Zooming Head of Red

Van Beuren cartoons vary between odd and bizarre. Red Riding Hood (1931) falls in the “bizarre” category.

There’s the scene where grandma pours some “jazz tonic” all over herself to become a black-bottom-dancing flapper who runs off with the wolf to get married. Red puts a stop to it by telling the wolf’s wife, who interrupts the ceremony by marching into the church with a phalanx of kids—all armed with rolling pins.

In the final scene, the stood-up grandma starts crying. The Red cries. Then the preacher cries. But suddenly, they all stop and happily sing “And that is the story of Little Red Riding Hood.” Being a Van Beuren cartoon, it ends with the three characters’ heads zooming toward the theatre audience.



As a bonus, we get Minnie Mouse as Red. Or, as Disney’s lawyers would say, too close of a reasonable facsimile of her (in the Van Beuren cartoon, she has a really bad falsetto).

Harry Bailey and John Foster are responsible for this cartoon.

Take That, Tire

Cubby Bear notices a tack in the path of his bike in Bubbles and Troubles. No problem. His bike can jump over it.



Because this is a 1933 cartoon made in New York, inanimate things come to life. In this case, the tack is not going to put up with being ignored. It attacks a tire before running out of the scene.



The Fleischers did these kinds of come-to-life-gags the best. Their pace was quicker compared to how director Manny Davis handles the gag here. The tack is bland. Fleischer characters happily sing or shout a line or show some emotion.

Gene Rodemich found plenty of ways to fit “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” into the soundtrack.

The Head's Coming at Us Again

Debate, if you want, that A Toytown Tale (1931) is a Christmas cartoon. Yes, it has “Silent Night” (and “Jingle Bells”), and snow and toys, but there’s no Santa or Christmas tree or presents.

What there is, is a truly disjointed story, the kind only the Van Beuren studio could conjure up. The moon comes out of the sky and hides behind some trees. A toy soldier flirts with a girl (they sing) but are threatened by a toy elephant. Suddenly, the elephant disappears from the plot and a monkey shows up. The soldier gets frightened. A new toy character comes out of nowhere to sock the monkey. Now the girl goes for him.

Meanwhile, a crazy jack-in-the-box shows up off-and-on throughout the cartoon to screech and clap and laugh. He’s clobbered by a toy policeman. Here comes the Van Beuren Head Zoom!



But the jack-in-the-box awakens, smiles, gives us a silly "Yankee Doodle" laugh and then sticks out his tongue to end the cartoon.



Then it’s another round of bootleg hootch for the writers.

John Foster and Mannie Davis get the “by” credit, and the music is supplied by Gene Rodemich.

Cubby and the Code

“Pre-Code” does not mean “Pre-Code.”

The Motion Picture Production Code did not suddenly appear in 1934. There was a code in 1930, and other measures going back to the silent era. It’s just that enforcement was lax until 1934.

One wonders if a gag in The Last Mail, a 1933 Van Beuren cartoon, would have gotten past the Code if it were made a year later. It stars Cubby Bear as a mail deliverer on a sled pulled through the snow by squirrels. The film cuts to a scene of beavers building a snowman. Emotion lines indicate they see something in the distance and they run away. It turns out to be Cubby.



Cubby and his sleigh plough through the snowman.



Here’s where the Code comes in. The snowman comes to life and checks his privates. They’re gone!



The snowman runs into the distance, a standard Terry/Van Beuren scene-ender going back to the silent days.



Somehow, I don’t think the Code would go for a Cubby Castration™.

Mannie Davis is the director of this one.

Woims

You have to wonder what took place during story sessions at the Van Beuren cartoon studio.

Jolly Fish is a 1932 short starring Tom and Jerry. It appears the staff tried to come up with funny situations but when they couldn’t figure out a payoff, they just quit and went on to the next situation.

In one scene, Jerry reaches into a can of worms. The can has a Brooklyn accent, and reads “Woims.” The funniest thing so far is Jerry’s weird eye shapes.



Jerry ties the worms together and dips them in the lake. Soon, a fish rises from the water, devouring the string of worms. Jerry then grabs the fish and shakes it. And then.



Well, that’s it. There’s no punch line. It’s like the staff couldn’t think of one so they just went on to the next scene. The cartoon is full of moments like that.

John Foster and George Stallings get screen credits along with Gene Rodemich, who puts two instrumentals on the soundtrack for mood.

The cartoon features fish of various sizes, swaying eels, a smiling lobster dancer seen in The Haunted Ship (1930) (a funnier cartoon) and a duodecipus.

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.