Breaking the Ice

Tex Avery loved literal gags. At MGM, Symphony in Slang was nothing more than slang being taken literally.

Just about everything Avery did had a genesis in his cartoons at Warner Bros. Here’s a literal gag from Land of the Midnight Fun. It’s silly at worst.

“In these thickly frozen waters,” intones narrator Bob Bruce, “passage would be impossible without the aid of these ships called ‘icebreakers.’ Let’s see how it’s done.”



Dissolve to the gag. He’s an icebreaker, all right.



Sick of Disney? Like Tex Avery? Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer was and did. In his “heresy note” published December 17, 1939 he “rises to remark that the Walt Disney shorts for the past year have not been what they ought to be. Mickey is slipping; so is Donald Duck, their latest shenanigans lacking the wit and ingenuity of, say, M.G.M.’s ‘Peace on Earth,’ or ‘Land of the Midnight Fun,’ a Merrie Melody.”

Scheuer admits that Disney was concentrating on features, but it’s interesting to see him refer to an Avery cartoon that wasn’t groundbreaking (though ice-breaking).

The National Board of Review announced approval of the cartoon in its weekly guide of Sept. 14, 1939, calling it “An amusing satire of a travelog, with the Northern capes as a setting. In color.”

The revolving story credit goes to Tubby Millar and the animation one to Chuck McKimson. The cartoon was released Sept. 23rd. We find it playing the day before at the Capitol in Pottsville, Pa.