What Happens When a Tree Eats Spinach

Spinach doesn’t just work on “hu-mings” in the Popeye cartoons. In Strong to the Finich (1934), the sailor demonstrates to the sick-of-eating-spinachk kids living at Olive Oyl’s Health Farm for Children that it gives vitaliky to just about anything.

In one scene, Popeye pours it into a hole of an anaemic-looking tree.



Being a Fleischer cartoon, the tree sprouts a mouth (and teeth) and begins chewing.



The tree begins to grow.



It sprouts leaves. And since “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” is playing in the background, apples begin to grow.



Wait a minute! The apples become pears.



The pears become pineapples.



Finally, some of the pears become bananas.



It’s on to the next gag.

This is one of the cartoons with a low-voiced Olive played by Bonnie Poe. Red Pepper Sam (aka William Costello) is Popeye.



Much like an Our Gang comedy, there’s a black kid. This is likely meant to be inclusive; all the children are equal in this. He doesn’t talk like Amos ‘n’ Andy, and he’s not the subject of ridicule (like being slow or afraid of ghosts).

Seymour Kneitel was the de facto director of the short, with Doc Crandall also getting an animation credit.

The Fish That Went to Bed in Song

Imaginative visual gags are part of what makes the Screen Songs created at the Fleischer studio in the early 1930s so much fun to watch.

Here are just a few examples from Show Me the Way to Go Home (1932). We start with a goldfish in a bowl in a saloon. He jumps into a glass of booze.

As the background male quartet work their way through the song, the fish becomes drunk, jumps onto the top of the glass, yells “Whoopee!” and then leaps out of the scene.



The fish stands in for the usual Fleischer bouncing ball for the theatre audience to sing along. Each time the fish lands on a lyric word, hands pointing “the way to go home” sprout up. There are seven words in the line. Six of the hands form pairs and shake. The seventh picks up the fish and throws him out of the scene.



The fish staggers across the next line of words. There’s a swirl. It forms a bowl. A pillow and blanket appear and the fish enacts the words “I want to go to bed.”



There are other imaginative treatments of the words as well.

Some of the Screen Songs feature live-action footage of Paramount stars (on the East Coast), including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Ethel Merman. This one does not, but it has angular footage of a live-action drunk. It’s very clever. I wish these Screen Songs were on TV when I was a kid instead of the weak Famous Studio versions with the same mixed chorus.

There are no credits available for the cartoon, but the old man drawn in one of the scenes reminds me of a figure in a Shamus Culhane Christmas card. Culhane was soon off to the West Coast and Ub Iwerks.

Fleischer's Snow-White

The Fleischer studio cartoons of the early 1930s are among my favourites of all time.

Their attitude is different than the happy musical setting you’ll find in a Harman-Ising cartoon for Warner Bros. The Fleischer cartoons are bleaker, nightmarish at times, and, given the musical artists featured, not very white. In urban New York, that meant alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.

Jerry Beck’s “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” (JG Press, 1998) skips past Swing You Sinners! (1930), but includes three great Fleischer cartoons in its top 20. Number 19 is the Betty Boop version of Snow-White. Unlike the Walt Disney feature version, the dwarfs here are not likeable with child-like personalities. They’re zeroes. Instead, we get Betty in the title role, Bimbo and Koko as palace guards who rescue Betty, the Wicked Queen and her magic hand mirror.

The songs given to Betty (Mae Questel) are fairly ordinary, but the cartoon gets into bizarre territory when the four characters go into a mystery cave and Koko acquires Cab Calloway’s voice and sings “St. James Infirmary Blues,” with Betty in an icy “coffin” (she is still alive and moving) and the clown into a high-stepping ghost enacting the lyrics. It’s a far cry from Foxy singing “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.”

A real highlight is the background art in the cave sequence. I suspect some of you have seen this video, but it’s new to me. Someone has managed to clip together the panned backgrounds from two scenes. It must have taken forever to get around the characters that take up most of the foreground. Then there’s always a problem (as I have discovered trying to do the same thing) of making the black-and-white tones from one frame match another. I don’t have fancy software to help; I use an ancient version of MS Paint. I gather that’s what this person has done.

You can see a video of the backgrounds below.



To look at the background recreation from frames, you can go here.

We’ve posted Film Daily’s review of the cartoon elsewhere on the blog. Here are some capsule comments in The Motion Picture Herald of the day:

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—Clever cartoon that features “Saint James Infirmary Blues” sung by Cab Calloway. I featured this in my advertising and believe that it helped.—H. B. Schuessler (Martin Theatres), LaFayette Theatre, LaFayetts, Ala. Small town patronage.

SNOW WHITE: Betty Boop, Cab Calloway—One of the very best cartoons we have shown. It deserves billing. Running time, 9 minutes.—A. B. Jefferis, New Piedmont Theatre, Piedmont, Mo. Rural and small town patronage.

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—good filler on any program. Running time, one reel.—D. E. Fitton, Lyric Theatre, Harrison, Ark. Small town patronage.

PICK-UP: Sylvia Sidney, George Raft—Dated this with Paramount short “Snow White” and RKO “Century of Progress.” Patrons liked feature and business was excellent, due probably to extra draw of the shorts, which we had advertised heavily. Played October 1-3.—Avece T. Waldron, Blue Moon Theatre, Oklahoma City, Okla. Suburban family patronage.

And from the March 1933 issue of the journal of the National Board of Review:

SNOW WHITE (Talkartoon)—Paramount. Family audience. Junior matinee.

Yup. Entertainment suitable for children. Approved by censors. Depression-era kids were a hardier lot than the “Oh, you can’t show guns on Saturday morning cartoons. Think of the children!” Mind you, you couldn’t show kids a cartoon cow’s udder back then. Every generation has its ridiculousness.

Calloway was a Fleischer favourite, appearing first in Minnie the Moocher (1932), then in Snow-White and, finally, The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).

While Doc Crandall got the sole animation credit for this short, the background artist isn’t credited. That’s a real crime.

Pool Around With Me, Will Ya?

Popeye and Bluto take their punchfest underwater in I Wanna Be a Lifeguard (1936).

Their fight in a swimming pool is mainly on a five-drawing cycle.



Bob Rothberg and Sammy Timberg composed the title song, which gets a workout from Bluto and Popeye in the cartoon.

Dave Tendlar and Bill Sturm get the animation credits.

Tendlar and Betty

In 1950, a local newspaper staff writer named Erma Bombeck told readers about alumni artists from Stivers High School in Dayton. First on the list was Milt Caniff. Second was an animator by the name of Dave Tendlar.

Tendlar’s career in animator stretched more than 50 years. He was cartooning a little before that. The Dayton Daily News of March 14, 1926 mentions he had been drawing for the student newspaper. A 1925 story mentions he was musically inclined, but didn’t state what instrument he played in the Stivers Orchestra.

His father was a tailor and by 1930 had moved the family to the Bronx, where the elder Tendlar was in the fur business. The Census that year lists Tendlar’s occupation as “cartoonist, movie.” He told the late Jim Korkis, quoted on Cartoon Research: “I started at Fleischer as a painter [in 1927]. It was opaqueing, but now they call it painting. I was there a very short time but they reorganized Fleischers so I went to Krazy Kat for a couple of years. And then I went back to Fleischer as an animator.” There was also a stop at the John McCrory studio in between.

Tendlar’s first screen credit was on the Betty Boop/Bimbo short Crazy-Town (copyrighted 1931 but released in 1932). He followed the Fleischers to and from Miami, where he was president of the Flippers social club (the club had a 40-page magazine called Flip. Oh, if copies survived!).

He was part of the staff when Fleischers became Famous. Evidently, he left the studio briefly, then returned, as the 1950 Census records him as “cartoonist, novelty films.” He was back at Famous that year. When Gene Deitch arrived at Terrytoons, Tendlar was hired to work for him. Near the end of the 1960s, he had moved west where he worked for Filmation and then Hanna-Barbera, where he was picked to train new animators, among other duties.

In 1936, the Dayton Herald announced he was coming to town to visit friends. The Daily News followed up with a story about him in its August 7, 1936 edition. He talks about the changes in Betty Boop's design.

Comic Movie Artist on Visit
David Tendlar, native of Dayton, but now one of the most interesting of the commercial artists in New York is home on a visit to family and former haunts. And with him is Mrs. Tendlar on her first visit.
Tendlar is the leading artist of a group of animators for the “Betty Boop” and “Pop-Eye” cartoons, seen in the movies. He spends a full working day either drawing one of the characters, depending upon which one is in production at the New York studios of Max Fleischer.

When interviewed at the Biltmore where he is domiciled while in Dayton, Tendlar, personable, jolly and interesting, said that the making of an animated cartoon such as those he works on was a great job. “An artist makes about four and one-half feet a day,” said he; “that is all he can do. The average visual length of a completed film is about six minutes on the screen. Ninety feet of film pass in one minute, so you see the cartoon is about 550 feet in length. Each move is a frame, and each frame is a separate shot for the photographer, and that makes more shots than one could figure up in a few moments.
“We sketch our figures on thin paper, and the first move is placed on another piece of paper, and so on and on. A bright electric light bulb is under our sketching desk, and in that way we watch the progress of the figure across the screen.
“The figures are then placed on transparent celluloid and colored, as the background is stationary for each scene, only the figures are changed.
“About 10,000 separate sketches are made for each cartoon,” and with that amazing statement Mr. Tendlar was asked to sketch the figures of the famous Betty and also Pop-Eye, Olive and Wimpy in the interviewers book which he did. Said the artist, “We have lots of fun with Pop-Eye, and we can make these figures do anything, fall down, hit each other, and indulge in all sorts of slap-stick comedy, hut it is different with Betty. She is always dignified. She must never fall, never be treated too roughly, and for that reason she is a very difficult character.”
Eagerly the idea to include Betty’s missing garter was made, but it seems that the censors preferred to have Betty eliminate that obsolete piece of apparel, and also to observe that the fashion trend was for an added inch or so on her skirt length, and so that is the reason why Betty flirts a longer skirt.
Tendlar went to Stivers high school, and was interested in art always. When quite a youngster he admits that he went in for cartooning and copying all sorts of pictures, and chose the wall paper (on the wall) for “bigger and broader fields.” Martha Schauer was the teacher of art at Stivers, and encouraged Tendler and Milton Caniff, also a Stivers student, when they sketched for the Stivers paper. Caniff lives in New York.
The first visit of Tendlar in some years is finding him visiting various places which he remembers most happily. For instance, Thursday afternoon was to be spent at Lakeside park and the Soldiers home. Tendlar wanted to see the lake, and the spots in Lakeside park in which he remembered having good times.
Max Fleischer owns Betty Boop, and has been making cartoons with this character for eight years, also with Pop-Eye, although the character is copyrighted by someone else.
Saturday Mr. and Mrs. Tendlar will complete a number of social gatherings which have feted them during the week of their visit in Dayton, and will then return to New York to start work on several technicolor cartoons.

Tendlar was 84 when he died in Los Angeles on September 8, 1993.

Hold It

Thanks to DVDs (and Blu-Rays), it’s easy for the animation fan to stop a cartoon and look at an individual frame. The Fleischers did this for theatre-goers in 1938 with the release of the Color Classic Hold It.

At the end of the cartoon, director Dave Tendlar (listed as an animator with Nick Tafuri) has joyous cats jumping into the air. Then they “hold it.” The soundtrack goes silent and the drawing below is held for 15 frames.



There’s a fun series of drawings of two cats, twirling 180 degrees then back again in a cycle. Did any other studio try anything like this before 1938?



The cartoon also borrows a gag from the defunct Van Beuren studio. Four singing cats join their mouths together to form one mouth.



UCLA did a great restoration job on this cartoon.

One of the cats in this short is named “Myron,” no doubt in honour of Mr. Waldman (I do not know if he animated any of this cartoon. Someone likely does).

Jack Mercer does a fine job as a raspy cat singing the title song. The short begins with Bing Crosby’s theme “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”

From All of Us At Tralfaz

Yowp here.

I’m not a Christmas celebrant, but some of you reading are, either of the religious or secular versions, so I’m taking this time to thank you for stopping by this blog. I hope it’s been entertaining and/or informative. We will be on indefinite hiatus again soon.

The number of readers here is quite small but generally dedicated, and helpful if I get something wrong in one of the posts.

Below is a little Christmas song by one of the fine voice actors of the Golden Age, Mae Questel, from a 1937 Decca recording.



Another great cartoon actor was Daws Butler. We’ve talked about the “Talking Komics” he made with Marian Richman. Here are two sides of one involving Christmas, called “Sleepy Santa.” Radio veteran Ray Erlenborn provides the sound effects and the music is by Bob Mitchell. Bob Bellem wrote the story and lyrics. Marian Richman may be best known as Ralph Phillips’ mother, and she worked at UPA in addition to Warner Bros. We wrote about her in this post.

Being a Cartoon Musician

Is there any doubt that Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf was the most popular song written for a cartoon short in the 1930s?

It was composed by Frank Churchill with Ann Ronell. Churchill went on to write “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho,” “Whistle While You Work” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”

It would seem there would be no better person to talk about cartoon music to Tempo magazine than Churchill. This feature story is in the January 1938 issue.

Cartoon Comedy Scores
How They are Written And Synchronized
by Frank Churchill
(As told to Charles Gant)
THE music for a cartoon comedy is planned when the story is prepared and written, before the cartoons are drawn. I start by getting together with the writers—“story men,” we call them—in a conference in which we sit around and discuss the plot and its characters. The music must suit the characters emphasized in each scene or sequence and the next step is to lay out a “break-down” in which the sequences are separated into footage-shots. The secret of synchronization, one of the most important items in our type of work, where the characters usually perform in rhythm with the music, is merely a mathematical problem. We know how many frames of film fall to the bar of music and write the music accordingly. Of course, this method has its difficulties, but nothing that can’t be overcome with knowledge and experience. It is a matter of timing the tempos and rhythms to correspond with the proper number of frames of films.
It is possible to use any kind of time 4-4, 2-4, 6-8, even 5-4, providing the fundamental beat is kept in synchronization with the proper number of frames. When this is done it is a relatively simple matter for the animators (those who make the series of drawings that give movement to the figures) to keep their characters in time with the music. For example, a horse is to gallop with his hoofs moving in time with the music. The animator contrives that the horse’s movements coincide with the required number of frames and there’s no chance for error.
Recording

The music may be recorded without even seeing the picture, though we often make piano soundtracks to use with the rough tests just to check up. In recording, the conductor, and many of the musicians wear earphones, through which they get a beat supplied from a mechanical device which supplies a beat adjusted to fit with the film when it is run. The rhythm section always wears earphones.
Composing
When I joined the Disney company, about a year after the advent of sound-pictures, it was customary to use excerpts from familiar—often too familiar—sources. I was engaged to adapt music of this kind and discovered very soon that it was impossible to avoid hackneyed themes of the well known “spring song” and “flower dance” type. It was sometimes difficult to synchronize these themes with the action, so I started composing original scores. Since that time I have batted out some 75 complete scores, not to mention countless sequences discarded because of changes in the picture during production, which necessitated turning out new music to go with the new sequence. For me, writing has become easier as the time went by, each score seeming to supply ideas which could developed rapidly for the next one. After a number of years of this kind of work it gets to be just another routine job to the writer who spends so many hours a day at it, but I believe I find the work as interesting as that of any of the studio music writers. However, when I’m through with the day at work I rarely feel like attending a concert or listening to the radio. I’d rather sit down to a game of poker or go to a prize fight.
Songwriting
For the score of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I did, in addition to most of the background music 10 songs (lyrics by Larry Morey), two of which were cut out of the picture but which will be published along with the others. Some of these I wrote as much as three years ago when we first started work on Snow White. Tune writing has always been easy for me. It’s just a knack, I guess, that some people have and others don’t.
One of the best known studio composers, who has turned out some outstanding scores, can’t write a tune to save his life. I have some tunes among the Snow White songs that I think arc pretty fair melodies. One of the best I wrote in five minutes. If some of the Snow White songs go over as well as I hope, I may devote more time to songwriting in the future.
Recording Musicians
The musicians we use for recording dates have to be thoroughly schooled men, all-round performers who can “cut” anything at sight, and in addition they have to be handy at putting in the odd effects we use in cartoon music, and doing them in the right way. The cartoon comedy music calls for the same high degree of ability necessary for any studio musician and often a little more. Many of the odd effects you hear in cartoon comedy music sound as though they had been produced by novelty instruments, and while we do use “jug bands” and other novelty instruments at times, many of the effects are just standard instruments playing the “trick stuff” we write for them. A knowledge of how to write these effects into the music, and an ability on the part of the musicians to play them, are important features in this kind of work.

The “Studio Briefs” item referred to in the photo reads:

Reorganization of the music department for Universal’s Walter Lantz productions (Oswald Rabbit Cartoons) brought in Nat Shilkret as musical director, Frank Churchill (see Page 6) as composer, Frank Marsales as arranger and sound technician. Lantz office said purpose of new set-up was to give productions musical background of the highest possible character. It is also rumored that Shilkret has contract for music on an ambitious series of commercial cartoon pictures to be sponsored by a toothpaste company.

Lantz seems to have decided to cough up a good deal of money around this time, also hiring Burt Gillett to direct and Willy Pogany to paint backgrounds.

Why Churchill left for Lantz after Snow White may be told in some Disney history book, but Lantz began to have money troubles and Churchill returned to write for Dumbo and Bambi. The stress of work, perhaps coupled with alcohol, got to him. ”My nerves have completely left me,” he wrote in his suicide note to his wife. He died May 14, 1942, age 40. Neal Gabler’s book on Disney says:

Always sorrowful and sensitive, he had no doubt been further depressed by Walt’s ongoing dissatisfaction with his work on Bambi. (Churchill had written a great score for the “musical circle of Hollywood,” Walt griped, but one that was monotonous and did not provide the excitement the movie needed.)
Churchill’s last request was that “Love Is a Song,” which he had written for Bambi, be dedicated to his wife, Carolyn, who had been Walt’s personal secretary from June 1930 to January 1934, when she married Churchill. But even that was denied since the song had already gone to the publisher.

The incomparable theatrical cartoon movie expert Daniel Goldmark deserves thanks for this post, alerting me that a number of old music publications are available on-line, albeit behind a paywall.

I don’t want to end this post with a suicide, so here’s a low-resolution photo from Tempo of July 1934. This may be the only shot of Carl Stalling with Art Turkisher. It shows they worked together on films at Iwerks.


The copy accompanying the photo reads:

ARTHUR TURKISHER
Born in New York City, Turkisher is the youngest musical director in any motion picture studio. Prior to his coming to Hollywood he was employed in the New York Paramount Studio, where he assisted in the scoring of pictures when sound was first adopted in the studios.
He has appeared with the Columbia Broadcasting Company and secured an assignment at Fleischers to assist in the technical direction and synchronizing and scoring of animated cartoons. He has acted as musical director on more than 130 pictures.
For the past fourteen months, he has been employed by UB Iwerks as musical director for scoring and arranging, and directed many Flip the Frog,” “Willie Whopper and “ComiColor” cartoons.
Turkisher is a concert cellist.

CARL STALLING
Born in Lexington, Mo., Carl Stalling had his own orchestra in Kansas City for ten years, during which time he specialized in the pipe organ which he played in conjunction with his orchestra work in Kansas City, Chicago and other cities in the Middle West.
Stalling joined UB Iwerk’s [sic] animated Pictures Corporation studio in Beverly Hills about three years ago and has created innumerable scores for animated cartoons, many of which have been played over national radio networks, this with particular reference to his original musical creation of “The Little Red Hen” which was played over the Pacific Coast network on an average of twelve times a day for a period of three weeks when the picture was released.

Turkisher never got screen credit on Jungle Jitters (released July 28, 1934). He seems to have had the same relationship with Stalling that Milt Franklyn did when Stalling replaced Norman Spencer at the Schlesinger studio.

Turkisher was back in New York by 1938 as he was on the executive of AFM Local 802. You can read more about him in this post. One thing not included is a piece from the Santa Barbara Morning Press of July 3, 1934:

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morley Fletcher of Los Angeles are the guests of Charles Hinman Graves for a few days. Mr. Fletcher, well known for his color prints done in the Japanese manner, but essentially a portrait painter, has just refinished a life-size canvas of James Culhane, prominent moving picture director, and Mrs. Culhane. His portrait of the young Hungarian ‘cellist, Arthur Turkisher, given its first public showing in Los Angeles recently, was enthusiastically received by critics in the southern city.

Culhane and Turkisher worked together at Iwerks.

How Cartoons Are Made – 1930

Disney has always dominated discussions about animation. There was a minor bit of hoopla amongst critics in the early 1950s about the “anti-Disney,” UPA, but by the time I was growing up in the 1960s, it was long forgotten. It took “Of Mice and Magic” to bring some knowledge of other cartoon studios to public knowledge; film publications of the ‘70s were doing the same thing to a more academic group.

There were many articles on cartoon studios during the sound era of theatrical cartoons, some of which were designed to satisfy the curiosity of how they were made.

Below is a story from the Los Angeles Times, dated April 13, 1930. It was published elsewhere. Most of it is about Disney, with a brief list of other studios. Several are not mentioned. Harman-Ising and Iwerks were just starting out, as was Paul Terry on the East Coast, whose first release was in February that year.

This was transcribed on the old GAC site in May 2009.

COMICS MEAN HARD LABOR
Creator of Mickey Mouse and Other Animated Cartoons Works Harder Than Composers
BY JACOB COOPER
A comic-strip artist and a master musician go into a huddle, and—Presto!—we have the animated sound cartoon. Or, rather, this is an abbreviated picture of what goes on in the little studio which hugs the small, green hills on Hyperion avenue, where Walt Disney directs the lives and fates of those droll zoological which his fertile brain creates.
Walt, you know, is, among other things, the daddy of Mr. Michael Q. Rodent, otherwise and affectionately known to his screen public as Mickey Mouse.
Besides the latter, Disney also produces the Silly Symphony series, and after seeing the involved process which goes to make up this one-reeler, it would be safe to wager that it carries behind it more anguish of soul a work-day minute than Tschaikowsky labored under during the creation of his Symphonic Pathetique.
PAINSTAKING DETAIL.
There is more than a keen sense of the humorous needed in the production of this type of opus, although this is one of its main ingredients. There is infinitesimal, painstaking detail to be done on the part of the thirty some odd persons engaged in the studio. Consider the fact that it takes about 6000 drawings to make up one reel of film, and you have an idea of just what these many people are doing. They must possess an understanding of movement involving every situation in which the human or animal body may find itself—an authoritativeness surpassing Michelangelo’s on the self-same subject. Then every person is expected to contribute to the fund of gags and droll situations as the ideas occur to them—and they are funny to the point of tragedy.
On the whole, the entire procedure is somewhat on the same order as any company may use in production of the over-famous back-stage revue. There is the scenario, in this case both written and drawn, in which the scenes are laid out according to the tick of the clock. The sets are drawn on pasteboard. The background of a scene need never be recopied; it is only the characters which move that have to be put through their copius [sic] gestures. These are first drawn on thin paper—one drawing for each frame of the film—and are then traced on a sheet of transparent celluloid. The celluloid drawing is then filled in with the necessary blacks and whites and superimposed over the background which has been placed under a hanging camera.
The cameraman’s job is no grind; far from it. He can only click one frame at a time and at this rate hardly ever exceeds an output of fifty feet per day.
There is very little cutting to be done on this type of film; it is almost in sequence when the exposed film is removed from the camera.
SOUND PREARRANGED
Then comes the musical and sound part. This has all been prearranged even before the drawings are made. In fact, many of the subjects are based on a musical idea. But this is no job for a thoroughly canonical musician. He must suffer to see Liszt made ludicrous, Bach a buffoon, and Debussy delirious. Whistles, horns, drums and perversions of the human voice add to this barnyard bedlam and Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphony venture forth into the world equipped with the utmost in risible accoutrements.
Then, lest we forget, there are the other cartoons which help fill our moments of frivolity. Two others are being produced in Hollywood: Mintz's "Krazy Kat," and Walter Lantz's "Oswald"—the latter being originally the creation of Walt Disney. It is rumored that Van Beuren's "Aesop's Fables," which now claim New York as their habitat, will move out to Hollywood. The eastern metropolis also sends forth Max Fleischer's "Talkatoons" and "Song Cartoons," declaiming and warbling into the world.

Bimbo Can't Escape

Swing You Sinners is filled with almost non-stop nightmarish imagery and is one of my favourite Fleischer cartoons.

Bimbo finds himself in a graveyard, with ghosts and gravestones singing accusations against him before escaping to a warped farmyard and being chased by all kinds of creatures.

In one scene, the grass opens up and a huge mouth comes out, while headstones advance toward him and form a square around him.



Bimbo jumps to escape. Cut to him grasping and then climbing to the top of a tall pole. “Oh, no!” wails Bimbo. A tombstone grows, develops a face and responds, “Oh, yes.” Bimbo drops to the ground.



And it’s on to the next scene.

Ted Sears and William Bowsky are the credited animators.

Shamus Culhane remembered the cartoon very well. He wrote almost two pages about it in Talking Animals and Other People, saying he, Al Eugster, George Cannata, Seymour Kneitel and William Henning (as well as Bowsky) were suddenly promoted to animators and this was their first cartoon. Culhane felt Grim Natwick should have received a credit for all the work he did on it.

It was released Sept. 24, 1930.