Happy Days For the Hungry Wolf

“I haven’t got a daddy,” says the cute but oblivious little creature to a wolf that wants to eat him. “Will you be my daddy?” he asks.

You know, I said to myself, “Where have I heard this before?” Why, I know. In Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s pitiable duck cartoons at MGM, then later at their own studio, culminating as Yakky Doodle. Except then it was “Will you be my mama?” In fact, it was the plot of Foxy Proxy with Fibber Fox (1961).

Yes, the whole Yakky Doodle concept, right down to the “Go on, get out of here!” part, goes back almost 20 years before that in the MGM cartoon The Hungry Wolf. Hanna and Barbera weren’t involved in it; this was a Hugh Harman/Rudy Ising cartoon.

This one has a twist though. Mama Rabbit goes searching in the snowstorm to find her son and discovers him next to the frozen and unconscious wolf, who had chased him out of his home to save the bunny from being eaten by him. Since the cartoon’s almost at the nine-minute mark, there’s a perfunctory and implausible explanation that “I guess he must have fainted,” before the scene cuts to the finale with the fully-conscious wolf, his feet in a warm tub, being fed by the rabbit family, all singing “Happy days are here again.”



Ah, there’s nothing like clumps of food inside an open mouth.



The wolf hiccoughs his head out of the scene from being a glutton. Oh my!



And because there’s a war on.



Variety of January 28, 1942 reported Scott Bradley was conducting the score of the short. It was released February 21st, and copyrighted six days later.

Showman’s Trade Review rates it “fair.” “This one moves too slowly to be entertaining,” it assesses. One exhibitor in the Motion Picture Herald said: “Just a fair cartoon, not made for laughing purposes but to show artistic talent, I guess.” Metro’s own shorts publication didn’t bother to do a special review of it.

I don’t know who plays the rabbit, but Mel Blanc is the wolf. He couldn’t have voiced many more MGM cartoons after this. Variety reported on April 25, 1941 that Blanc had been signed to a term contract by Leon Schlesinger. Part of the deal meant he could not voice theatrical cartoons for any other studio. And, let’s lay to rest the oft-repeated tale that Blanc's contract stipulated no other actor could be credited at Warners. As Keith Scott’s research shows, it simply isn’t true. And he’s seen the contracts.

There are no credits at all on this cartoon. Jerry Beck’s research shows that Hugh Harman was responsible for it, but Harman was gone from MGM by the time it was released. Variety announced May 2, 1941 that Harman was leaving and had formed Hugh Harman Productions. It was Harman’s departure that quashed any ambitions by members of the MGM staff for a director’s job; Tex Avery was brought in from outside in September.