Kiss My...

Van Beuren cartoons are at their best when weird stuff happens out of nowhere. Not an awful lot weird happens on In the Park, a 1933 Tom and Jerry.

If this were a Fleischer cartoon, there would be a sense of danger as the hero tries to rescue a wayward child toddling into perilous situations. In this one, Tom and Jerry spend the cartoon trying to keep the baby quiet.

There is one Fleischer-type gag. The child is hanging from its baby gown (what is that called, anyway?) on a tree branch. Suddenly, a safety pin pops over and the child’s diaper falls down.



All is not lost. A helpful leaf on the tree pulls the diaper back up.



The end gag is, literally, an end gag. A cop has been making time with the baby’s nurse. After the cop kisses the nurse, the kid falls into his arms. He goes to kiss the nurse again, but just about kisses the baby’s butt before he opens his eyes.



Boy, is his face red! Or would be if the cartoon were in colour.



Tom and Jerry chortle to bring this tame short to an end.



Frank Sherman and George Rufle get the "by" credit. They handled the next two Tom and Jerrys before the series was brought to an end.

Moo To You

On paper, it looked like a great idea.

Amadee Van Beuren decided to get out of the third-rate cartoon business, and hired Three Little Pigs director Burt Gillett to bring Disney magic to his cartoon studio.

It was a disaster.

The Van Beuren studio didn’t only need Disney calibre artists. It needed Disney calibre characters and stories.

What Van Beuren got was a weak live-action/animation combination, pointless cartoons with parrots, and a new star—Molly Moo Cow.

Molly was kind of a silent character, in that she didn’t talk. She mooed like she was belching and her cowbell was an annoying distraction by clattering half of the time.

And although Van Beuren was assembling a staff of good young artists, the drawings looked pretty ugly at times. Here’s a frame from Molly Moo Cow and the Indians (1935)



Whoever wrote this for directors Gillett and Tom Palmer is going for either drama or pathos in this scene. Molly is in tears, pleading with the Indian to save the lives of the two ducks he wants to eat.



Finally, the Indian throws the hoof-in-mouth Molly out of the scene. Someone should have done the same thing with the footage.



Gillett or someone must have realised things like the Molly, the Parrotville cartoons and the “Toddle Tales” shorts were not entertaining. They were all short-lived. The studio purchased rights to established characters like Felix the Cat (who talked) and the denizens of Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville (including the Trolley).

People on staff like Dan Gordon and Joe Barbera could have developed them into solid characters, but RKO had seen enough. It signed a deal with Walt Disney, effectively scuttling the cartoon studio it partly owned (Van Beuren continued with live-action shorts for another year).
Barbera, Carlo Vinci and others found work at Terrytoons. One of their cartoons featured a very familiar-looking cow.

Van Beuren Farm Fun

Unexpected, funny things used to happen in early 1930s Fleischer cartoon, like a plant being watered, coming to life and waving “Thanks!” In a way, what happened seemed logical.

At Van Beuren, unexpected things happened and you were left wondering “What was that?”

I swear John Foster and whoever helped him got drunk on bootleg booze during story sessions and decided to go with any weird idea they could think of.

In The Farmerette (1932), two cows are grazing on pasture. One google-eyed cow stands up and pulls her tail and the one next to her. Their skirts go up. Why? Who knows. It’s a Van Beuren cartoon. (Note in the third frame, the horns are inked in. The animation is in a cycle so the horns kind of flash).



Then the horns turn into horns that honk.



The two cows dance and collapse. One gets up to sing “Hey, hey!” to end the scene.



First, an inking error, then a camera error. In some cartoons, you’ll see a blip on the screen when a character loses a body part on a separate cel for maybe a frame. In The Farmerette, one poor “dog in the kennel” loses his entire body for 12 frames.



Foster and Harry Bailey get screen credit for this short.

Rat Tale

A kitten tries to pull on a rope, or something. Its kin attempt to help.



They fall after unable to budge whatever it is. No matter. The tail belongs to a rat, which comes out of its hole. This being a Van Beuren cartoon, the kittens are a basic design. The rat turns into a circle at times.



I like the design of the rat. But what’s with the silly expressions on the kittens? Shouldn’t they recoil in fear?



The rat turns into a circle again. This part of the scene shows Van Beuren tried to add a little extra. After capturing the black kitten, the rat hoists up the other two by its tail and then drops them. The rat could just have easily turned and gone back into its hole without the additional action.



Rough on Rats tries to be a pleasant, Disney-like atmosphere cartoon with the kittens frolicking without evoking laughs. There’s even a happy, Disney-like song with a female chorus. But the kittens are nowhere drawn as well as anything at Disney and they don’t have any individual personalities.

Still, I like this cartoon. It doesn’t drag and we get a climax where the kittens vanquish the rat with everything in sight, as the female chorus ooooos ominously. Harry Bailey directed.

King Crowned For Christmas

Of the dozens of cartoons made by the animation division of Van Beuren Productions from 1929 (when it changed from Fables Pictures following the firing of Paul Terry) to the animation division's demise in 1936, only one was Christmas themed.

The Film Daily of Dec. 19, 1933 reported:

Otto Soglow, creator of the famous “Little King,” has drawn a special Christmas animated cartoon subject for RKO-Van Beuren wherein the merry monarch becomes a good samaritan with charitable purpose and comic effect.

I suspect Soglow didn’t draw anything; that was left to the Van Beuren staff under Jim Tyer, who got screen credit for animation.

“Comic effect” is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps audiences of 1933 laughed at a king who behaved unregally and more like a child. But perhaps not, as the Little King series lasted ten cartoons and the king was dethroned when Burt Gillett was hired to run the studio.

The plot of Pals involves the Little King altruistically picking up two hoboes (one of whom is wearing a bra) on Christmas Eve, inviting them to bathe with him before a sleepover, and then coming downstairs the next morning to see what Santa Claus has brought. The King gets a small car, one of the hoboes getd a miniature fire truck, which they crash into anything and everything (“comic effect”?).

The two vehicles collide head-on. Positive and negative drawings emphasize the impact.



When the smoke clears, the woozy King is in the middle of a Christmas wreath.



Then he hiccoughs and a bubble comes out of his mouth to end the cartoon.



Yes, I know, it was one of the hoboes who swallowed a bar of soap and started bubbling away. Why is the Little King doing it now? The writers evidently thought it was hilarious. Methinks they were swallowing something a little stronger than a bar of soap.

Gene Rodemich fills the soundtrack with “Jingle Bells.”

Poor Cinderella

John Foster and Harry Bailey go for pathos in a scene from Cinderella Blues (1931).

After dropping and breaking the family dishes, Cinderella sits dejected by the fireplace. As violins play in the background, words of sympathy are formed by the flames.



Gene Rodemich’s scores for the Tom and Jerry cartoons at Van Beuren are made up from newish songs used as mood music but in this cartoon, he seems to be trying to score to the action, especially to dance numbers likely choreographed by Jack Ward.

There’s some really atrocious animation, with Cinderella walking into her limo like it’s a flat drawing, and the dialogue is over enunciated, but the cartoon does have a happy ending.