The Fish Gag Gets Canned

Tex Avery’s travelogue spoofs at Warner Bros. are hit-and-miss, sometimes in the very cartoon. In Land of the Midnight Fun (1939), studio politics must been the reason for gagless rotoscoped footage of Sonya Henje doing a skating routine. Why else would Avery stop everything in his cartoon to include this pointless bit?

There is some fun in Midnight Fun. I love the timber wolf commenting on the very pun he is in. There’s the ice breaker gag where Avery takes literalness to ridiculousness. And there’s just plain silliness. “These waters are truly a fisherman’s paradise,” says narrator Bob Bruce as he sets up an underwater gag. “We notice barracuda,” he says as several swim past while Carl Stalling plays “Over the Waves” in the background.



Swordfish. You’ll notice the underwater wave effect animation.



Tuna!



Avery was a master of timing as much as anyone. There’s a pause in the action. He’s setting up the punch-line. Bruce then remarks: “And here comes some salmon.”



Yeah, it’s not as funny as drunken fish singing “Moonlight Bay” (see Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt) but I like it. Stalling adds a silly arrangement of a snippet of “The Umbrella Man” to musically punctuate the gag.

Chuck McKimson gets the rotating animation credit, Tubby Millar rates being handed the story credit and background artist Johnny Johnsen remains uncredited. There’s good effects animation in this one, too. Oh, and a dog/tree gag. It is a Tex Avery cartoon, after all.