Consistency? Who Needs It?

The sheer ineptness of the Van Beuren cartoons can provide you with unintentional laughs.

Here are examples from the Cubby Bear opus Love's Labor Won (1933). All cartoon studios had unmatching shots from scene to scene, but Van Beuren’s are a little jarring. These are two consecutive drawings as Manny Davis or Harry Bailey cuts from one scene to the next. They’re not even close.



After a bit of business with some escaping wolf dentures, there’s another cut. Again, the action isn’t even close.



I still like this cartoon. There’s a wiener dog used as a jump rope, a stuffed living room chair that begins singing, a creature with a top hat living in a snail’s shell that doubles as a tuba, some pretty good music courtesy of Gene Rodemich and his musicians (I wonder if he used his own orchestra?) and bulrushes that pretend to be the NBC chimes.

Poor Cubby got chucked out of the studio (along with Rodemich and a bunch of artists) a year later when Burt Gillett arrived from Disney and inflicted Toddle Tales on theatregoers.