Screen Gems Spelled Backwards is "Lousy"

“Hey,” Cal Howard said to Dave Monahan, “Remember at Schlesinger’s when there was that gag with Daffy looking at billboards with parodies of advertising slogans? “Sure,” replied Dave. “Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur. I got the story credit.” “Well, let’s use the same gag in this cartoon,” Cal suggested.

And so they did.

The cartoon was Topsy Turkey, released by Columbia/Screen Gems on Feb. 5, 1948.

The above conversation likely never took place, but it makes more sense than some of the stuff in this woebegone short.

The slogans are:



Old Gold cigarettes.



Lucky Strike cigarettes.



Pond's Cold Cream.



Serutan. Spelled backward, it's "Natures."

Cut to the titular turkey singing a send-up of the radio jingle penned for Pepsi by Alan Bradley Kent and Austen Herbert Croom Croom-Johnson. Some random frames.



Animator unknown.

Lucky Strike had another slogan, one that hung in the wall of American Tobacco president George W. Hill’s office that was incorporated into the advertising: “Quality of product is essential to continuing success.”

The Screen Gems studio should have listened to Mr. Hill. It was not a success because quality of product was hit-and-miss at best. The studio was closed by the time this short, with its wacky-ending-for-the-sake-of-a-wacky ending, went into release.

Jack Mather is the voice of the hunter, Dave Barry pulled out his underwater voice for the turkey, and my guess is Cal Howard is doing the moose, uh, mooses, uh, moose.