Let the Game Begin . . . After a Slight Delay

There’s a problem starting a football game in Bosko the Drawback (1932). The timekeeper’s gun doesn’t have a bullet. It has an egg. The egg drops out of the barrel and hatches.



The problem is a short one. The chick pulls out a whistle and blows it to begin the first half of the game.



This may the only Warners football cartoon which does not include “Frat” or “Freddie the Freshman” in the score.

The animation credits go to maybe the studio’s best draughtsmen at that point, Bob McKimson and Friz Freleng. There are better gags than this I would have posted but the available versions of this cartoon are from VHS copies (and not first generation) that are rife with digital pixilation which makes the frames murky and the action difficult to see.

Bosko was Warners’ first star and his Looney Tunes deserve something better than 40-year-old technology.

A Fishy Camel

Before we get to the lacklustre Beau Bosko, let me grumble about the worse-than-lacklustre copies of many of the Bosko cartoons that circulate on-line.

I know they come from VHS dubs of 1990 cable TV enhancements, but shouldn’t there be decent versions around? They look like sixth-generation dubs recorded on the slowest tape speed. The copy of this cartoon has an end title spliced on.

It is true that Bosko is no Bugs Bunny, or Daffy Duck, or even Pepe Le Pew. But he was Warners’ first animated star and he deserves better treatment than this.

He deserved better treatment than the story of this cartoon. The first half is a bunch of snoring gags, and then a wash basin-in-a-backpack gag. The cartoon is just under seven minutes, and the villain doesn’t appear until the five-minute mark. There’s a gag about flies around a snoring turbaned guy and another with a different Arab stretching up and down as he rides a camel. Those are the gags. Yikes.

Here’s another one that’s cuter. Bosko’s camel drinks water out of a shallow pond in the desert (no mirage gag this time). Unexpectedly, a fish pops up. You can follow the action in the fuzzy frames below.



Ham Hamilton and Norm Blackburn are the credited animators. Frank Marsales' music provides the proper mood; most of it was original.

Who's the Real Monster?

Tex Avery tried a split screen gag in 1939 in Thugs With Dirty Mugs, and did it again the following year in Cross Country Detours.

Narrator Lou Marcelle intones over a tympani roll the next scene is quite gruesome, so the screen will be split with one side for grown-ups and one side for children.



Grown-ups get a “hideous gila monster” snarling and growling. Children get a recitation.

Avery loves violating split screen gags, and he doesn’t disappoint us here.



Avery uses a split-screen again in A Bear’s Tale (1940), Tortoise Beats Hare and Aviation Vacation (both 1941). The “Mary Had a Little Lamb” recitation routine goes back to Harman-Ising’s Bosko in Person and Bosko's Mechanical Man (both 1933). Avery used it in Hamateur Night (1939) and again as late as 1954, when MGM released The Flea Circus.

Rich Hogan is the credited story man on this short, with Paul J. Smith getting the rotating animation credit and Johnny Johnsen getting no credit for backgrounds.

It's Not What You Think

There should be a drinking game where you glug down something every time someone in a Bosko cartoon says “Ain’t that cute?”

In The Tree’s Knees (1931), we get it twice in a little over three minutes.

After the second time, something falls from the sky and lands on our hero.



Cut to the bird above. No, Bosko, it’s not what you think.



I guess it’s tree sap.

Inevitably, Frank Marsales plays Otto Rasbach's Trees in the background, and we get Walkin’ My Baby Back Home, then Joe Burke and Al Dubin’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes when a waltzing weeping willow is, well, you can guess.

Friz Freleng and Ham Hamilton are the credited animators.

Copies from battered old Sunset Productions prints are better than nothing, but it’s a shame that’s the way we have to see much of Bosko’s Warners career.

Rubber Hose Race

Spaghetti-limbed characters didn’t quite go out with the early 1930s. UPA used them on Gerald McBoing Boing and other cartoon shorts 20 years later.

Here’s an example from Bosko’s Fox Hunt (1931). The middle sausage-shaped horse in this ten-drawing cycle has no joints, just rubber legs and neck.



There is such a sameness about the Harman-Ising cartoons for Warner Bros. There are cycles in this cartoon used over and over (one has 12 frames of dogs running). H-I characters all have the same open mouths at a three-quarters angle. There always seems to be a scene when they run out of the frame at the exact same angle (borrowed from the silent Oswalds). And, in this short, they needed a fox, so they simply used the same design as Foxy in the Merrie Melodies shorts released earlier in the year.

Ham Hamilton and Norm Blackburn received the animation credits on this one.

The Last Man

Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth (1939) goes back and forth from extremely realistic artwork to fuzzy little cartoon animals with cartoon-y voices. Somehow it works, and Harman had every right to be proud of this cartoon.

Grandpa squirrel tells the tale of how men couldn’t stop fighting each other and, finally, the last two men on the planet shot each other to death.

Harman employs some melodramatics in showing the last man on Earth dying during a World War One-type trench war.

The short is set at Christmas time, as the little animals sing “Peace on Earth” to the melody of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Harman began planning this cartoon before World War Two began. Its anti-war message was still welcome at the time of its release. I imagine it wouldn’t have been once Pearl Harbor was attacked. The story (by Charles McGirl?) talks of a war between vegetarians and meat eaters. After December 7, 1941, America was involved in a war far less trivial.

The background art and effects animation are outstanding. It is shame whoever was responsible for it never got credit.

Cartoon Answer Man

Question: In Bosko’s Holiday, why is the dog licking a tire?



Answer: To set up a gag. The dog bites the tire and blows up like a balloon.



Question: In Bosko's Holiday, why is the dog licking Honey’s butt?



Answer: To set up a gag. Honey thinks it’s Bosko and slaps him to end the cartoon.



Question: In Bosko's Holiday, how can a huge bite in Bosko’s sandwich just disappear?



Answer: There's no real gag here. I guess it's because anything can happen in a cartoon.

This is another “Bosko and Honey go on an outing” cartoon. It stars an alarm clock and a candlestick phone in the first sequence. They’re funnier than Bosko and Honey.

Friz Freleng and Paul Smith are the credited animators in this 1931 cartoon.