Bird Butt

Dick Lundy’s last cartoon for MGM, Bird-Brain Bird Dog, includes some familiar bits from Tex Avery’s cartoons, and a really odd cut.

Barney Bear shoots his own large butt after his bird-loving hunting dog drew a little quail on it.

Lundy cuts to a close-up of the damage. In the very next frame, he cuts back to the longer shot, but the difference in the action is pretty jarring. These are consecutive frames.



Without a summary of the scenes from the studio, it’s hard to determine if some action was cut. A cue ends when the scene ends, and a new one starts when the next scene begins, so it’s really tough to say if there’s a cut in the soundtrack. It’s possible.

Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley are the credited animators (Mike Lah either didn't work on this or his name was omited) and Johnny Johnsen gets a background credit. Heck Allen and Jack Cosgriff provided the gag, including a variation on Avery's "Timber" routine, and characters stacked on top of each other as in Half Pint Pygmy.

MGM had a backlog of cartoons, and this was one of the shorts on a shelf for a while. Not only was Lundy gone from MGM when this short was released on July 30, 1954 (he told Mark Mayerson he left at the end of October 1951), so was Avery, who had come back only to have his unit disbanded in March 1953.

Crying Eyes of the Walrus

Walter Lantz’s Musical Miniature series holds its own with any cartoons produced in Hollywood at the time.

Kiddie Koncert (released by United Artists, Apr. 2, 1948) puts Wally Walrus front and centre as a conductor, with some fine animation by Ed Love. He’s responsible for a good portion of the cartoon, including a cute gag timed to a movement in Von Suppe’s “Morning Noon and Night in Vienna.”

The audience starts crying during a violin and harp passage, tears from the audience overflowing the small schoolhouse where the concert is taking place. There’s a cut to Wally conducting while wiping his nose. Director Dick Lundy comes in for a close-up, then cuts to Wally’s eyes. They fill up, and the pupils swim to safety. You can see some frames below. I like how the pupils congratulate each other, then go back to where they started.



Alas, only one other Musical Miniature followed, Pixie Picnic, released May 28, 1948. Lantz' deal with U.A. started to sour, and to save money, he virtually shut down his studio. Lundy, Love and musical director Darrell Calker did not return when the studio re-opened in 1951.

Here’s what Boxoffice had to say about the cartoon on Apr. 17, 1948.

Kiddy Concert [sic]
United Artists (Lantz Cartune) 7 Mins.
Very good. Wally Walrus conducts the school orchestra in a concert. The orchestra is composed of chickens, penguins, pigs, turtles, seals, a bloodhound and a skunk, who plays a trumpet outside the window. All the performances are novel. A centipede plays five violins, while the dog drummer beats out the rhythm with a pair of knitting needles. A pig trumpet player runs into trouble when he attempts to chew bubblegum and play his instrument at the same time. The musical score is excellent.

The ad to the right is for a theatre in Houston on the day of release.

A Box Gag Returns

Some old cartoon ground is ploughed by director Dick Lundy in Caballero Droopy, an MGM release starring Droopy, the matador wolf and a bull. We saw them all in Tex Avery’s Señor Droopy, released three years earlier.

Avery had been given time away from the studio to deal with some personal things. His writer, Rich Hogan, left animation at the same time. In came Lundy, with Jack Cosgriff and Heck Allen to help with the gags. They crafted yet another story of Droopy and the wolf vying for the hand of a Latina (in this case, a cartoon, not a live-action Lina Romay).

There are Avery-type gags, too. One was lifted from King-Size Canary (1947), where a hungry hobo cat piles two boxes on top of each other to reach a window; the boxes suspend in mid-air.

Here, it happens after the wolf sends an Avery-style anvil into the air. Ignore the horrendous DNR in the frames below; there's a better version out there but I don't have it.



The stacking starts in mid-action.



He’s got the girl! Oh, no, he hasn’t. The anvil he sent in the air earlier returns, thanks to the laws of gravity.



Exhibitor magazine of July 30, 1952 rated it “fair” and complained the cartoon slowed down after the first half. By comparison, Señor Droopy is superior. It has some great posing and animation by Bobe Cannon.

The animators here are Avery’s team from when he left: Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton, with Ray Patterson from the Hanna-Barbera unit taking care of some scenes (Bob Bentley would soon be hired). Johnny Johnsen is uncredited as the background painter.



The official release date was Sept. 27, 1952 but the cartoon played at the Paramount in Bristol, Tennessee from Aug. 24 to 28 with The Merry Widow.

What Was That I Just Passed?

Animator Ed Love doesn’t go for a huge Tex Avery-type eye-take in the Woody Woodpecker cartoon Drooler's Delight.

In a time-honoured comedy tradition, Woody goes in drag to distract his enemy, Buzz Buzzard.



Buzz strolls along then realises he just walked past a babe. Here’s how Love handles it (we aren’t posting all the in-betweens).

Buzz (and his cigar) get hot.



This was when the Walter Lantz studio was at its peak, with some great animators, a number of them formerly with Disney. In fact, it shut down after this cartoon when Lantz’s deal with United Artists went sour.

Love animated almost all of this 1949 cartoon on his own, if I understand the situation correctly, with some help from an assistant. Dick Lundy directed the short.

Woody Throws It Away

Some of the Walter Lantz cartoons in the 1940s featured bits of perspective animation, with a character or object moving to and from the camera.

Here’s a brief example in Woody the Giant Killer, directed by Dick Lundy and released in 1947. Woody (voiced by Bugs Hardaway) gets conned into buying “magic” beans by Bucky Beaver (played by Harry Lang). He shakes the box of beans into the dug-out ground.



Woody then throws the box away in perspective. Lundy holds the first drawing for three frames, the second for two frames, then the others are one frame each.



Woody has some good expressions in this cartoon. Not outrageous ones, but you know what he’s thinking. La Verne Harding and Ed Love are the credited animators. Pat Matthews is here, too; my guess is the final scene is one of his.

Writers Webb Smith and Hardaway make fun of the post-war housing shortage by mixing it with the beanstalk fairy tale.

On the Downbeat

Sir Wally Walrus conducts an orchestra of animals in The Overture to William Tell, a 1947 Musical Miniature directed by Dick Lundy for Walter Lantz.

Here are some of Wally's positions as he gets set to lead the orchestra in the Ranz des Vaches portion of Rossini's famous composition.



La Verne Harding and Casey Onaitis receive the animation credits in this cartoon, with Bugs Hardaway and Milt Schaffer charged with coming up with different musical instrument gags than in the other Miniatures.