Rubber Hose Race

Spaghetti-limbed characters didn’t quite go out with the early 1930s. UPA used them on Gerald McBoing Boing and other cartoon shorts 20 years later.

Here’s an example from Bosko’s Fox Hunt (1931). The middle sausage-shaped horse in this ten-drawing cycle has no joints, just rubber legs and neck.



There is such a sameness about the Harman-Ising cartoons for Warner Bros. There are cycles in this cartoon used over and over (one has 12 frames of dogs running). H-I characters all have the same open mouths at a three-quarters angle. There always seems to be a scene when they run out of the frame at the exact same angle (borrowed from the silent Oswalds). And, in this short, they needed a fox, so they simply used the same design as Foxy in the Merrie Melodies shorts released earlier in the year.

Ham Hamilton and Norm Blackburn received the animation credits on this one.