Amadee Van Beuren decided to get out of the third-rate cartoon business, and hired Three Little Pigs director Burt Gillett to bring Disney magic to his cartoon studio.
It was a disaster.
The Van Beuren studio didn’t only need Disney calibre artists. It needed Disney calibre characters and stories.
What Van Beuren got was a weak live-action/animation combination, pointless cartoons with parrots, and a new star—Molly Moo Cow.
Molly was kind of a silent character, in that she didn’t talk. She mooed like she was belching and her cowbell was an annoying distraction by clattering half of the time.
And although Van Beuren was assembling a staff of good young artists, the drawings looked pretty ugly at times. Here’s a frame from Molly Moo Cow and the Indians (1935)
Whoever wrote this for directors Gillett and Tom Palmer is going for either drama or pathos in this scene. Molly is in tears, pleading with the Indian to save the lives of the two ducks he wants to eat.
Finally, the Indian throws the hoof-in-mouth Molly out of the scene. Someone should have done the same thing with the footage.
Gillett or someone must have realised things like the Molly, the Parrotville cartoons and the “Toddle Tales” shorts were not entertaining. They were all short-lived. The studio purchased rights to established characters like Felix the Cat (who talked) and the denizens of Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville (including the Trolley).
People on staff like Dan Gordon and Joe Barbera could have developed them into solid characters, but RKO had seen enough. It signed a deal with Walt Disney, effectively scuttling the cartoon studio it partly owned (Van Beuren continued with live-action shorts for another year).
Barbera, Carlo Vinci and others found work at Terrytoons. One of their cartoons featured a very familiar-looking cow.
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