Homer Brightman’s story is a send-up of the TV show Dragnet with its monotone narration and investigating-crime time checks. Naturally, it ends the same way as Dragnet, which had a sweaty hand holding a hammer pounding a metal stamp with the words “Mark VII Limited.” Brightman finds a logical way to make fun of it.
The villain of this short, “The Bat,” is designed in silhouette, giving director Don Patterson liberty to have his animators turn him into all kinds of odd shapes (I suspect Patterson also animated on this).
Brightman’s ending is maybe the most head-shaking one he wrote at Lantz. Woody captures The Bat in a trunk. But when he gets to the police station, all that’s in the trunk is a baseball bat and a bottle of Woody’s Redwood Sap Tonic. But ... what? Huh? How? Oh, well, no point in trying to find a logical explanation.
There’s a smart use of colour here, with Woody turning kind of a forest green when his tonic wears off. Clarence Wheeler has a pretty effective score. The voice providing narration and speaking for the Joe Friday/Frank Smith stand-ins is Dick Nelson.
All that was missing was Jack Webb's warning about how pot kills people.
ReplyDeleteLOL Even back then before rockc they could hav e used a jazz club setting..for a pot cartoon...
DeleteThe joke at the end is that Woody thought he captured the bat. The detective said he had been watching too much television and deluded himself, a la Don Quixote.
ReplyDelete