Ever See a Dog Fly?

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit disappears for about half a cartoon in The Quail Hunt (1935). Perhaps he wanted to avoid being connected to this sorry effort that was co-written by Walter Lantz.

The nominal star of this short is Elmer the Great Dane, who is Oswald’s hunting dog. The quail he’s hunting turns sympathetic and saves Elmer’s life, enabling him to appear in more lacklustre cartoons. A hawk comes into the picture to try to capture the quail, and it’s Elmer’s turn to save a life.

In the most surreal situation in the cartoon, Elmer manages to grab the hawk by the tail and pull him off a tree. They roll backwards and crash into another tree.



When the dust disappears, Elmer now has the hawk’s feathers. Not only that, he has developed wings and can fly!



This was a pretty fallow period for Lantz. He tried to make stars out of three chimps, a turtle doing a bad impression of Rochester from the Jack Benny show and a panda he eventually took off the screen and put in comic books.

The animators on this one are Ed Benedict, Ray Abrams, Bill Mason and Fred Kopietz.