There’s no time clock and no stereotyped glowering boss (or clucking co-workers) around.
There’s a nice throwaway “Gone With the Wind” parody gag as the work-day unfolds. But that’s all. The cartoon isn’t a workplace comedy. All this is filler to what apparently is the intended story, which takes up about the rest of the 4½ cartoon. Maisie tries on hats. All kinds of them. The scene just goes on and on and on. The gag here is that women’s hats are crazy. Supposedly, we are to laugh at each one of them as they are introduced by narrator Frank Bingman, who barrels through the list.
We’re half-way through the cartoon, and Maisie orders a special hat. The scene now switches to the hat designing department. There’s one gag. Everyone here is insane. The cartoon stretches basically one gag for three minutes, with Blanc conjuring up another moronic voice (He’s a mad hatter. Get it?).
So how does the cartoon end? What’s the build-up to the big finish? Maisie walks by a cat in a window that is so frightened by the hat that it closes the window, pulls down the shade and cowers. Yes, that’s the gag.
I’d call the finish a let-down, but the whole 653-foot cartoon is a let-down. Mind you, maybe I know nothing. The Exhibitor magazine review in 1940 called it "excellent" (maybe they were misogynists) and it was released in May 1953 as a "Columbia Favorite."
No writer is listed in the credits. Sid Marcus directed the short, Art Davis and Herb Rothwill get animation credits and Joe De Nat supplied the score. The group was credited together in The Greyhound and the Rabbit and Tangled Television earlier in the year.
The animation of the hat dept employees was reused in Frank Tashlin's A Hollywood Detour (1942), to showcase the typical life of a Hollywood cartoon studio.
ReplyDeleteA good amount of A HOLLYWOOD DETOUR is made up of recycled footage from earlier Columbia shorts.
DeleteThe mad drive about Hollywood (ending on the nose of WC Fields) is lifted from POOR ELMER (1938)
The footage of the celebrities playing baseball is lifted from HOLLYWOOD PICNIC (1937)
Thanks guys. I'm not up on my Columbia cartoons, and tend to wince when I watch most of them.
DeleteI think I remember actually seeing this twice theatrically in the 70's and/or early 80's. So was that an actual re-release, or an old print sitting on a shelf at the exchange? And Sony popped it on a DVD screwball comedy collection as a bonus feature. Somebody might have thought it was special.
ReplyDeleteThe '80s? I don't think anyone was releasing shorts to theatres then. Sounds like it was in a back shelf at the theatre.
DeleteDave K, if you saw THE MAD HATTER theatrically, that might have been a 16mm print from a collector who actually likes these cartoons. Never saw it in 35mm.
DeleteHmmm. Well, 80's may have been wrong on my part, but Columbia was definitely booking ancient cartoons in the 70's to theaters and drive-ins. Saw stuff like ROOM AND BORED and any number of Magoos on actual-factual movie theater screens. Drive-ins around the Hartford, Connecticut area had the disturbing habit of starting their double features way too early, always with a nearly invisible cartoon up front. Sat in my car with my bride many a time listening to the disembodied voice of Jim Backus. Circa 1973, I lived in an isolated Northern Wisconsin town. Old time theater (single screen) changed its program twice a week, ALWAYS had a short subject; a beat-up travelogue, a beat-up Lantz, a beat-up DePatie–Freleng or, yes, a beat-up Columbia from years gone by. These things may have been stuff left on the shelf, but I'm pretty sure the shelf wasn't at the theater (I knew the projectionist!) The shelf may have been at the exchange...
DeleteLest one think that humor based on women's head-coverings is well..."old hat", the syndicated comic strip, Curtis, frequently features a Sunday episode where the title character and his younger brother hoot and giggle at the straight-up wack chapeaus the local church ladies don as they strut down the aisle. Considering how hackneyed the gags usually are in each day's installment, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if creator Ray Billingsley was a fan of this particular cartoon.
ReplyDeleteColumbia's animation unit had passed its Fleischer Cartoon Gone Wrong period and was entering its Warner Bros. Cartoon Gone Wrong period. A few of the cartoons turned out nicely, though.
ReplyDelete