The Fish That Went to Bed in Song

Imaginative visual gags are part of what makes the Screen Songs created at the Fleischer studio in the early 1930s so much fun to watch.

Here are just a few examples from Show Me the Way to Go Home (1932). We start with a goldfish in a bowl in a saloon. He jumps into a glass of booze.

As the background male quartet work their way through the song, the fish becomes drunk, jumps onto the top of the glass, yells “Whoopee!” and then leaps out of the scene.



The fish stands in for the usual Fleischer bouncing ball for the theatre audience to sing along. Each time the fish lands on a lyric word, hands pointing “the way to go home” sprout up. There are seven words in the line. Six of the hands form pairs and shake. The seventh picks up the fish and throws him out of the scene.



The fish staggers across the next line of words. There’s a swirl. It forms a bowl. A pillow and blanket appear and the fish enacts the words “I want to go to bed.”



There are other imaginative treatments of the words as well.

Some of the Screen Songs feature live-action footage of Paramount stars (on the East Coast), including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Ethel Merman. This one does not, but it has angular footage of a live-action drunk. It’s very clever. I wish these Screen Songs were on TV when I was a kid instead of the weak Famous Studio versions with the same mixed chorus.

There are no credits available for the cartoon, but the old man drawn in one of the scenes reminds me of a figure in a Shamus Culhane Christmas card. Culhane was soon off to the West Coast and Ub Iwerks.