Nutsy Blur

Confusions of a Nutsy Spy (released in December 1942) is full of angled shots and varying perspectives in a war-time tale of a really stupid Porky Pig trying to capture a bomb-carrying Nazi spy.

There’s also a pan shot reminiscent of the Fleischers in the late 1930s. To simulate speed, the pan is blurred. Not by the camera pan itself but by brush work over the background painting. I can’t snip this together to give you the full background, but here are some frames that may give you an idea.



The backgrounds are likely by Dick Thomas.

Norm McCabe directed this war short, which has some of the most tedious and obvious puns you can find in a Warners cartoon, supplied by Don Christensen.

The cartoon opens with a rather low-key violin and clarinet version of “Hey Doc!” by Edgar Sampson and Kim Gannon. You can hear a different version below.

And the Champeen Is...

In 1943, there was a war on, so you'd expect a certain amount of sabotage to be going on around the world. Unfortunately, one place where it shouldn’t have been happening was in the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, where Norm McCabe’s directorial efforts were continually sabotaged by weak stories.

One of them is the one-shot Looney Tune Hop and Go, released February 6, 1943. There are some pretty good visual touches in it, but the story (credited to Tubby Millar) stars three weak characters. There’s a dopey kangaroo (who doesn’t have an Australian accent), a rabbit (who has a Scottish accent for some reason) and another rabbit with no personality who barely speaks.

Somehow, Millar wants us to connect with these characters and to a plot about who is really the “champeen” hopper. But does anyone really care? Maybe he thought the early ‘40s love of heckling cartoon characters could somehow carry the film.

On top of that, McCabe seems to have been stuck shoehorning patriotic war stuff into his shorts. In McCabe’s The Ductators, it works well because the characters are clear-cut Axis bad guys. In this one, the ending just seems obligatory. And the best Millar could come up with a name for the kangaroo was "Claude Hopper"?

McCabe has future UPAer Dave Hilberman as his uncredited layout man, and the two try to be creative. The opening is shot at the kangaroo’s visual perspective with the scene hopping up and down. There are attempts at perspective animation. And there’s great use of light and shadow after the kangaroo is catapulted into the night atmosphere by the rabbits.



Claude lights a match to see where he is.



Suddenly, the sound of anti-aircraft fire. Claude twirls around, with his body alternating in shadow, or partly lit.



Now we see the anti-aircraft fire.



Cut to a long shot of Claude flying through the search lights.



There’s an explosion and a crate put in the kangaroo’s pouch by the rabbits jostles out.



As Claude falls, he realises what the crate contains and tosses it away. Claude hit the earth and hops away. The crate hits the earth. Nothing hops away.



Dissolve to Claude, telling us that we now know who the “champeen” is. Cut to a longer shot. Claude has destroyed Tokyo. Cue Porky bursting out of the drum.



Interestingly, the background artist (Dick Thomas?) spells it “Tokyo.” McCabe’s next cartoon spelled it “Tokio.” But the less said about that one, the better.

Cal Dalton is handed the rotating animation credit on this one. Izzy Ellis and John Carey are likely artists on this as well.

Pinto Colvig appropriates his Goofy voice for the kangaroo. Mel Blanc plays both rabbits, with one having his standard Scottish accent he gave to Botsworth Twink on the Abbott and Costello radio show.

Daffy, the One Duck Band

Norm McCabe’s The Daffy Duckaroo has a lively start, with the newspapers revealing crooner Daffy Dackaroo has deserted films for the wild and wooly west.

Wearing a cowboy hat that covers his head, Daffy rides a burro into the cartoon, strumming a guitar and singing “My Little Buckaroo.” After removing the hat (and the hats underneath), Daffy gives a “Howdy, you all!” to those of us watching the cartoon and carries on with the song.



Things gallop along, with Daffy quickly pulling a honky-tonk piano from a trap door in his travel-trailer (complete with a stein of beer on top). After two bars, he reaches behind the piano, pulls out a trombone he plays for three-quarters of a bar, honks a horn twice for the rest of the bar, then gives another two bars on the piano.

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McCabe cuts to Daffy scatting the song from various positions, including extended bouncing legs that we saw when he shouted “woo-hoo” in those pre-greedy, pre-Speedy days.



There are several animated character twirls. Here’s a frame from one.



Tubby Millar’s story leaves a bit to be desired. Daffy’s motivation isn’t well thought out. I get using sex as a weapon against your opponent, but Daffy takes it a little far for no necessary reason. There’s no real ending; the cartoon stops when a character who had nothing to do with the plot shows up out of nowhere (I can’t help but wonder if McCabe was told his cartoons had to end with a war public service message). But it’s likeable enough, certainly in the first half.

I learned something today from a note from Matt Hunter:

There’s a brief bit of footage cut from most prints of this. The camera pans back to reveal Daffy’s trailer, which advertises him as a Warner Bros. Star.
This was likely done when the cartoons went to TV through the Guild/Sunset films deal…Jack Warner wanted all references to the studio removed from anything that went to television. He felt (at the time) that TV was inferior to theatrical films, and didn’t want his studio’s name associated with it.

You can see the murky, low-resolution frame grabs. I have two versions of this cartoon (three counting a Fred Ladd colourised re-trace). Both are fuzzy and the other is muddier than this one. You can’t appreciate the animators’ work (Cal Dalton gets the screen credit). McCabe deserves better than this.

The song over the opening titles is “I Can’t Get Along Little Dogie” by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl. I swear I’ve heard either Judy Canova or Jerry Colonna sing this on an old radio show. It sounds a lot like Jerome and Scholl’s “The Old Apple Tree,” sung by the McKimson crow in Corn Plastered.

Gophers, McCabe-Style

The elements were there, but Norm McCabe and his writing staff just couldn’t pull it off.

Art Davis (and, I guess, writer George Hill) invented some heckling gophers in The Goofy Gophers (1947).

Tedd Pierce and Chuck Jones came out with a couple of mice, one a Brooklyn sharpie, the other a dullard, who terrorised a cat in The Aristo Cat (1943).

McCabe tried both concepts a few years earlier in Gopher Goofy (1942).

It has familiar elements from Warner Bros. cartoons—a character happily copying Jerry Colonna saying “Something new has been added!”, a human character with a red nose (a la Elmer Fudd in A Wild Hare and other cartoons), characters talking to the camera (“Keep your shirts on, folks. Us gophers go through this all the time), and Carl Stalling loading up the soundtrack with “42nd Street.”

McCabe and writer Don Christensen also pull a variation on a Maltese gag from The Heckling Hare (1941) where a dog crushes a tomato but thinks he’s killed Bugs Bunny. Here, the farmer thinks he’s crushed one of the gophers.



Here’s the punch line.



I really want to like Norm McCabe’s cartoons. Really I do. But most of them are full of blah characters and weak jokes. None of the characters in this short do anything for me. The farmer is a zero and the gophers don’t have the wit of Hubie. The dummy says, out of nowhere, “I miss Central Park.” What? Why? Lame characters equal lame cartoons.

This was a Looney Tunes cartoon. The series still featured Porky Pig in the opening and closing titles, but Leon Schlesinger had given up any pretense that the LTs were a showcase for the pig. Porky d-dee-uh-doesn’t appear anywhere in this short. It might have been stronger if he had been the farmer and got some decent dialogue.

Izzy Ellis is the credited animator and Dick Thomas remains uncredited as the background artist.

It's Just a Jokio

During war-time, it’s okay to ridicule the enemy. Of course, when the war’s over, the ridicule becomes really out of place. Bugs Bunny stopped nipping anyone from the Land of the Rising Sun, Popeye didn’t tell anyone in Japan they were saps, and Tokio stopped being a jokio.

Tokio Jokio was Norm McCabe’s last directorial effort for Warner Bros. It would appear he had left the studio and was in uniform when this cartoon was released on May 15, 1943 as his credit is “Cpl. Norman McCabe.” (The city was spelled “Tokio” back then).

The short is supposedly a captured Japanese newsreel and is full of unflattering, tired stereotypes. It starts out with a parody of the Pathé newsreels with the rooster crowing. Except the rooster turns out to be a Japanese vulture in disguise.

“Cock-a-doodle do, prease,” says the vulture, who then rubs its hands (?) together as the Japanese flag appears in the background. (The deal is Japanese people are polite and pronounce the letter “l” as “r,” so they say “prease” instead of “please.” Try to control the laughter).

The music behind this scene is “Fou So Ka.” You can hear it below, from a Victor recording in the U.S. Library of Congress.



The Japanese national anthem, “Kimi Ga Yo,” is under the opening credits.

Don Christensen gets the revolving story credit. Izzy Ellis is the credited animator, though I suspect Art Davis, Cal Dalton and John Carey also animated, with an uncredited Dave Hilberman providing layouts.

McCabe and Christensen don’t leave their ridicule for the Japanese. Hitler and Mussolini show up as losers as well.