At Van Beuren, unexpected things happened and you were left wondering “What was that?”
I swear John Foster and whoever helped him got drunk on bootleg booze during story sessions and decided to go with any weird idea they could think of.
In The Farmerette (1932), two cows are grazing on pasture. One google-eyed cow stands up and pulls her tail and the one next to her. Their skirts go up. Why? Who knows. It’s a Van Beuren cartoon. (Note in the third frame, the horns are inked in. The animation is in a cycle so the horns kind of flash).
Then the horns turn into horns that honk.
The two cows dance and collapse. One gets up to sing “Hey, hey!” to end the scene.
First, an inking error, then a camera error. In some cartoons, you’ll see a blip on the screen when a character loses a body part on a separate cel for maybe a frame. In The Farmerette, one poor “dog in the kennel” loses his entire body for 12 frames.
Foster and Harry Bailey get screen credit for this short.
I suppose pulling a cow's tail to raise her skirt is like pulling the cord on the window blinds to raise them. By 1932 some moviegoers must have been complaining about all the exposed cow udders in animated cartoons and demanding that they be fitted with concealing skirts, which would become official policy under the Production Code a few years later. No doubt Foster and Bailey were having a bit of fun with the notion.
ReplyDeleteWhat gets me are those gigantic umbilical hernias that characters in Aesop's Fables cartoons always seem to have. The Code would put an end to those, too.