Whoopee For Goopy?

Goopy Geer had the potential of being a big cartoon star.

Warner Bros. wanted musical cartoons made from songs it owned. One song was by Herman Hupfeld, copyrighted at the end of 1931, called “Goopy Geer: He Plays Piano and He Plays By Ear.” Here’s a song about an actual character. He was ripe for being turned into a cartoon character by the Harman-Ising studio (while pushing the song at the same time).

But Goopy doesn’t seem to have inspired the studio’s writers or director. In Goopy’s 1932 debut, there’s a scene of Goopy running around a piano. If that’s a gag, I don’t get it.

In fact, not only is Goopy not in entire sequences of his own cartoon, Hugh Harman and/or Rudy Ising didn’t even bother with all-new animation. Scenes were re-used of a gorilla waiter weaving around, a wide-mouth hippo and drunken horse from a cartoon made the previous year called Lady, Play Your Mandolin.

Goopy doesn’t even supply the main vocal for the cartoon. That’s done by a kitten in ill-fitting high heels singing “I Need Lovin’.”

Another scene has hat racks coming to life to dance. Here are the poses as they get into position. I like how the upper hat peg turns into a cigar.



The racks high-step in unison.



They tap a little bit.



And (are you chortling?) one kicks the other in the butt.



Keith Scott tells us Johnny Murray is Goopy. Friz Freleng and Ham Hamilton are the credited animators.

The other two cartoons starring Goopy don’t feature him playing a piano (by ear or otherwise). He’s a mountaineer in Moonlight For Two and a court jester in The Queen Was in the Parlor. All three Goopys were released in 1932 and were three of four consecutive Merrie Melodies. (The other cartoon, It’s Got Me Again, was nominated for an Oscar). Goopy made a cameo appearance in Bosko in Dutch (1933), then disappeared.

Well, actually, Goopy didn’t disappear altogether. In November 1932, a 15-minute show called “Goopy Geer” was heard on KMBC in Kansas City. I figured it must have featured someone playing the piano in character. After a little digging, I spotted this photo in the March 25, 1934 edition of the Kansas City Journal. The caption reads: “The man with the reclining tendencies is His Royal Laziness, Goopy Geer, whose nimble fingers and drawling voice are heard on KMBC each week day afternoon at 1:15 o’clock. Ted Malone, who announces Goopy’s program, is shown in his usual routine two seconds before program time. Goopy’s specialty is composing impromptu melodies out of four or five musical notes his listeners send in. Paul Sells, well known Kansas City pianist-accordionist-conductor, portrays the sleepy piano pounder.”

Goopy survived on KMBC into May 1936. By then, Harman and Ising had left for MGM, and the replacing studio had gone through some other lame starring characters until Tex Avery decided a little pig had possibilities and made him the solo star of The Blow Out.

Now, for your listening pleasure, a jaunty instrumental version of the song by Jimmy Grier’s orchestra.