A-Haunting We Will Go (Paramount/Famous, 1949)
Dir: Seymour Kneitel
TC4P Rating: 5/9
For their third Casper Noveltoon film (he would graduate to his own series after this one), Paramount's Famous Studios really switched gears and tried to break free of the formula that their squeaky clean, overly Friendly Ghost character had been mired in through his first two shorts.
Ha! I had you there, didn't I? Of course, the Casper films changed very little from short to short; it is, after all, Famous Studios we are talking about here, and there was no way that they were going to veer that suddenly from a barely trod but safe path. The closest thing that they did here to switch things up for the third Casper film was to give Seymour Kneitel his first shot directing the character; in all honesty, though, sometimes it is truly hard to tell any real discernible difference between Kneitel's films and those of his Paramount partner, Isadore Sparber. One other minor change was an attempt to slowly begin the slimming down of the once rather portly Casper, a progression that would continue until eventually he would reach the dimensions that much of the world recognizes from both his later cartoons and his Harvey comic books. (His head in the first two films seemed to climb right out of his shoulders; here, Casper is beginning to gain some semblance of an actual neck distinctly separate from his noggin.)
Do ghosts naturally behave in the manner portrayed by the previous inhabitants of the abandoned buildings which the spooks now occupy? If so, this would explain the antics of the ghosts who reside in the rundown little red schoolhouse that is seen at the beginning of A-Haunting We Will Go. Unless, of course, Famous is upping the chilling notion at the heart of the Casper series – that Casper is the ghost of a dead child – by casting an entire classroom of recently deceased school-kid spooks?
The action begins inside the boarded up schoolhouse, where we meet a bespectacled schoolteacher leading a classroom of small but deeply voiced ghosts since the words of the film's title – "A-haunting we will go!" – again and again. punctuating the chorus with "Boo! Boo! Boo!" The ghosts learn the tools of the haunting trade in this classroom setting that would otherwise seem normal for regular kids except for the sayings that line the chalkboard. "Boo unto others as you would have others boo unto you," "Fright makes right" and "I will spook when spooken to" are the examples shown, and it seems the teacher will not easily accept failure in her classroom. Poor Casper the Friendly Ghost has obviously found this out the hard way, planted as he is in the corner of the room with a dunce cap atop his ghostly little head.
Casper's failure as a ghost lies not in his inability to frighten; as we well know from past films and endless comic books, however inadvertently and unwanted, he frightens others exceedingly well. He is quite recognizably a ghost, after all. No, the problem that causes Casper to achieve outcast status amongst his phantasmic kin is that he wishes not to frighten. Thus, Casper is a dismal failure in his ghosting class. The schoolmarm announces, "For your homework tonight, we will all go out and practice what we screech. Class dismissed!" With a wave of her arms, the class flies right through the walls of the schoolhouse and into the dark of night. And so, yet again, in the manner of the previous two films, Casper will set out to find a friend, departing from the frightening course the rest of his classmates set out to achieve. He marches out sadly from the schoolhouse, but then perks up at the thought of new friendship, and skips happily to a local pond.
But Casper always has problems with the friend-making game. First, a turtle he meets is so shocked that he zips away faster than any rabbit could, without a doubt breaking the turtle land speed record. Next, a pelican is certainly frightened enough by the little ghost, but not as much as the fish inside the huge flaps of the pelican's mouth. The poor fish is easily twice as freaked out by Casper's appearance. He bug his eyes out wide at the sight of the ghost kid – in triplicate, even – and then slams the pelican's mouth shut around himself, and leaps down across the water pulling the pelican behind him! A pond full of ducks immediately disperses at the ghost's sight, and so Casper sits down on a lone duck nest in the middle of the pond and begins to cry in his trademarked fashion. He sputters out, "I might as well be dead!," not realizing the irony of those words, and concludes with "Nobody wants me as a friend!" (Well, not if you are going to whine like that, Ghosty...)
However, the single egg that was left in the nest when the mother flew off hatches beneath the ghost, and as Casper has orphaned the duckling quite by accident, he takes up the duties of the child's missing mother. (I would call her neglectful because, after all, she has left her young to the mercies of an invading spirit.) The baby quacks relentlessly in obvious hunger, so Casper feeds the baby (who from here on out is named Dudley) a worm. Casper is astonished that the little duckling isn't afraid of him (or just isn't grown up enough to know to be afraid of ghosts yet), and he starts to believe that he finally has a real friend in this world. The narrator returns to say, "Over the next few weeks, I'll bet you couldn't find a ghost in better spirits than our little Casper!"
Next, the Friendly Ghost takes little Dudley for swimming lessons, and the attempt is a success from the moment they hit the water. When the rain pours down on the nest that night, Casper attempts to shield the baby duck from the downpour. The narrator reads, "Each night, they snuggle together in their little nest, and Casper would guard his little friend Dudley with his very life... or, whatever you might call it." However, Casper notices that the rain is going through his body and hitting Dudley instead, so he flips the nest over to wear it like a hat to shelter his pal from the storm, looking for all the world like a giant mus. The next day brings flying lessons, but Dudley doesn't quite get it at first and Casper has to catch him in a rescue. He shows Dudley what to do, and Dudley finally gets it.
In the midst of his first successful flight, Dudley spies a quacking duck in a clearing within the reeds. He lands near the duck, but it turns out to be a decoy. Nearby, there is a hunter lurking with a dog in a nearby rowboat. (The hunter may be the same one from There's Good Boos To-Night, though the dog is different from either of the hounds in that picture.) Casper calls to his friend, and Dudley responds to the ghost's voice. The hunter fires at the departing but completely oblivious duckling, and poor little Dudley is clipped in the tail by the shot and plummets toward the ground below. Before the hunting dog can grab Dudley, Casper swoops down to catch the little duck and whisk him away to safety. The arrival of the ghost scares the spots off of the dog, and then Casper similarly frightens off the hunter, who rows his boat on top of the land in a mad effort to escape.
Just as you think that for the second picture in a row, Paramount is going to kill off a cute baby creature just to give Casper a ghostly companion (but only for a single film's close), the duck comes back to life within Casper's arms. It is presumed that Casper is the toast of the duckpond, because now he gets to fly south with the rest of the ducks, with little Dudley riding on top of Casper with his wing in a sling, while Casper honks the duck call left behind by the hunter. Iris out.
There seems to be a double standard here with the switch in the ending scenes in two successive Casper films, and I think it has to do with what type of creature who faces death in each film. I still maintain that you can kill off an impossibly cute cartoon creature only if it is of a predatory nature and get away with it. That is what happened, shockingly, to Ferdie the Fox in There’s Good Boos To-Night, a film that milks that little fox's death for all it is worth, until finally Ferdie is allowed to play forever with Casper in the afterlife. (Ferdie is, surprisingly, way cuter than Dudley Duck as well, and they still have him croak.)
Now, depending on the type of duck and where they live, ducks do have a predatory side as well. Yes, they eat some plants and grains, but they also eat land bugs and water insects, and some ducks will catch small fish and crustaceans as well. But mankind does not think of ducks this way. We think of them running up to catch small parcels of corn from the farmers who keep them, not as adorable creatures completely capable of cold-blooded murder in order to survive. (Don't even get me started on duck cannibalism, and I am not talking the type where Donald Duck has a turkey for Christmas.) So, to the common public eye, ducks are cute and innocent and most decidedly not possessed of that killer trait (except for where possibly bugs are concerned). So, unlike little Ferdie the Fox who would grow up to be a villain, baby Dudley Duck gets to live by picture's end where Ferdie does not.
But back to that ghost school thing... if the ghosts don't take on the traits of the previous occupants, then how come we don't see ghost schools in buildings that weren't schoolhouses? If an abandoned schoolhouse is required for ghosts to learn how to be ghosts, then the “ghostal” learning for each town is dependent on there being at least one abandoned schoolhouse in each town. Or maybe, ghosts set up school districts or have an exchange program for teaching their haunted craft to new ghosts, in which case they could bus ghosts from the poorer ghost areas for their lessons, instead of depending on there being a school readily available in their vicinity. Or maybe, these ghosts were just having fun playing at "school" simply because they were already in the building. Or maybe, as I stated beforehand, they indeed have an instinct for adopting the behavior of previous occupants.
I should just let it go. After all, now I have cannibalistic ducks to worry about suddenly...
For their third Casper Noveltoon film (he would graduate to his own series after this one), Paramount's Famous Studios really switched gears and tried to break free of the formula that their squeaky clean, overly Friendly Ghost character had been mired in through his first two shorts.
Ha! I had you there, didn't I? Of course, the Casper films changed very little from short to short; it is, after all, Famous Studios we are talking about here, and there was no way that they were going to veer that suddenly from a barely trod but safe path. The closest thing that they did here to switch things up for the third Casper film was to give Seymour Kneitel his first shot directing the character; in all honesty, though, sometimes it is truly hard to tell any real discernible difference between Kneitel's films and those of his Paramount partner, Isadore Sparber. One other minor change was an attempt to slowly begin the slimming down of the once rather portly Casper, a progression that would continue until eventually he would reach the dimensions that much of the world recognizes from both his later cartoons and his Harvey comic books. (His head in the first two films seemed to climb right out of his shoulders; here, Casper is beginning to gain some semblance of an actual neck distinctly separate from his noggin.)
Do ghosts naturally behave in the manner portrayed by the previous inhabitants of the abandoned buildings which the spooks now occupy? If so, this would explain the antics of the ghosts who reside in the rundown little red schoolhouse that is seen at the beginning of A-Haunting We Will Go. Unless, of course, Famous is upping the chilling notion at the heart of the Casper series – that Casper is the ghost of a dead child – by casting an entire classroom of recently deceased school-kid spooks?
A narrator, who sounds at first like someone trying to imitate Jack Benny poorly, introduces us back into Casper's world by stating "I don't think anyone ever really believes in ghosts OR ghost stories..." as we see the camera begin a somewhat eerie pan from its starting point on a dark cemetery at night to the one-room schoolhouse that some civil engineering genius decided to build right next to it. The narrator has that "but" tone in his voice as his voice trails off, and sure enough, he continues, "...but there is one they tell about an old, deserted, little red schoolhouse..." (The narrator's continued intrusions are pretty much unnecessary, as his introduction really makes little sense and there is no point that we can't figure out what is happening without him.)
The action begins inside the boarded up schoolhouse, where we meet a bespectacled schoolteacher leading a classroom of small but deeply voiced ghosts since the words of the film's title – "A-haunting we will go!" – again and again. punctuating the chorus with "Boo! Boo! Boo!" The ghosts learn the tools of the haunting trade in this classroom setting that would otherwise seem normal for regular kids except for the sayings that line the chalkboard. "Boo unto others as you would have others boo unto you," "Fright makes right" and "I will spook when spooken to" are the examples shown, and it seems the teacher will not easily accept failure in her classroom. Poor Casper the Friendly Ghost has obviously found this out the hard way, planted as he is in the corner of the room with a dunce cap atop his ghostly little head.
Casper's failure as a ghost lies not in his inability to frighten; as we well know from past films and endless comic books, however inadvertently and unwanted, he frightens others exceedingly well. He is quite recognizably a ghost, after all. No, the problem that causes Casper to achieve outcast status amongst his phantasmic kin is that he wishes not to frighten. Thus, Casper is a dismal failure in his ghosting class. The schoolmarm announces, "For your homework tonight, we will all go out and practice what we screech. Class dismissed!" With a wave of her arms, the class flies right through the walls of the schoolhouse and into the dark of night. And so, yet again, in the manner of the previous two films, Casper will set out to find a friend, departing from the frightening course the rest of his classmates set out to achieve. He marches out sadly from the schoolhouse, but then perks up at the thought of new friendship, and skips happily to a local pond.
But Casper always has problems with the friend-making game. First, a turtle he meets is so shocked that he zips away faster than any rabbit could, without a doubt breaking the turtle land speed record. Next, a pelican is certainly frightened enough by the little ghost, but not as much as the fish inside the huge flaps of the pelican's mouth. The poor fish is easily twice as freaked out by Casper's appearance. He bug his eyes out wide at the sight of the ghost kid – in triplicate, even – and then slams the pelican's mouth shut around himself, and leaps down across the water pulling the pelican behind him! A pond full of ducks immediately disperses at the ghost's sight, and so Casper sits down on a lone duck nest in the middle of the pond and begins to cry in his trademarked fashion. He sputters out, "I might as well be dead!," not realizing the irony of those words, and concludes with "Nobody wants me as a friend!" (Well, not if you are going to whine like that, Ghosty...)
Next, the Friendly Ghost takes little Dudley for swimming lessons, and the attempt is a success from the moment they hit the water. When the rain pours down on the nest that night, Casper attempts to shield the baby duck from the downpour. The narrator reads, "Each night, they snuggle together in their little nest, and Casper would guard his little friend Dudley with his very life... or, whatever you might call it." However, Casper notices that the rain is going through his body and hitting Dudley instead, so he flips the nest over to wear it like a hat to shelter his pal from the storm, looking for all the world like a giant mus. The next day brings flying lessons, but Dudley doesn't quite get it at first and Casper has to catch him in a rescue. He shows Dudley what to do, and Dudley finally gets it.
Just as you think that for the second picture in a row, Paramount is going to kill off a cute baby creature just to give Casper a ghostly companion (but only for a single film's close), the duck comes back to life within Casper's arms. It is presumed that Casper is the toast of the duckpond, because now he gets to fly south with the rest of the ducks, with little Dudley riding on top of Casper with his wing in a sling, while Casper honks the duck call left behind by the hunter. Iris out.There seems to be a double standard here with the switch in the ending scenes in two successive Casper films, and I think it has to do with what type of creature who faces death in each film. I still maintain that you can kill off an impossibly cute cartoon creature only if it is of a predatory nature and get away with it. That is what happened, shockingly, to Ferdie the Fox in There’s Good Boos To-Night, a film that milks that little fox's death for all it is worth, until finally Ferdie is allowed to play forever with Casper in the afterlife. (Ferdie is, surprisingly, way cuter than Dudley Duck as well, and they still have him croak.)
But back to that ghost school thing... if the ghosts don't take on the traits of the previous occupants, then how come we don't see ghost schools in buildings that weren't schoolhouses? If an abandoned schoolhouse is required for ghosts to learn how to be ghosts, then the “ghostal” learning for each town is dependent on there being at least one abandoned schoolhouse in each town. Or maybe, ghosts set up school districts or have an exchange program for teaching their haunted craft to new ghosts, in which case they could bus ghosts from the poorer ghost areas for their lessons, instead of depending on there being a school readily available in their vicinity. Or maybe, these ghosts were just having fun playing at "school" simply because they were already in the building. Or maybe, as I stated beforehand, they indeed have an instinct for adopting the behavior of previous occupants.I should just let it go. After all, now I have cannibalistic ducks to worry about suddenly...
RTJ
*****
And in case you haven’t seen it…
[This post was originally published on 02/06/2006. It was greatly rewritten, re-edited and updated with new video and photos on 10/09/2017.]
Cute. I watched a lot of Casper as a kid. Seemed like they were run and rerun a million times.
ReplyDelete