Rachel's Turn On The Fence: Another Look At THE ALLEY CAT (1941)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

The Alley Cat
Release Date: July 5, 1941
Director: Hugh Harman
In short: An unlikely romance ensures between a scraggly alley cat and a Park Avenue Persian--much to the regret of a certain bulldog and a butler...

(Edited 7/08/08 to correct minor errors and to add further comments).

Foreword: Getting sick is probably the worst thing that can happen to a blogger on a hot streak, but that's precisely what happened to me.

For most of June, I not only had to struggle with a cold, but a cold in the middle of allergy season, making it doubly potent--and twice as hard to get rid of. By the time I was ready to work on the promised Landing Stripling review, I was too busy sneezing to do much writing--when I wasn't flat on my back in bed.

While I recuperated, Kevin provided some wonderful content, the most intriguing of which was his review of a Hugh Harman cartoon, The Alley Cat--a cartoon I admit to having given only scant notice before. As usual I was astounded by his memory for detail, and drawn in by his enthusiasm. His instincts are rarely wrong--after seeing this cartoon again, I knew I had to add my own observations.

The Landing Stripling review will come, of course. For now, I beg your indulgence as I give you my own take on the wonderful The Alley Cat.

Just looking at the names "Harman" and "Ising", one can be forgiven for thinking they were meant to be together--a coupling of names ordained by the animation gods.

That unlikely, unintentionally punning combination--belonging to two men noted for their skill in combining music with animated images--is a most incredible accident of fate, to be sure. We've become so accustomed to seeing those names together, it's easy to think of the two of them as a single unit, joined from birth by their drawing hands.

It's a mistake even I have been known to make, speaking of the two as if they were interchangeable. Yet Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, ironically, were linked only in name. They never once co-directed a cartoon--and probably couldn't have, had they bothered to try. Each had his own respective crew, and their demeanors--and attitude toward filmmaking--couldn't have been more different.

Harman was the fiery one, the one who went head-to-head with producers, distributors, and just about everyone else in an effort to improve his product. The words "good enough" were not in his vocabulary--it had to be better, and to Hugh Harman, "better" usually meant a bigger budget. Ising was the phlegmatic one, a man who very quickly earned the nickname "The Sleepy Bear"; the lethargic Barney Bear was Rudy Ising in fur.

Harman created characters--Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid might have showed Ising at the drawing board, but Bosko sprang from Harman's pen. Action meant as much to Harman as personality, perhaps more--Bosko rarely stood still, always ready to entertain, bouncing along to a steady rhythm. Ising created stories, in which the characters were often secondary to the lush backgrounds or the music. Harman aspired to be Disney, yet Ising was the most Disney-like, being most at home in the realm of the fairy tale, Walt's stock in trade. It was Ising, not Harman, who broke Disney's Academy Award winning streak with the uncannily Disney-like The Milky Way.

(Note: Kevin, of course, just couldn't resist reminding me about Ising's Two Pups. I'll concede certain points: yes, the settings were contemporary, and the timing fast--one cartoon in particular has scenes similar to The Alley Cat--but even these come across as more cute and storybookish than what Harman was doing at the same time, on the order of the early Chuck Jones. The pup's owner even had what sounds to me like a nursery-school teacher way of speaking, in the manner of one reciting a story to children--R.)

In my review of Romeo In Rhythm, I put forward the theory that Harman's style was energized by the influx of New York talent. Now, looking at Harman and Ising's contributions separately, I realize this is only partly true. Harman's cartoons, thanks largely to Bill Hanna's often-discussed timing, were always energetic--one need only look at Circus Daze, The Old House, and even the early Schlesinger Bosko musicals to see that. What the New York animators did do, however, is take Harman's cartoons out of the farmyard.

Romeo In Rhythm, as we've already seen, opens in a cornfield, but that's the only glimpse of a rural setting we'll see in that cartoon. The play-within-the-cartoon is aggressively urban, its Romeo a contemporary hipster serenading his Juliet in a mock-up back alley to the sound of swing.

Today's highlighted cartoon also takes place in an urban alley (a "real" one this time) its contemporary music sung by an audacious alley cat. While the mangy "star" of the story may lack the musical finesse of the crows in Romeo In Rhythm, he more than makes up for it in enthusiasm and pure chutzpah--an attitude that's pure New York.

The cartoon opens with a view of an "uptown" skyscraper from the perspective of a back alley, the cartoon's title superimposed over the scene. The copy I'm working from for this review has the "letterboxed" opening titles Turner was infamous for, and it does this cartoon a disservice, as it's difficult to see the painstaking detail in the backgrounds. The opening shot is still impressive, however: the camera tracks upward as it travels up the exterior of a posh Park Avenue apartment building toward the penthouse.

The scene dissolves to the interior of a luxury apartment; a butler, shown only from the neck down for the moment, knocks on a bedroom door carrying a tray of food. He walks though the lushly-appointed room and places the tray on a table, in close-up. He removes the tureen to reveal a plate of fish, and clears his throat as he says, "Dinner is served," m'lady!"

"M'lady", whom we expect to a be a wealthy socialite, is actually a white persian cat. She appears to sniff the fish and give it a slightly disdainful look as the butler clears his throat again and says, "Will there be anything else, m'lady?" The cat purrs "Nooo...." in a Mae West-like voice. As the butler leaves, she gives her meal another slightly disdainful glance, jumps off the sofa and walks away. The butler, meanwhile, can be seen slowly closing the door behind him--but before he does, he can't resist giving the audience a contemptuous sniff. He's clearly not happy with having to wait on a cat.

The socialite persian, meanwhile, walks over to the window and jumps on the sill--a full moon shines through. She lets out a soft purr--she's clearly bored, and is looking for a little fun.

Cut to a view of the alley, where we get the first view of our alleged hero, who dances into the scene much in the same manner as Bob Clampett's "Gorgeous Hunk Of Man" in his The Hep Cat (and even looks as if he could be a close relative to Clampett's cat). He jumps onto a crate, then onto a fence as he rummages through a nearby trash can. He prepares to eat the remains of a fish when he spies the uptown persian walking back and forth on the balcony of her luxury apartment. She idly sniffs the flowers planted along the edge.

Cut to the alley cat, who's clearly impressed. "Oh, boy! Hi, baby!!" he yells at her in a voice vaguely reminiscent of Clarence "Ducky" Nash (though it's not, despite what the IMDB says--more on that later.)

The persian turns her back to the alley cat--for the briefest instant, we're led to believe she's going to snub him, as befits a cat of her position, but as we cut to a close-up, she looks over her shoulder and enticingly says "Hello...."

Scott Bradley's music swells and the alley cat starts to "sing" (if you want to call it that) the 1937 musical number "That Old Feeling":

I saw you last night and got that old feeling....

Cut to an aerial shot of the high-class feline on her balcony, who's suddenly more humanized--she meows her response to the alley cat's song as she paces back and forth along the balcony on two legs. As she half-meows, half-sings, she clutches her paws to her chest in a slightly exaggerated "romantic" gesture. Cut to the alley cat who sings the next line while his lady love continues to meow along from off-camera--he's clearly singing words, but at least on this copy of the cartoon, they're no more understandable than the female cat's meowing.

The alley cat's joined on the fence by three of his buddies, who meow and purr along in close harmony. They clearly have the talent our hero lacks, since this is perhaps the most entertaining scene in the picture.

The butler, however, doesn't seem to think so, since he comes out on the balcony and shouts at the cats to "Stop that bloomin' noise!", clamping his hands over his ears. Naturally, he's ignored--the butler yanks the curtain shut, making us think for a moment he's resigned to the racket.

Not quite--as we cut to the interior, we see the butler turn and shout as he stalks down the corridor, "Rover! Rover! Wake up, Rover! Cats!" It's actually quite a nice shot, as the figure of the butler moves closer to the camera as he walks down the corridor, to the point that only his legs are revealed. It's almost like a SteadiCam shot.

"Rover", whom we see for the first time in the next scene, is awakened from his nap by the butler's off-camera shouting. He groggily rises, the jumps up as if hit by an ember from the nearby fireplace. He runs toward the door at full speed, but neglects to notice it's still closed, and rams straight into it. The butler comes into view, if only from the waist down, and opens the door yelling "Rover! Get him!!" What follows is a rather impressive "speed" shot of the dog barreling down the stairs so quickly, the momentum causes him to run down the side of the bannister. This scene looks vaguely familiar, and given Harman's penchant for re-using animation, it's quite possible this scene was cribbed from a Bosko cartoon. (If memory serves, there's a similar scene involving Bruno in The Old House).

Cut to exterior view--we next see the bulldog as he bursts through the front door and toward the camera. The alley cat's three backup singers scatter as the dog approaches, but our hero isn't afraid of him. In fact, the dog's more afraid than anyone, as he skids to a halt and freezes with his hindquarters in an arched position when the alley cat slashes his claws at him.

Suddenly remembering what he's there to do, the bulldog tries to assume a more threatening pose and scare the cat away. Ah, but pampered pooch that he is, he's a bit out of practice: the sound that comes from his mouth is more like that of a toy poodle than a big, bad bulldog. (The more observant may remember that barking sound as the sound the trout make in the Barney Bear cartoon THE FISHING BEAR. Barking fish? Well...you'd have to see it to understand...)

The embarrassed bulldog tries to clear his throat as the alley cat, now standing on two legs, laughs at him from offscreen. "Tough guy, eh?" the cat remarks.

The bulldog makes a leap at the alley cat from the bottom of the frame. Having recovered his voice, he makes a rather menacing growl as he snaps at the cat and misses. There's something familiar about that sound, too, but I'd rather not get too far ahead of myself at this point. The cat merely hisses at him and jumps down on the other side of the fence.

The bulldog sniffs around until he comes to a knothole in the fence. Peering through it, he fails to see another knothole right by his rear end--you can pretty much guess what's going to happen here, since our friend the alley cat's on the other side. Sure enough, we see the cat standing on the other side of the fence, preparing to menace the poor unsuspecting bulldog. He grabs an old eggbeater from the trash and proceeds to aim it through the knothole right at the dog's behind. He gooses the dog with it--as the dog flips around, he shoves the eggbeater through the other knothole and gooses the dog again--this action gets repeated several times until the dog gets dizzy--a closeup shows his eyes rattling around in his head.

Once the bulldog regains his senses, he thinks he's figured out the situation and puts one paw over the knothole on the right, then another paw on the left one. But the camera pans back to reveal the alley cat merely lounging on top of the fence, eyeing the bulldog with an amused expression. He grabs an old light bulb from the trash can in front of him and drops it on the dog's head. The dog is startled as the bulb shatters, sending him running to the safety of his doghouse. Returning his attention to the classy girl cat, the alley cat remarks, "You ain't seen nothin' yet, baby!!"

Grabbing a bottle of ammonia from the trash, he pours the bottle into a spray gun (called a "Flit" gun, since spray guns of that type were once used to dispense an insecticide called "Flit."). We see a long shot of the cat from one corner of t he doghouse as he marches toward it, Flit gun in hand. He knocks on the doghoouse and says to the still-covering dog, "Well, well, does little Rover want to come out and play??" The cat then pulls on the dog's nose and jabs him in the eyes Three Stooges-style--but it looks a good deal more painful here than it does when Moe does it to Curly.

The cat marches out into the middle of the yard shouldering his Flit gun like a rifle, and tests it while he waits for the dog's inevitable attack. He doesn't have to wait long--the dog lunges at him, but in mid-air, he gets a snootful of atomized ammonia, sending him dropping to the ground like a rock.

This only momentarily dazes him, though; he lunges again and gets a much stronger dose. Now it takes a little bit longer to come to his senses--his ears flutter like wings in a very cartoony fashion as he exhibits a stupefied grin. He doesn't get a chance to make a third lunge, as the cat hits him with another facefull before he can jump. The third time proves to be the charm, freezing the poor dog like a statue--all the cat needs to do is tap him to send him toppling over.

The cat does a little self-congratulatory victory dance as we cut to the object of his affection admiring him from above. This is clearly her kind of guy--she meows "Come up and see me sometime..."

Strangely, while she cops Mae West's tagline, she's lost the Mae West-like voice she had in the first two minutes of so of the cartoon. She now sounds, for no apparent reason, like an exact duplicate of the alley cat, which to me seemed a bit strange. Is this her way of expressing admiration (or as Kevin half-jokingly put it in his review, an indication that she's in heat?) It prompted quite a bit of discussion between Kevin and me; I'm forced to conclude that while Harmon may have indeed wanted to indicate a change in the cat's mood, but it seems more likely he was rushed, and couldn't get the original voice artist when he needed her--so he relied on the fellow with the Donald Duck-imitation voice for that one brief scene, thinking it might come across as funny. As Harman is no longer alive to ask, I suspect that'll remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, our alley-cat protagonist goes wild over the classy female's invitation--he too undergoes a temporary voice change, yelling "Yahoo!" in a voice similar to Tom's whenever Tom was excited or in pain. As I recall from the Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection sets, that voice was provided by Bill Hanna--an effect which makes this seem at times more Hanna-Barbera and less Harman-Ising. But the Harman touches are still there, as in the sudden, out-of nowhere burst of speed the alley cat exhibits in his excitement. He hops on a fence, zips up a telephone pole, and speeds along a telephone wire toward the luxury townhouse where his love awaits, all to the sound of sirens--not all that different from Harman's Swing Wedding (the Stepin Fetchit frog exhibits a similar and all too temporary burst of speed, also to the sound of sirens).

Cut to a shot of the female cat as a black blur zooms by her, leaving her to stare at the audience with a stunned expression. In the following scene we see the alley cat, in the same cozy living room the bulldog had been, lounging on the floor brazenly smoking a cigar. Exhibiting even further gall, he calls to the female cat as she passes by him, "Say, what's cookin', sister?" Since love is apparently not only blind but deaf, the female cat ignores this rather crude come-on and walks over to the radio. As Latin music comes over the airwaves, the alley cat decides to get in the spirit of things by taking the lampshade from a nearby lamp and converting it to a nifty blue sombrero. He dances toward the camera, then the scene changes to reveal both him and the female cat in medium shot as they dance together.

The alley cat dances toward the fireplace, but gets a bit too close--his tail catches on fire, in a couple of quick cuts, he zips out of frame, past the female cat, and toward a fishbowl, in which he extinguishes the flaming appendage. The bowl's stuck to his rear, though--a fish swims by and gives him a confused look. The cat yowls and jumps out of frame, landing next to the female cat and going through all manner of samba-like gyrations as he tries to remove the bowl--without missing a beat of the music.

In the meantime, the bulldog, only now aroused from his ammonia-induced stupor, hears the commotion going on from inside. With a rumbling growl he scrambles out of the frame toward the entrance.

Cut back to inside: the alley cat's still trying to get the bowl off himself, pounding on the floor in frustration, then leaping into the air. The bulldog appears just as the alley cat is about to land, and the dog ends up having the fish bowl broken over his head as the cat drops right on top of him. The alley cat stands there for a moment as the dog, sprawled on the floor, starts to growl--the cat pokes his head in like a lion tamer sticking his head into a lion's mouth. When he stares at the razor-sharp teeth and realizes his nemesis is back, the cat says "Uh-oh!" and speeds off to the left of the screen. We briefly cut to a view of him zipping around the corner with the bulldog in close pursuit. The momentum causes books from the bookshelves to whirl around in their wake.

They come to a corner, but instead of going around it, they go through it, knocking out a good portion of the wall. We cut to a long shot of them in the library--the cat jumps up onto a conveniently-placed lamp, while the dog runs so fast the momentum sends him up the wall and onto the ceiling (and that, students, is an example of centrifugal force).

The confused dog, of course, stops while upside-down on the ceiling and after remaining suspended there for a second or so, drops to the floor--the chase continues. The dog, who has for the moment lost track of the alley cat, stops in front of a suit of armor, which the alley cat just happens to be hiding in. He sends the right arm, which is holding a mace, down on the dog's head, followed closely by another hit and a poke in the rear with a sword. The dog of course attacks the suit, sending a shower of metal parts toward the camera. As anyone who's seen The Old House knows, this is a classic Harman "money shot"--a bolt flies so close to the viewer that it takes up the entire frame (much as the skull in The Old House had done).

The smoke clears to reveal the dog wearing the remnants of the armor. The cat merely goes to the fireplace in the living room and...you guessed it. He opens the helmet, which is stuck on the dog's rear, and dumps in a shovel of hot coals. The pain from the dog's glowing red posterior sends him leaping through the ceiling. The butler, meanwhile, yells "Rover! Rover!" looking around frantically. He soon learns where the dog is, as the dog lands right on his head. The bulldog merely proceeds to run--still on top of the poor butler--and gets caught in the butler's clothing, in the process revealing the servant's very un-butler-like red flannel underwear.

The chase goes on, up over walls and around corners--hunks of plaster get gouged out of the walls as the speed past. The dog, running up to a mirror, crashes through both it and the wall behind it. In the meantime, the alley cat has found the laundry chute--he opens it, sending the bulldog sliding down into the laundry room below. The cat then rushes down the stairs toward the basement (in a repeat of the "running down the stairs" footage from earlier in the cartoon) to meet the dog as he hits the bottom.

The alley cat pushes the washing machine in front of the laundry chute as the dog comes through. While the poor dog is being pummeled by the plungers inside the washer (it's a slightly more advanced version of the one Cap used in Blue Monday) the butler runs past the camera and chases the cat with a broom, yelling "Why you...just let me get me 'ands on you..."

Speaking of Blue Monday, the scene following looks as if it were taken directly from that cartoon, if a little faster than that version. The butler chases the alley cat in one doorway and out another in an endless circle, fast enough to create what looks like a swirling vortex. The butler finally wises up and stops between the two doors, waiting with broom in hand for the cat to emerge. The cat does, but the butler is a little too slow, missing every attempt to bash the cat with his broom.

The cat runs into what looks like a music room, skids and doubles back toward the butler. The dog, who by now has been released from the dreaded washing machine, now chases the cat around and around between the two doorways, rendering the poor butler dizzy as he tries vainly to swat the cat. (The scene is a repeat of the earlier one with the bulldog--we see the butler in closeup as his eyes spin around and around in his head). The butler, trying to make sense of the swirling mass around his feet, brings his broom down on the first thing he can--and it turns out to be the wrong thing. He hits the poor bulldog square on the head.

The dazed dog shakes his head as he comes to, and gives the off-camera butler a menacing look--he's had about all he can stand. We cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of the butler as he appears increasingly nervous, stammering "Oh, dear...sorry Rover..." and other inanities. We cut again to the growling bulldog's point of view as he chomps the butler's rear end, ripping a sizable chunk out of the seat of the butler's pants. He chases the butler with a crash through a large window and out into the night. We can assume the butler will be submitting his resignation from somewhere in the next state, if his employers don't fire him first.

Dissolve to the persian's now-devastated boudoir--all the furniture is destroyed, while huge hunks of plaster are missing from the walls. The once-beautiful apartment is a ruin, looking worse now than the grimiest rat-infested tenement. The alley cat sits on the windowsill, saying "Well, so long, baby!" Lapsing into song, he sings "Thank you/For a lovely evening...." to which the persian, seated on her destroyed sofa, musically meows in response. We dissolve from there to the alley cat's three companions as they meow the final notes of the song to the iris out.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This review proved highly difficult to write--I'd been working on it intermittently since the second of this month-- the amount of detail in the cartoon is so overwhelming, my eyes were spinning faster than the poor butler's. Every observation from me prompted a counter-observation from Kevin, which prompted a counter-counter observation from me. In the interest of time I won't go into all of them, but I would like to address Kevin's speculation that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were involved in this cartoon, and were in fact the uncredited directors.

It is certainly possible. Like so many MGM cartoons of this period, this is a transitional work, anticipating the later Tom and Jerrys in its wanton destruction, high-speed chases and slapstick takes. The alley cat, in appearance and manner, looks much like a forerunner of Butch, the black alley cat nemesis/sometime friend of Tom in later years. The scene of the alley cat nonchalantly and boorishly smoking a cigar reminded of one of several cartoons in which Tom and Butch were romantic rivals: Puss and Toots comes to mind.

Unlike the Tom and Jerrys, however, this cartoon makes me cringe, as it did when I first saw it some thirty years ago. Not that it's badly done--far from it. It's certainly one of the fastest and most slapstick cartoons Harman ever attempted, with its quick cuts and generous use of "smear" animation. But it suffers from a common fault of Harman's cartoons, the jarring juxtaposition of Disney-like realism with out-of-nowhere cartooniness.

In the beginning of The Alley Cat, the two principal characters move and behave very much like "real" cats, albeit slightly humanized, much in the same manner as Disney's The Aristocats. No sooner do the two cats meet, however, than they become more and more anthropomorphic, to the point of standing on two legs. The scene in which the pretty society cat pines for the alley cat on the balcony is comically out of place, as she shifts from very cat-like movements to very human gestures in a split-second. It prompted the same sort of nails-on-the-chalkboard feeling I had when I first saw Harman's Circus Daze; the realistically-rendered elephant, under attack by the fleas, suddenly looks as if it should be in a different cartoon, becoming very human-like as it stands on its hind legs and scratches with its front paws. Harman would set down certain "rules" for the behavior of his characters at the beginning of every cartoon, then gleefully (or carelessly) ignore them to suit the scene or the gag. Done right, the contrast between realism and cartooniness in Harman's work led to brilliance, as with Peace On Earth; more often, however, it led to laughable contradictions, as with the realistically rendered deer and the "rubber hose" fawn of Tales Of The Vienna Woods.

It seems as though Harman were in crisis at this point in his career, uncertain of which direction he wanted his cartoons to go. Wanting to be artistic, but feeling compelled to do slapstick, he opts for a little of both, and the results were both confusing and fascinating.

In The Alley Cat, this "one foot in reality" approach undercuts the cartoon a bit. Even though the characters are humanized and somewhat exaggerated, the cartoon nonetheless takes place in a world which seems to operate according to the normal rules of physics, as in the scene with the bulldog on the ceiling I wrote of earlier. The momentum could conceivably propel someone that high were they to move fast enough. Take a look at Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" sequence in Singin' In The Rain if you have any doubt--at one point the momentum of his leap enables him to walk halfway up the wall before he backflips down to earth again.

It unfortunately makes the alley cat's boorishness and destruction more intolerable (and difficult to watch) than they would have been in a less realistic cartoon--we know in a Tom and Jerry cartoon that no matter what damage they do to themselves and everything around them, things will be all right again in the next scene. Not here--one can't look at the destruction without imagining the thousands of dollars worth of repairs the place would need. (Hundreds of thousands in 2007 dollars). It's enough to give Donald Trump nightmares.

Interviews later in his life provide some insight into why Harman worked this way. Talking to Michael Barrier in the '70s, Harman lamented having to work solely on funny-animal cartoons, wishing he could have taken the medium further. His dream, he tells Barrier, would have been to get Orson Welles involved in the animation industry, which in his view would have elevated the animated film to a level of artistry that would have surpassed even the great Disney. (He could well have been right). Long after Harman's career was over, and Walt Disney had passed on, Harman dreamed of ways to upstage his old rival.

Certainly the best thing about this cartoon is the music, and Scott Bradley doesn't disappoint. The signature song here, That Old Feeling, is taken from an obscure musical, Vogues of 1938; for those who might be curious about the lyrics (since they're barely comprehensible when "sung" by the alley cat) Kevin has graciously provided them:

I saw you last night and got that old feeling

When you came in sight I got that old feeling

The moment you came by I felt a thrill

And when you caught my eye

My heart stood still

Once again I seemed to have that old yearning

And I knew the spark of love was still burning

There'll be no new romance for me

It's foolish to start

For that old feeling is still in my heart

(repeat)

One of its composers seems to have had a penchant for obscure musicals. He'd already co-written Hold Everything, which by a coincidence possible only in Hollywood, provided the inspiration for one of Hugh Harman's earlier cartoons, Hold Anything: yes, none other than Lew Brown of DeSilva/Brown/Henderson fame. (Though he partnered with Sammy Fain for this particular number).

It's in the music, in fact, that this cartoon distinguishes itself from the majority of Harman's efforts; like Romeo In Rhythm the year before, this is an aggressively MGM cartoon, a companion piece of sorts to Romeo. The number is so good, and suits the cartoon so well, one can forgive its highly burlesqued rendition.

And the voice that warbled the number? As I said, it's not Clarence Nash, and if my memory and my ears had been functioning properly when I first heard it, it would have been apparent to me immediately. It's closer to the sound of the cat in Tex Avery's Ventriloquist Cat than anything even vaguely resembling Donald Duck. Jerry Beck settled the question once and for all, saying in a letter to Kevin:

It is not Clarence Nash in the MGM cartoon. That is for sure. Nash never did cartoons for anyone else except Disney. The voice in THE ALLEY CAT is radio actor Harry E. Lang who did Donald Duck like voices in several cartoons for MGM and Columbia.

It's probably just as well. Actually hiring Nash would only have reinforced the erroneous belief that Harman was a mere Disney imitator--and as I said in the beginning, he was very much his own man.

Tags: review/synopsis, The+Alley+Cat, Hugh+Harman, MGM

Sufferin' Cats! Kevin's Review of Hugh Harman's THE ALLEY CAT

Getting "That Ol' Feelin'"?: THE ALLEY CAT (1941)

Review by Kevin Wollenweber

I have always been a cat-lover. Even though I do not presently own one, cats I’ve “met” at others’ homes have neatly gravitated to me and we seem to have an immediate “communication” or rapport. So it is certainly understandable that I’d like the 1941 classic cartoon from MGM directed by Hugh Harman called “THE ALLEY CAT”.

At the time of this cartoon’s regularly being shown in heavy rotation on early morning kids’ TV, a la “THE EARLY BIRD CARTOON SHOW”, a local staple of our ABC-TV affiliate here in New York, just before the all-important morning newscast at approximately 9:00 a.m., our family had a cat, and we were kept awake at times throughout the nights with many a musical offering by amorous alley cats, so I took to this cartoon immediately, even though there is really nothing to like about the cartoon’s title character. You really can’t figure out just why the beautiful and pampered female cat likes him so much. He can’t even seem to carry a tune all that well and he spends most of the cartoon nastily taunting the snarling bulldog or tearing apart the house by accidentally lighting his tail ablaze when getting too close to the fireplace and then getting the fishbowl caught on his rump and leaping to the ceiling trying to shake it off…

…But I’m getting ahead of the story, as Jay Ward would probably tell me if I were narrating this thing.

The cartoon opens inside a spacious townhouse where the only human that we meet is a bored and ver-ry British butler (or should I say, “but-lah”?), carrying in a bowl of food for someone, namely the equally bored and sleek and white kitty cat who, when asked “will there be anything else, M’lady?”, slowly picks herself up to only purr “nooo!” The butler moves to leave the room, but not without showing his hint of anger over having to wait, hand and foot, on a cat by giving out with a disdainful snort before slamming the door behind him. Miss Kitty turns away from that scene as well and goes to check something outside. Can we guess what that is?

It is so obvious as Scott Bradley’s score gets brassier and jazzier and we see our “hero” (dubbed Butch by the animators, although not called at all by that name anywhere in the cartoon) emerge from the alleyway, checking garbage cans for food that the neighbors have tossed out, even bopping around to the music if I remember correctly. He is the most unlikely of heroes, though, because, when he notices the Persian cat glaring out at him from the balcony, he tosses away the fish he was about to devour and yowls, in what has to be the coarsest catcall I’ve ever heard, “Boy oh boy! Hi, baby!” She purrs back her “helloooo” which launches old Butch into his signature song…if you want to call this singing:

“I saw you last night and got that oooool’ feelin’…”

With his female companion singing along on key with “meow meow meow meow”, he continues to garble the words so bad that one needs an original version of this song to actually find the correct lyrics. I would go on record as saying that, perhaps, DONALD DUCK or YACKIE DOODLE could have vocalized this better!! This rouses the butler angrily to the window, just as a covey of the alley cat’s feline buddies begin to harmonize quite nicely, too, and he shoes the lot of them away with yells like “Fssst, I say, you cats, stop making all this noise!” When this fails to startle them, he sends out his secret weapon, the very large bulldog. “Rover…Rover…I say…cats!!” The dog hears these excited monosyllables and it takes time to register, but he tears off after the cats who, en masse, go flying away from the fence and the chase and battle of wits begins. The dogs stops in front of the alley cat and attempts a roaring bark which comes out as mere yelps of a dog you would think is much smaller than this, sending Butch into gails of gravelly laughter “tough guy, eh?” he taunts and swipes his claws at the dog’s head as the dog leaps up trying to snap at the cat.

Butch doesn’t just let it go at that. Surely, he has to play a couple of really painful tricks on the dog, at one point taking a hot light fixture from one of the poles in front of the house and dropping it on the dog’s head. The explosion sends the dog running for cover back into his house, sending the cat into further hysterics, calling up to his girl on the balcony, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, baby!!” He goes to a nearby pail and grabs a perfume bottle, filling it with a heavy and pungent dose of ammonia or some such smelly vapor and proceeds to leap onto the doghouse roof, knocking on the roof and calling “Well, does little Rover wanna come out and play?” He pulls the bulldog up by his snout, claws bared…ooh, does that hurt! The dog is now angry again and ready for some sort of attack, but not for long. As the dog rushes up to mere inches in front of the cat, he gets a face full of something so powerful that it nearly knocks him out or makes him reel dizzily, almost dangling in midair before Butch sprays him again and, with his paw, pushes him lightly down on the ground over on his back, fast asleep! “Awww” the alley cat mocks, seeing the dog totally comatose on the lawn.

His attentions are turned back to his kitty love above, who now throatily yowls, in a barely recognizable Mae West impression, “come up and see me sometime”, sounding, instead, more like her aroused boyfriend. She’s definitely in heat!! Butch howls, leaps into the air and, in the space of a few frames and seconds, blasts off through the front door of the house and straight up to the upstairs area where Kitty is waiting with the door opened. Butch sails past and, as the camera moves toward the couch, he is sitting there comfortably smoking an expensive cigar. Wow, this guy wastes *NO* time! “Well”, he says, “what’s cookin’ sister?”

Geez, I wonder which animator’s alter-ego *THIS* is!

He then decides to clumsily entertain his ladylove by dancing to a great Latin rhythm of the usual song, “La Cucaracha”, but he dances too close to the fireplace, setting his tail on fire. This is good for the audio of the cartoon because the action starts up now, even with Bradley’s score percolatin’ as well underneath. Butch yowls and leaps into the air looking for something to put out his flaming behind. He wedges himself into the fishbowl, but is again driven mad trying to release himself from it. He again leaps into the air, this time hanging from the ceiling and ripping it to shreds as he hangs on and tries to shake the bowl loose. While all this is happening, out in the darkness, the bulldog is coming to and hearing the commotion. He groggily makes his way into the house just as Butch rips his way across the ceiling to where the bulldog is unfortunately right under him…and this is where the claws lose their grip on the ceiling and the cat and fishbowl come tumbling down on top of the dog with the fishbowl breaking over the dog’s hard head! I dimly recall the intercutting of inside and outside scenes here as being quite good, climaxing in the afore-mentioned crash as the cat falls from the ceiling.

The chase is on…and forgive me if some of the finer details are forgotten here, but the cat seems to evade the dog’s attacks, sending the dog crashing into a wall or tumbling into a suit of armor that Butch fills with hot coals that send the dog flying up into the air. As this occurs, the butler (geez, I wondered where he was all this time) is now aware of the commotion and is calling for his dog, who crashes down in a heap on top of him. The dog is not done chasing the cat, though, and the beast tries to leap forward, not realizing that he is caught in the butler’s suspenders. Once ripping free, the dog continues the chase, knocking over pictures and vases or whatever is in his way up and down the stairs!

The butler, meanwhile decides to grab his pick ax and get rid of this intruder himself. The chase had gone through the wash cycle in the nearby tub and now escalates through the rooms as the butler enters swinging the ax and trying to hit the cat as the cat and dog go running in circles around where the butler is nervously standing, but can you kids guess what happens next?

Yup, the ol' faithful bulldog gets it in the head, but as is the case with cartoon characters, he is merely stunned for a few seconds and ends up turning on the evil butler with the ax in his hand, snapping angrily at his pants and ripping them to shreds and sending the two crashing through the plate glass window and off down the street as the alley cat continues singing to his ladylove, inviting his pals in for a last chorus as the iris closes. Aw gee!

There are so many elements of this cartoon that smack of Hanna-Barbera intrusion. Didn’t we see an envious butler and his dog in a much later “TOP CAT” episode in which Benny the Ball is mistaken for some rich cat and those alley cats invade the good life for a while? Also, that hormonal howl of the alley cat taking up his lover’s invite sounds mysteriously like those yowls that Joe Barbera is said to have produced as vocalizing for Tom getting pinned on any part of his body by Jerry in their usual battles of wits. Just listen to a cartoon called “THE MILKY WAIF” and you’ll see what I mean. As far as I know, this is the first time we hear this howl in an MGM cartoon, so it is possible that Joe Barbera (or was it Bill Hanna) premiered it here? It has also been a running gag in some Hanna-Barbera cartoons that the lead character is not always what he or she seems. So it might be an H/B-ism for the alley cat to be such a loud-mouthed, gravelly-voiced and almost unappealing boorish young male instead of the usual golden-throated romeo that we’ve come to expect in animated vehicles like this.

My only other comment is that the four-part barber shop quartetting covey of alley cats reminds me of a similar scene in Disney’s much later “LADY AND THE TRAMP” in which a covey of dogs serenades the two lovers (or friends). Maybe, if we get another fantastic Scott Bradley double-CD set of scores similar to the fantastic TOM & JERRY AND TEX AVERY, TOO set, the consultants can find that bit of singing and include it in its entirety. It is fantastic and I’m sorry that the action is taking place while the cats are in good harmonics, here.

What can I say, I love cat cartoons! “Meow meow meow meeeooooow!” Check it out yourselves on YouTube. It is posted there, and let’s hope that a complete HAPPY HARMONIES set comes out real soon.

Tags: Kevin+Wollenweber, The+Alley+Cat, Hugh+Harman, orphan+toon

It's Only The Beginning, Folks: The First Looney Tunes, Part 2

What Do We Do For An Ending?: RIDE HIM, BOSKO (1932)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Ride Him, Bosko
Release Date: Sept. 17, 1932
Animators: Isadore (Friz) Freleng, Norm Blackburn
In Short: In a typical Western town, typical Western villains endanger Honey. Will Bosko pull off a typical Western rescue? Maybe...maybe not...

The Looney Tunes series had come a long way in two years, and the only thing keeping it from going any further--as far as Hugh Harman was concerned--was money.

As far as Leon Schlesinger was concerned, he'd given them more than enough. Indeed, the cartoons had been quite successful as they were, enough to launch a second series (Merrie Melodies) the year before. One is tempted to think of Schlesinger's reluctance to give them more as an indication of his legendary cheapness, but in fact by 1932 Warner Bros had been hit especially hard by the Depression--as a result, Schlesinger's per-cartoon budget became ever more meager. As Michael Barrier says:

As Warner Bros. and most of the big Hollywood studios sank in deep financial trouble in the early thirties, Schlesinger and Warner's amended their contract twice to reduce the amount Schlesinger got per cartoon in the 1932-33 season of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. He wound up getting $7300 per cartoon instead of $10,000, and when he signed a new contract with Warner's on 1 March 1933, he took another cut, to $6000 per cartoon. Had he continued with Harman and Ising and raised their payments, he would actually have lost money on each cartoon...

The easy-going Ising had been more accepting of the financial arrangements they'd made with Schlesinger. The more irascible Harman, who had by this time assumed sole control of the Looney Tunes series, was not--which usually resulted in loud and frequent arguments with Leon. This would, of course, eventually lead to their departure from the studio; one can almost see the tension between Harman and Schlesinger play out in those last few cartoons. With the Merrie Melodies now assuming the role once held by the Looney Tunes as Warner's musical "showpiece" series, the Looney Tunes could now be more gag-oriented--and Harman grew ever more ambitious. Three cartoons from that tense final year (Bosko In Person, Bosko's Picture Show, and Ride Him, Bosko) show a marked, at times astounding, improvement over the series' output to date: Bosko, no longer the carefree, whistling little character bouncing his way through nonsensical, plotless cartoons, was now either cast as a stage entertainer, or as the central figure in an actual story. We see the first faint signs of the Looney Tunes we'll come to know, such as celebrity caricatures: in Bosko In Person, Bosko imitates both Jimmy Durante and Maurice Chevalier; in Bosko's Picture Show, a newsreel segment shows an animated Durante being chased by none other than an ax-wielding Adolf Hitler! Even Ising's Merrie Melodies occasionally used what would become familiar conventions: I Like Mountain Music not only contains a rare caricature of Will Rogers, it makes use of the "magazine covers come to life" motif seen in Bob Clampett's ingenious Book Revue.

Even more familiar (and startling) is a technique which not only looks backward to Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid, but forward to cartoons like You Ought To Be In Pictures: the use of live-action footage, as we'll see in today's cartoon.

"Where men are men...nine times out of ten."

The cartoon opens with a coyote howling atop a mesa with the moon looming in the background; in true classic "rubber hose" fashion, the coyote's chest swells up like a child's balloon when it inhales. We see Our Hero Bosko riding his horse across the cartoon desert, playing his guitar and singing a popular song from the previous year (Nat Johnson and Fred Howard Wright's "When The Bloom Is On The Sage"). His noble steed doesn't seem all that co-operative--in fact, he looks half-asleep--so Bosko dismounts and gives the horse a little shove over a small hill before resuming his song.

While Bosko makes like Gene Autry, we cut to a title card that reads, "RED GULCH--Where Men Are Men, Nine Times Out Of Ten..." (For some reason I find that unbelievably funny, though I'm not quite sure what it means--and I'm afraid to ask.) It's way off-kilter for a Harman-Ising cartoon of this period, a line more suited to Mel Brooks than Hugh and Rudy--which of course makes it all the funnier.

We get our first look at the little town of Red Gulch in long shot; it's clear from the first moment this isn't exactly the safest place to be. We see a fellow in a sombrero chased out of an alley and past the saloon by an outlaw; a pig cowboy stupid enough to pass by the same saloon gets hit on the head by a bottle-wielding arm emerging from the door. The pig staggers a bit and falls unconscious in the alley. A long, tall dachshund cowboy also unfortunate enough to pass by gets hit with a hail of bullets, but rather than drop dead, he merely loses his midsection--and several feet in height. The now literally cut-down-to-size cowboy finally wises up and flees in terror.

The above scene strikes me as a milder version of the typical Lawless Western Town in Freleng's Bugs Bunny Rides Again--there, the gunplay was so frequent that bullets stopped at a traffic light to let other bullets fly past, and even innocent clothing-store mannequins had their hands in the air. But this is a 1930's cartoon, and while it could do the impossible as well as anything Avery, Clampett, or Jones did later, animation hadn't yet learned how to be absurdist. A very important difference, and one that would rocket Schlesinger's studio to the top of the heap in another ten years.

Enter Bosko and his horse--the horse exhales with relief and deflates like a balloon. Rather than tie him up, Bosko simply leaves the flattened-out remains lying there in the street (though it's not as if the horse were going to go anywhere--a horse thief would need a bicycle pump and some No-Doz to make off with him.)

Bosko meanwhile, enters the saloon in typical Western style (legs bowed out) and yells inside, "Howdy, fellas!" He's greeted by a stream of bullets from inside--if his friends treat him like that, his enemies might make him look worse than his horse. "Howdy, Bosko!" they yell back.

Bosko merely picks up the bullet-riddled hat that had been shot off his head (had this been an Avery cartoon, that ten-gallon hat would have been shot down to a pint and a half) laughs nervously, and steps through the saloon doors. Me, I'd have been in the next county after the second bullet.

As the scene cuts to the inside, we see a piano player, a fiddler and a banjo player providing the musical entertainment. Bosko, consummate performer he is, slides into frame in the next scene and does a nifty little tap routine. The piano player, meanwhile, performs some deft keyboard wizardry--slamming down on the keys, he flips the mug of beer beside him into the air and catches the contents in his mouth. This is some pretty potent stuff, though, and burns away most of the fellow's clothes. What remains looks a bit like frilly bloomers, which for Harman and Ising is an opportunity to do something they loved to do in those pre-Code days--a "sissy" gag. The piano player instantly sprouts rouge and mascara and strikes an effeminate pose, crying out "Whoopsie!" as he swishes off-screen. (With a propaganda message like that, Prohibition should have succeeded).

Bosko now takes over for the piano player, energetically shouting "Come on, boys" and giving the stool a bit of a spin before he sits down. He starts into a jazz number so lively the cards in the gamblers' hands start scatting along with him, as we see in close-up. The "joker" in the card hand adds his own throaty bit of singing before a pistol does him in.

Harman and Ising, as is well known by now, made generous use of recycled animation, and the scene that follows would be used in no less than two cartoons--one in a whole other studio. The crowd of people dancing to Bosko's rhythmic piano-playing will be retraced exactly in both Moonlight For Two (Schlesinger) and The Old Pioneer (MGM), one of at least two instances of such cross-studio reuse. (Harman and Ising would also use old Schlesinger animation in their first MGM release, Bosko's Parlor Pranks--a simple matter, considering those sequences belonged to them, not Schlesinger. He was simply the middleman, and wouldn't form his own studio until after their departure).

Cut to a title reading THE DEADWOOD STAGE (Free Wheeling). There had to be a stagecoach at some point--this is a Western, right?

As for the "free-wheeling" gag, your guess is as good as mine. I've never been able to trace the exact origin of it, though it's obvious it comes from a series of early '30s auto or tire ads. Anyway, it's "free-wheeling," all right--the wheels wobble around as if they're barely connected to the coach. (I wonder if that stagecoach company ended up designing grocery carts a couple of generations later?) Inside, Honey bounces around uncontrollably, but doesn't seem too bothered by it at first, but after a couple more serious bumps, she squeaks out, "Please! Be careful!" (I don't think I would have been nearly as polite after a few hundred miles of that).

And since this is a Western, you can't have a stagecoach without stagecoach robbers, which is exactly what we see in the next scene. They skid to a stop--the lead bandit and his horse sneak along the ground toward the stage. This scene and those that follow (a front view of the bandits in pursuit) will also be reused--not by Harman and Ising, oddly, but Schlesinger--in My Little Buckaroo a few years later.

The bandit stops at the edge of a cliff as we see the stagecoach pass by in the distance. He and his men gallop off in the other direction, presumably to "head 'em off at the pass" (I'm with Harvey Korrman--I hate that cliché!) Reaching the mouth of the canyon, heading 'em off is exactly what the bandit does--he pulls up right in front of the passing stagecoach and draws his pistols. The stagecoach driver merely takes the other path in the fork in the road where the bandit is standing, causing him and his horse to twist like a corkscrew as the stage goes by (one of many gags in this cartoon that could have been improved with a little more speed.). The horse and bandit lie there reeling for a moment--too long a moment--before taking off in pursuit, followed by the rest of his gang.

Cut to the stagecoach--the driver, being shot at from off-camera, keeps getting his hat shot off his head, only to catch it and put it back on. This too would be reused in My Little Buckaroo, but with a funnier twist: the Andy Devine pig character would replace his hat with a new one each time it gets shot off his head--a derby, a straw hat, and so on. (Yet another indication of how much funnier this could have been).

In mid-pursuit, the trunk
that's been bouncing along on top of the stage for the last couple of minutes gets knocked off onto the ground--amid the bullets, the trunk opens and all the clothing inside gets up and heads for the hills. A corset flaps around and flies out of the scene (nice touch, guys). We then cut quickly to the second repeat of the front-view "bandits in pursuit" footage in only a ten seconds, then to a view of the stage in long shot traveling along a narrow path at the edge of a cliff.

The square dance sequence dances over to another studio: from Warner's (above left) to MGM (above right).

Through all this, poor Honey is still bouncing along inside, oblivious to what's happening. We cut to the exterior again--this time the stage driver hits a bump and gets thrown free--he hits a tree and slides down the narrow trunk (ouch!) and onto a pile of cacti (double ouch!). He lands on top of a steer skeleton--the sort of skeleton you see lying in the desert in every Western--which causes it to spring to life and head off into town with the stage driver astride it. Every couple of seconds, the steer skeleton lets out a "MOO" as it runs along--a cycle that runs about five or six seconds longer than it should. Harman's attempt to pad the picture is pretty obvious here.

Meanwhile, back at the saloon (I would have loved to say "ranch" at this point) Bosko's still playing and everybody's still dancing, until the stage driver runs in and yells "Hey!", pointing outside. Panting, the exhausted driver gasps as Bosko enters the scene, "The stage is robbed!" He finally collapses--or at least the upper half of him does--into his pants, which continue to stand there. As Bosko rushes out of the scene, the stage driver's arm emerges from the pants and grabs a mug of beer from the bar. Rather than come up out of his pants to take a drink, he simply pours the contents of the mug into them (another not-too-bad bit).

Cut to a long-shot view from the perspective of the alley outside--Bosko runs toward his horse (now miraculously inflated again) but ends up putting the saddle on the steer carcass the stage driver rode in on. (I never thought I'd type that sentence in a review). The steer gallops around a few times with Bosko aboard (another painfully obvious instance of padding) before tossing Bosko in the air--Bosko's horse merely comes up underneath him and catches him.

Now the chase is on, with another long cycle of Bosko and his horse jumping over the same rock twice. The scene cuts again to the "bandits in pursuit" bit of animation for a few seconds. Meanwhile, the stage is now going on driverless, and Honey finally gets clued in--her head emerges from a window as she cries "Help! Help! Bosko, save me!" We cut back to the cycle of Bosko chasing after the stage: just as we think he's going to catch up with it, however....

...the camera backs away to reveal three animators gathered around a drawing board watching the action: the one on the far left (Walker Harman) stands smoking a pipe. Norm Blackburn is on the other side of the table, while Rudy Ising sits nearer the camera, providing the "galloping" sound effects by slapping his thighs.

"Say, how's Bosko gonna save the girl?" Ising says.
"I dunno," Harman replies.
"Well, we gotta do something," says Ising.
"Let's go home," Blackburn pipes up.

"OK," everybody agrees. All three grab their coats and leave, while a confused Bosko stops and stares helplessly at the audience as we iris out. Since "How Dry I Am" is playing on the sound track at this point, one can surmise "home" is the last place these three guys are going. Poor Bosko, meanwhile, can only spend all night in a dark, empty studio wondering "Now what do I do??"

(My thanks once again to Jerry Beck, who provided me with the identity of the three men).

Concluding Thoughts

In Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin sarcastically suggests this "out of left field" ending reflected Harman and Ising's true attitude toward Bosko and their work in general. A cop-out? Maybe--but it's a great one. In that final minute, a routine Bosko story skyrockets into the realm of the "classic."

Perhaps it's for the best that the rest of the cartoon is a routine Bosko story, since audience expectations get completely thrown out of whack. Ride Him, Bosko has imagination, a quality only occasionally seen in early Looney Tunes. Maltin is at least partially right: one can sense Harman and Ising's growing boredom and frustration with doing the same old thing. The gags, though mild and a bit slow, are more frequent, with some scoring a direct hit (the "where men are men, nine times out of ten" line is just strange enough to provoke sudden laughter). It's as if they're desperate to be funny at times, throwing out everything they have in their arsenal to see what takes. This is their message to Leon Schlesinger, to show what they can do on a limited budget--and hint at what they might do with a little more.

They wouldn't get that chance, obviously, but they leave Schlesinger with a bang. The delightful Bosko In Person would follow in a few months, with a Bosko and Honey we'd never seen before, due to the expressive personality animation of the young Bob McKimson. Both it and Bosko's Picture Show will feature Bosko in his now-familiar role as an entertainer; the latter's alleged unprintable dirty word will leave audiences wondering and arguing for decades--which, no doubt, is precisely what Hugh and Rudy hoped

But true greatness would elude them while making cartoons for Warner Bros.; they would find it thanks to the lavish budgets of MGM and the music of Scott Bradley, culminating in the astonishing, Academy Award-nominated Peace On Earth. The cartoons made in that last contentious release season of 1932-33, however, show that their brief time at Schlesinger's wasn't a total loss.

Tags:

Harman-Ising, Warner's, Bosko, orphan+toon

The Lion In Black and White, Part Two

Ach! Der Captain Is Having A BLUE MONDAY (1938)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Blue Monday
Release Date: April 2, 1938
Director: Bill Hanna
In Short: Cap's having a bad day--but when he faces off against household appliances, he learns things can be far worse...

In his entire career Bill Hanna never once put pencil to animation paper, yet for years he was considered one of the top animation directors in the business. The shelf full of Oscars in Fred Quimby's office would attest to that--he and his collaborator Joe Barbera would bring in seven of them, a total exceeded only by Walt Disney.

Yet long before he met Barbera, he'd already come close to perfecting his skills. Others may have drawn better than he, but Bill Hanna was the master of the exposure sheet, that graph-like piece of paper that times every action, every syllable of every word of dialogue, down to the single frame. As any comedian will tell you, timing is the difference between a good gag and a gut-bustingly funny one, and Hanna knew that instinctively. It did help, however, that he had two of the best teachers he could possibly ask for.

Hanna drifted into the Harman-Ising studio around 1932 as "basically a cel washer", according to an account in Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. It was anything but easy work, but in the depths of the Depression, better than anything else available--and there wasn't much available. Eager to learn, it didn't take him long to move into other aspects of the business. As he recalled, "....I used to get in there early and sweep and wash cels. That didn't keep me busy, so I painted cels...." (Barrier 289).

He soon became the head of the inking and painting department, gradually moving from there into timing the cartoons. Hugh and Rudy had been among the first (if not the first) to use exposure sheets to synchronize sound, using a rudimentary version of them while making BOSKO THE TALK-INK KID. Hanna, who had some background in music, merely adapted that knowledge to the timing of animation (as had colleague Friz Freleng). Hanna later said:

"...and I used to get [the songs] down on bar sheets and do the timing....they had
exposure sheets, but they didn't know how to put the notes down and get the values,
like a sixteenth note, an eighth note, a quarter note...all of that, which I understood....
(Barrier, 289).

As Harman and Ising's schedule became more hectic, they gradually transferred more and more control over the timing of the cartoons over to Hanna. By the time he followed them to MGM, he was accomplished enough to direct an entire cartoon (he was the uncredited director of the 1936 Happy Harmony To Spring).

Though initially loyal to his bosses after they'd parted with Leon Schlesinger, Hanna nonetheless jumped at an opportunity to direct at the new MGM cartoon studio in 1937--along with fellow employees Carmen "Max" Maxwell and Bob Allen--while still technically in the employ of Harman and Ising. According to Barrier, he merely followed the example set by his employers: Hugh and Rudy had done the same thing while working for Disney. They were, in part, responsible for Disney's loss of his Oswald the Rabbit character to Charles Mintz; while still working for Walt, they helped Mintz set up a studio where they could make Oswald cartoons without Disney's involvement.

As a new director in a new studio, Hanna was charged with the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS series; he was as enthusiastic about it as Freleng had been, but as we'll see, Hanna did far better than expected at that disagreeable task, giving what otherwise would have been "one-note" characters a sense of life. The characters--and even some inanimate objects--do more than move. They breathe. They think.

This is "Cap's" cartoon, all about his frustrations with the ordinary--such mundane things as putting on pants and shoes, or dealing with balky household appliances with a mind of their own. Both fate and machinery conspire against poor Cap in this cartoon--with the usual cataclysmic results. Thanks to Bill Hanna's timing, we can not only take delight in seeing it coming, but feel Cap's pain as everything--literally--comes crashing down around him.

"No buttons on der ding-busted pants!!"

As the scene opens, the Captain is engaged in his favorite pastime: sleeping. He's lying in bed, covers down and long underwear exposed, snoring away. Ah, but it's too good to last: the alarm goes off--rather loudly and violently, in fact--and for a second or two the scene shifts to Mama downstairs yelling, "Captain! It's time to get up!"

As expected, this has little effect on Cap. When the alarm rings again, he's barely aware of it, mistaking it for a telephone ("hello, hello--yah, dis is der Captain...."). He's roused out of his stupor only on the third ring--and he's not pleased. He flings the alarm clock on the floor, but (unknown to him, naturally) it lands in his pants, which are hanging on the bedpost at the foot of the bed.

Grabbing the pants and still not fully conscious, Cap methodically puts them on--one leg, then another--and pulls them up around him, only to hear the ringing of the clock from behind him. He jumps slightly and turns to his right--nothing. It rings again; this time he looks to his left--nothing. When he sits down, he jumps back up when he feels the still-ringing clock rattling around in the seat of his pants. He stumbles around with one leg in the air trying to twist the pants around and succeeds in shaking the clock out through the pant leg. Heaving a frustrated sigh, he puts on one shoe, then another, only to find that the clock has now taken residence in his left shoe. Juggling both shoe and clock in the air for a moment as the clock continues to ring, he throws the clock off-camera--or thinks he has. With an annoyed expression as we hear an off-camera crash, he goes to put his shoe on again, only to discover he's trying to put the clock on the bottom of his foot.

Above: In this series of stills, we can see how Bill Hanna's timing mines humor from the "simple" act of putting on a pair of pants--simple for anyone but Cap, that is...

Cap disgustedly tosses the clock to the floor; this time it doesn't land inside any other articles of clothing, fortunately. Since putting on his shoes didn't prove very successful, he decides to forgo that for a moment and button his suspenders. He tries once, only to have it snap back in his face; the same thing happens when it tries it again.

He quickly discovers why--the button on the waistband has fallen off. "So," he says, his temper gradually rising from "dormant volcano" to "nuclear meltdown": "no buttons on der pants!! Dot's it! Dot's all der troubles! Dot's der whole troubles! No buttons on der pants! VOT KIND OF A HOUSE IS DIS ANYVAY?! MAMA!"

As he screams, he holds up his buttonless, suspenderless pants with both hands, storming out of the room. Cut to a shot of him heading down the hallway toward the stairs, still bellowing "Mama!" At this point, he's pretty much forgotten he also has only one shoe on. (Heaven and Hanna only know where he threw the other one). He's also quite unaware that the alarm clock he threw away is right in his path--he tumbles down the stairs, creating a rising cloud of dust when he lands.

Cut to Mama at the stove in the kitchen as Cap tumbles through the kitchen door. Turning toward the half-dressed, apoplectic figure on the floor, she says, "Hmmm...good morning, Captain? Vot's der trouble?"

"'Vot's der trouble?'" he thunders back. Vot's der trouble--der WHOLE DOD-GASTED HOUSE IS DER TROUBLE! No buttons on der pants..." (he grabs a handful of buttonless pants to emphasize his point). He's so beside himself he sputters almost incomprehensibly, gesturing in the air: "Der clock...and den...NO BUTTONS ON DER PANTS! Der window and der... and de..de..NO BUTTONS ON DER DING-BUSTED PANTS!"

Slamming his fists down on the table (only slightly disturbing the pancakes Hans is absorbed in eating) Cap says, "Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay? Slamming his fist down again--which deposits Hans' pancakes on top of Cap's head--he screams, "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? I-I-I was...the clock...d-d-d-...he babbles as Hans merely continues to eat his pancakes from the top of Cap's head. (Obviously a child for whom these morning tirades are as much a part of the morning routine as brushing his teeth).

Hans stuffs several of the pancakes in Cap's mouth, but that doesn't silence him--it doesn't even slow him down: he continues to unintelligibly mutter and fume as he raises his fists in the air (which, of course, sends his pants down to his ankles).

Cut to the front doorway as Mama hands the kids their school books and shoos them out the door: "Come, come, kiddies, qvick, qvick, off to der school...and remember, good mit divisions!" (I've played this line three times and that's what it sounds like to me...maybe Kevin can come to the rescue again). She swells her chest as she prepares to really let Cap have it.

But Cap isn't ready to listen to anything. "Dot's der last straw!" he rages. "No buttons on der pants...." <he pauses only a moment to pull his buttonless pants back up> "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay?"

For Mama, them's fightin' words. Cut to Mama standing face-to-face with Cap as she jabs him in the chest. "Well, 'Mr. Wisenheimer', if YOU don't like der way I'm running the house, den YOU run it!" she yells back, jabbing his bulbous nose for emphasis. She then shoves a broom into his hands, plops a dusting cap on his head, and throws her apron on top of that before she stalks out of the room.

To the sound of military music on the sound track, the Captain stalks after her, broom in hand; marching to the front door, he yells after her, "Vell all right! I VILL run it!!" Slamming the door, he shatters the window, sending shards of glass everywhere (that should give you an idea of the catastrophe to come).

Cut to a view of Mama on the sidewalk through the broken window: "And remember, vise guy...dis is der vash day!" Cap merely pulls the shade down and growls. "By Jiminy, I show her how to run der dod-spotted house!" he remarks as he marches toward the staircase. Calling upstairs, he yells, "Inspector! Inspector!"

We hear Cap speaking as we fade in to a shot of him and the Inspector standing in the upstairs hallway. He's handing the Inspector a number of cleaning implements. "Yah, dot's vot I said!" Cap tells him. "Today I'm running der house! So get busy!" (Well, he knows how to "delegate", that's for sure). Cap snaps into a stiff military pose and leaves the poor Inspector to his task, heading back downstairs. (Note: the vacuum cleaner in the background near the railing already looks as if it has a human face--anyone care to wager on the likelihood of its devouring the poor little Inspector? I'm laying even money.)

The Inspector timidly inspects the vacuum cord--as if he's not quite sure what to do with it--and plugs it into the wall. The machine, easily twice his size, immediately starts up and creeps toward him, sucking up every object in its path (including a feather duster lying in front of it, and a good portion of the rug). Cut to a medium side view of the Inspector and the demon machine as it edges toward him--he nervously kicks it, hoping that'll stop it. No such luck. He backs away slowly, then breaks into a run as the vacuum goes on the loose. Unfortunately, his avenue of escape is blocked by a wall.

Now the insane machine tries to suck the beard off the Inspector's face, followed by his shoe. Cut to a shot from the vacuum's point of view as the Inspector continues to stand with his back toward the wall. Everywhere he tries to go, the homicidal vacuum follows. It grabs ahold of his beard again: the Inspector frees that, only to lose both his shoes. Thinking a peace offering might help, he presents the vacuum with a bouquet of flowers from a nearby vase (I love this bit, incidentally--it shows just how simple-minded the Inspector is). It does no good--it merely sucks that up along with everything else--and almost takes the Inspector's arm with it. The same goes for the vase the little guy desperately offers--and the umbrella. (Do I sense a pattern developing?) Not content with those mere trifles, it next goes after the Inspector's coat--the Inspector runs frantically in place trying to get out of its grasp. He pulls free--for the moment--and stands in the corner panting heavily as we fade to...

...the washing machine downstairs, putting away to the "Irish Washer Woman's Jig" (it looks like one of the earliest electric models popular at the time, essentially an open tub with a wringer). Quite obviously Cap's handiwork, since various articles of clothing are spilling out from underneath the closed lid. (It wouldn't surprise me if he sat on it to get it closed, as with an overstuffed suitcase.)

Speaking of "overstuffed," our self-satisfied Captain stands proudly with his hands on his hips, remarking "By Golly! Dot's what I call 'housecleaning'!" (I had a few words in mind, too, but not that). Cut to a shot of Cap walking over to the sink. There are enough dishes for two families in the sink, and Cap's going to stack every single one of them in one neat little pile--tower, really--while he turns on the water. It's not quite so easy, though, as the massive stack stubbornly refuses to stay put, threatening to topple over at any second. Keeping one hand on the quivering, ceiling-high stack of plates, he quickly turns on the water with the other. Once accomplished, that hand zips back to add reinforcement to the Leaning Tower Of Dishes. There's only one tiny little matter Cap forgot, though--the soap.

Steadying the dishes with one hand again, Cap slowly inches along the counter toward the soap flakes, never once letting go of the tottering stack. He's actually successful, grabbing the box with one quick swiping motion. He shakes the box to see how full it is, for a split second letting go of the pile; his hand zips back in place just as the dishes are about to fall on his head. He's neglected to shut off the still-running water, though, and as he shakes the box a second time, the sink overflows onto the floor.

Before he can stem the rushing tide, though, we hear a pounding at the door and briefly cut to a hand knocking from the outside. Cut back to Cap, one hand still on the dishes, and spilling enough water on the floor to float the Ark. "Vait a minute!" he yells.

As if there weren't enough calamities already, we cut to a shot of the wall phone ringing. The pounding at the door continues--and Cap still hasn't shut off the water. "Vait...hold der...vait!" the now very flustered Captain yells again. Shaking the box of soap (which only succeeds in getting flakes all over the floor--there's so much water anyway, he might as well wash the dishes there) he absently moves his other hand off the dishes so he can better struggle with the box. Unfortunately, he happens to stick his foot in a nearby mousetrap. Naturally, when he grabs his foot in pain, he lets go of the dishes, and every single dish breaks over Cap's head--except one. Throwing aside the trap in frustration, he grabs for the one unbroken dish left in the house and angrily decides to smash it, too. But there's a reason it won't break--it's metal. When he throws it down, it simply bounces off the floor and hits him in the face.

Figuring that throwing it might produce better results, he flings it in the air; but like a proto-Frisbee, it does a U-turn near the ceiling and hits poor Cap in the head before he can get up from the waterlogged floor. Picking it up, he throws it toward the one place he figures it won't come back--through the kitchen window. Of course, he smashes even more glass in the process.

That proved no more successful than the first effort, as it comes back again to hit him in the head. As he lies on his stomach on the floor, he fails to notice his loose suspenders are getting caught in the washing machine's wringer. As he watches the stubborn plate clatter on the floor in front of him, he realizes his clothes are snagged. He tries to make a run for it, but once the suspenders stretch to their absolute limit, he can only helplessly run in place on a throw rug before being dragged back to the continually chugging machine.

He makes a break for it again, thinking he can get some leverage this time. He lunges for a nearby china cabinet, grabbing every available drawer. Every single one gets pulled out as he frantically grabs for them. Next trying the cupboard portion of the cabinet, he grabs ahold of the very bottom shelf, but only manages to bring the contents (as well as the entire cupboard) down on him.

His suspenders snap back, slamming into the washing machine and spilling out its contents--pants, socks, and unmentionables fall on him like rain. The machine then decides to exact its revenge on Cap for abusing it, and grabs him with the plunger mechanisms (used to beat the dirt out of the clothes). With both plungers stuck to the top of his head, he gets bounced up and down several times and knocked around before freeing himself from the machine's clutches. But it's not quite through with him--one of the plungers grabs ahold of his massive rear end and flings him around, upside down, like a rag doll. "Inspector! Inspector!" he screams.

Ah, yes, the Inspector--we forgot about him, didn't we? He's still upstairs, tussling with the vacuum. And by all appearances, losing: he's down to his underwear by now, and the infernal thing won't quit. He's still struggling to keep his beard from being sucked in. He fails--not only does his beard get sucked in, so does the rest of him (I'd like to know who manufactured that thing--it sort of makes the Oreck vacuum look pathetic).

Cut to a view of the vacuum "looking" down on the poor Captain in the kitchen through a grate in the upper floor. It's apparently no more pleased with him than the washing machine was, since it starts sucking up every item of clothing the washing machine had scattered about--then eventually Cap as the suction attracts his suspenders. Fortunately, the ceiling acts as a barrier. But Cap, not willing to leave "bad enough" alone, pushes on on the ceiling to free the suspenders, which have been sucked up through the grate--and pulls down not only the vacuum, but most of the second floor.

Wait, it gets worse. (As impossible as it may seem). The vacuum--which like any demonic being, is apparently immortal--still runs, and it's landed right smack into the tub of the washing machine. With, of course, the predictable result--it sucks up every drop of the water, its bag expanding to the size of a weather balloon before it bursts.

Pieces of clothing and what used to be furniture drop down right in front of the camera. The finally-expired vacuum hangs suspended from some undetermined object up above that miraculously escaped the damage. When the hail of debris clears, the camera pans around the perimeter of what used to be the kitchen--it now looks like it could qualify for Federal disaster aid. And in the doorway, hands on hips, is Mama.

"Vell, Captain," she says. "Just vot kind of a house is YOU running?" Cap, who'd been blown by the explosion into the oven (his head poking up through the range top) can only blubber "No buttons on der ding-busted pants..." The Inspector, sitting on top of the stove next to him, dabs Cap's eyes with his beard--but when Cap tries to blow his nose on it, he quickly yanks it away as we gratefully exit this pathetic scene.

I suppose they can look on the bright side--they'll get maid service at the hotel they're going to have to stay in until the house gets rebuilt. And if Mama is smart, she'll insist the Captain buy a belt before she lets him back in the place.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

As we've already seen, for most of the animators, the first two years of the MGM animation studio were an insecure, uncertain, tense period best left forgotten. Shakeups in management and conflict between contentious New York and California factions (each with their own vision of what the studio's creative direction should be) threatened to bring down the fledgling studio before it had a chance to really begin.

For Bill Hanna, on the other hand, it was a training period, a chance for him to learn how to make truly funny cartoons. His mentors Harman and Ising had never been laugh-out-loud funny, but he would make good use of what he learned from them--and his work would reach stellar heights once teamed with a born gag man like Joe Barbera.

Where Milt Gross got laughs out of things larger--and sillier--than life, Hanna (much like Chuck Jones at Warner's) would glean them from the subtle and the seemingly insignificant. Certain segments in this cartoon take an unusually long amount of time. The opening scenes in which Cap fumbles with his alarm clock, then finds himself fighting with it as he tries to put on his pants, then his shoes, then his suspenders, take well over two minutes. It didn't seem that long to me, since I was too engrossed in this poor fellow's plight. We've all had days we wish we could live over, days which, despite all efforts, just go completely wrong. The sequence works because it's just exaggerated enough to be funny, and just real enough for us to relate to it. Just watching the contortions Cap puts his enormous body through is funny enough.

It takes a skilled comedian to get laughs from a mute character, and Hanna did an extraordinary job with the Inspector, normally a very nondescript personality. He seems childlike here (though his size certainly contributes to that) almost a Laurel to the Captain's Hardy. (I could easily imagine Stan Laurel doing something along the lines of the "flower" routine with the runaway vacuum cleaner). Here, one can easily see the genesis of the sort of gags we normally associate with two other characters (also mute) that would later gain Bill Hanna fame--Tom and Jerry.

When the great Tex Avery finally arrived, and the direction of the studio veered back toward the larger and the more outrageous, Hanna was able to adjust to the new sensibility, yet retain the subtlety of timing in certain scenes that made you believe his characters were able to think. HEAVENLY PUSS comes to mind--the scene in which Tom is desperately trying to secure Jerry's forgiveness at the last minute is classic because it's almost Avery-like in its exaggeration, but subtle enough for genuine emotion to show through. Done too fast, the emotions in the facial expressions wouldn't have read; too slow, and the sense of "cartoony" exaggeration would have been lost.

Viewed from the perspective of one who's seen more than 50 years' worth of TV sitcoms, the "men take over the housecleaning chores" plot really seems like the most overused, contrived situation imaginable--and it was probably hackneyed even in 1938. But Hanna takes that old plot into new areas of absurdity; the damage Cap does to Mama's house makes what Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz do to Lucy's kitchen (burying it in a virtual tidal wave of rice) seem almost almost normal. Yet as absurd as it is, it comes across as the logical consequence of the Captain's windy pomposity, because we got to "know" him at the beginning. And we got to know him because Bill Hanna gave us just the right amount of time to do it.

Tags:

Captain+and+the+Kids, MGM, Bill+Hanna