Thursday, 31 October 2024

Bimbo Can't Escape

Swing You Sinners is filled with almost non-stop nightmarish imagery and is one of my favourite Fleischer cartoons.

Bimbo finds himself in a graveyard, with ghosts and gravestones singing accusations against him before escaping to a warped farmyard and being chased by all kinds of creatures.

In one scene, the grass opens up and a huge mouth comes out, while headstones advance toward him and form a square around him.



Bimbo jumps to escape. Cut to him grasping and then climbing to the top of a tall pole. “Oh, no!” wails Bimbo. A tombstone grows, develops a face and responds, “Oh, yes.” Bimbo drops to the ground.



And it’s on to the next scene.

Ted Sears and William Bowsky are the credited animators.

Shamus Culhane remembered the cartoon very well. He wrote almost two pages about it in Talking Animals and Other People, saying he, Al Eugster, George Cannata, Seymour Kneitel and William Henning (as well as Bowsky) were suddenly promoted to animators and this was their first cartoon. Culhane felt Grim Natwick should have received a credit for all the work he did on it.

It was released Sept. 24, 1930.

2 comments:

  1. Good timing, too. Happy Halloween, Yomp

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  2. A great cartoon. And if you watch a pixelated digital version, the slight distortion (is there a pristine 4K restoration of this? there should be) makes it look like 1970s Xerography and the goony characters look like '70s design evoking the '30s style (if you follow that; nostalgia was very big in the '70s), only with better animation; after all, this is the real thing.

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