Coming To Bat...

Baseball being America’s Pastime, it’s a subject ripe for spoofing in animated cartoons. No doubt you’ve seen Baseball Bugs, Porky’s Baseball Broadcast, Tex Avery’s Batty Baseball and others.

The earliest one may be The Ball Game a 1932 Aesop’s Fable from the Van Beuren studio. It stars insects. Here’s one coming to the plate.



The fly lifts its head. Why it’s none other than (as of 1932) the greatest ball player of them all, Babe Ruth. You can tell by the pig nose. The Bambino was unflatteringly drawn with a pig face in Ub Iwerks’ Play Ball (1933).



Being an insect, he has a bat for each pair of “arms.”



Now it’s time for some Van Beuren strangeness. Because Babe has more than one bat, the pitcher calls in his infielders and outfielders and they all have balls to throw at home plate. Some are regulation white. Others are grey. The Sultan takes his swats.



Babe goes into his home-run trot, tipping his cap to the fans. Suddenly, he is pelted with baseballs.



The Van Beuren staff decides to end the cartoon with one of their chaos scenes. Hundreds upon hundreds of balls are thrown in cycle animation at stick-figure fans, who run from the stadium.



What’s the score? We never know. There’s no attempt at a story in this cartoon, let alone building to a game-winning climax. It simply boils down to this: “Let’s do a baseball cartoon with bugs. Who’s got some gags?”

John Foster and George Rufle are in the credits. Gene Rodemich has a good helping of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “I Love a Parade” (from the 1931 Cotton Club show “Rhythmania”) and “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town” by Ira Schuster, Jack Little and Joe Young. I’d love to know the melody Rodemich uses when the first bug is up to bat and is stung by the mosquito with the ball. As you likely know, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising used “I Love a Parade” as the basis for a 1932 Merrie Melodies cartoon. You can hear the song below.