Pink Elephants Not On Parade

There’s a great sequence in Walter Lantz’s The Bandmaster (1947) where a drunk on a circus high-wire sees pink elephants. There’s a cut to a scene where they are ballet dancing to the Overture to Zampa.

There’s a cut back to the drunk and the elephants, which dive into his bottle of hootch. Each of the three elephants go into the bottle in a different way. The drunk’s reactions are animated as well.



How did the drunk get up there? Beats me. Maybe that scene got cut.

Bugs Hardaway and Webb Smith came up with the gags. La Verne Harding and Les Kline received the animation credits but the star animator in this one is the great Pat Matthews, who gives us some lovely perspective animation of the staggering drunk. He is my favourite of the 1940s Lantz artists.

Darrell Calker does a fine job for the score.