Friday, 1 May 2026

Woody Builds a Car

Woody Woodpecker is too busy singing and pointing at people in the theatre watching his cartoon that he crashes his car into a telephone pole.

No matter. Woody splits into multiples of himself, some in outline drawings, and rebuilds his little convertible in about a second of screen time. The frames show how.



I like the earliest, goofy-looking version of Woody, though some of his stories were lacking a bit. This scene is from The Loan Stranger (1942), with voices by Kent Rogers, who throws in a Red Skelton voice ("You bwoke my liddle head!") and the loan-sharking fox doing Jolie ("Mammy!). Woody singing at the outset is unmistakeably Mel Blanc. Direction is by Alex Lovy, story by Bugs Hardaway and Milt Schaffer, and animation is credited to Frank Tipper.