Countdown to Halloween: Scrappy's Ghost Story (1935)

Scrappy's Ghost Story (1935, Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems)
Dir.: Manny Gould and Ben Harrison [uncredited]
TC4P Rating: 6/9 (It is really only a 5/9 in execution, but I moved it up a notch solely because of its swell ghost song)

Ah, if I could only count the number of times I tried to frighten my little brothers when we were kids! Why, for one thing, I would be much, much more adept at counting. Like most siblings, we were prone to fights and squabbles and arguments... and lots and lots of pranks. I get along with my two younger brothers today like I do nobody else. Our bond is clear to any outsider, I miss them every moment that I am not around them, and I love them both dearly. But we had definite battle lines drawn in our younger years, especially as I hit my teen years and became a surly little bastard (as most of us do at that age).

The factions would shift: two brothers would sometimes align against the third one, which would then switch at a moment's notice, depending on the toy, comic book or TV show over which we were fighting at the time. Or I would get it in my head to protect the youngest one from the middle one, which was often the case. And much of the time, my interference was completely unnecessary and owed more to my ego and need for dominance in the household (and in a life where I had little to no control most of the time). And sometimes, we were all aligned against one or both of our parents, who were probably in the right most of the time punishing us for being little jerks. I deeply regret every moment where I acted like a complete asshole as a kid (and I take most of the responsibility over my brothers for I should have acted like a better person in most instances).

I am sorry to start off what should be a simple cartoon review for the Halloween season with these thoughts, but anytime that I start to watch Scrappy's Ghost Story, that is precisely where my mind goes. Time misspent in the company of my brethren that would have been better spent strengthening our bonds and using our combined talents to make our lives better. That is, I don't regret the time spent that we did have together as kids; I just regret wholly the mean stuff that happened during it, and wished that I had done better by both of them. But still, some of the pranking was pretty good (though never all that elaborate), but even better was when we teamed up to prank others. And a lot of the pranks that were played out between us involved scaring the living crap out of each other. Just like Scrappy and Oopy...

Scrappy and Oopy do have their own stupid sibling rivalry going in Scrappy's Ghost Story (and many other films in the Scrappy series). In this case of this cartoon from Columbia Pictures in 1935, that rivalry may not come out good for Scrappy by this film's end. The opening scene that set off my Personal Regret Alarm starts out benignly enough, with giant-headed Scrappy seated at one end of a couch reading a book to himself. In front of him, the crackling flames within a fireplace are the sole source of light in the darkened room, and Scrappy's much smaller brother Oopy shakes an old-fashioned popcorn popper and flips the kernels in the air. Oopy manages to actually catch and swallow one of the kernels, but it pops inside his tiny body, causing his heart to jut out from his chest for a brief second. Scrappy shushes his brother, but the popcorn causes Oopy to flip up in the air and land hard on the couch, which then leads to his brother bumping up in the air as well.

Having lost his book in the jostle, Scrappy turns to his brother and begins to tell him a spooky story. He begins with a wave of his hands and a drawn out, "It was a da-aaaarrrrrrrk night!" Oopy leaps to his feet on the couch, knocking his knees together and clasping his hands in instant fear. Scrappy waves his hands up in the air again, and says, "It was pitch black!" and when he hands drop, the flames on the fireplace go out as well. The room is indeed shrouded in complete darkness, but the light returns as Scrappy is seen using a bellows to fan the flames to life anew. He continues his story... "I was walking alone through the woods!" Inside the fireplace, the fire suddenly has a very human face and it uses a pair of hands built from flames to pick up a log from itself and chew the top layer off of it, almost like someone eating from off of an ear of corn.

Scrappy crawls down to the floor and says, "Suddenly, I heard...!" but before he can continue, Oopy lets out a small, worried shriek of angst. Scrappy continues regardless, knocking his knuckles several times on the floorboards to simulate footsteps. "Tap, tap, tap, tap..." Oopy, completely mesmerized by the story, falls off the couch, and as Scrappy says spookily, "They came closer... and closer... and closer...", the little guy is backed up all the way to the open fire. Scrappy yells, "Suddenly...!!" and Oopy falls backwards briefly into the fire, scorching his rear end, which sees him leap high into the air as he is thrown right back to the couch. With both boys seated there again, just as Scrappy continues his spooky tale, we see an ominous hand with long, black fingers extends across the wall behind them over the couch.

At this juncture, Scrappy continues from his initial "Suddenly..." with "...a haannnnnnd slo-owwwwwly..." and continues with a few other words. [But I am not too proud to say that the poor soundtrack on the low quality file for this cartoon that I found online is not clear enough to readily make out the rest of the sentence. I will keep trying, and invite your comments and thoughts on it as well.] As Scrappy explains about the hand with his garbled words, the camera pans to the right and we see that the ominous hand was nothing more than the shadow of some tattered drapery around the window in the same room. Next to the window sits a pet parrot on a perch, who squawks and says, "What a night!"

Switching to a more rhythmic form of speech, Scrappy relays more of his story:

"Bump, bump, bump!
How my heart did beat
To that
Thump, thump, thump
Of those phantom's two feet!"

[Not sure of 'phantom' in that last line; it sounds more like "phan," but I have not heard of this as shorthand for phantom or phantasm anywhere. Help, anyone? What do you hear?]

Scrappy pulls on his shirt as his heart is supposed to be thumping, and leaps to the floor to continue knocking his fists to the sound of those mysterious feet. As he does, the scene of their living room fades into that of Scrappy walking through a dark forest, as a tall ghost in a sheet follows behind him in the gloom. Scrappy shows great worry at the sight of the ghost, who flings his arms up and down with the rhythm of their pace. Scrappy lets fear get hold of him and starts to run away from the spectre. The ghost, however, has other plans, and gives up chasing the giant-headed boy to stop in the middle of the forest, wave his arms, and launch into a marvelous song...

"I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
And I haunt all of the bad little boys
Who tell big fibs and break up toys!

I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
And I'm after kids who fuss and fight
And never wash their necks at night!"

While he sings the first two stanzas of this song, the phantasm wiggles his long, sheet-bedecked fingers menacingly at the camera as he just his body forwards as well. At the end of the second verse, he almost grabs Scrappy from where the boy hides behind a tree, but the kid whirls away in terror, yelling "Woooo!" as he spins.

Some rather frightening trees that surround the ghost pick up the song, and their manner is equally as scolding as the specter's in tone, as they wag their twiggy fingers at Scrappy, who remains trapped in the middle of them...

"Ooooh ooooh ooooh ooooh!
Don't tie cans to the doggie's tail!"

In amongst the trees, with the full moon serving as a background, is an owl sitting on a branch. The owl completes the bridge...

"Hoooo hoooo hoooo hoooo!
I'll get you when the moon turns pale!"

The action returns to the ghost haunting Scrappy, who sneaks up behind the boy and frightens him as the song is seemingly completed...

"I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a snooky, ooky, spooky, wooky,
Eerie, dreary, sceer-ry ghost!"

[The last adjective is clearly meant to be 'scary', but the singer turns it into 'screer-ry' to complete the rhyme scheme of the line.]

At the close of the song, Scrappy screams in terror and hightails it away from the ghost, who gives chase close behind. Scrappy wheels his arms about as he runs but when he reaches a tree, he ducks his head down and somehow manages to buzzsaw straight through its trunk using his noggin. He keeps his head down in that position and runs through another tree several yards away. Keeping to the Universal Rule of Three in comedy, a third tree is finally encountered, but the twist is that the tree is lying prone, so that Scrappy rams his head into its base and buzzsaws all the way through the long length of the downed tree.

The boy continues to run but looks behind him, only to see the taking long strides and leaps in the distance in his direction. Scrappy runs into an opening ahead, with the full moon beaming down at its center, and he hides between two trees at the far end. He pulls out a heretofore unseen length of rope and fashions a lasso, which he waves above his head hoping to catch the phantom. When the ghost arrives, the lasso drapes about the top of its head so that it yanks the sheet right off of its body... and we find Scrappy's little brother Oopy standing atop a tall pair of stilts!

Oopy strides over to Scrappy, waves down at him, and then triggers a lever that causes the stilt's steps to move like an elevator down to the ground. Oopy waves coyly at his now very angry older brother. "Were ya scared?" asks Oopy, but when Scrappy winds up his fist to knock his brother across the field, Oopy stomps on Scrappy's foot and causes him to cry out in pain! But before Scrappy can get to his feet to retaliate, Oopy looks off into the distance and starts to quake with fear. Pointing in the direction of his costume, Oopy manages to stutter out, "G-g-g-ghost!" Scrappy looks and leaps into his little brother's arms just before we see Oopy's costume lifting from the ground in the form of a legitimate phantom!

The ghost waggles its long fingers at them as they race towards a hole in a very large tree, where they both reach and pull down a wooden door, off of which the ghost bounces as it is closed. Both boys laugh uproariously, until they turn around and see that the inside off the tree trunk is actually an elevator... and the operator is another ghost! The creep pulls a lever and the giant ring of wood upon which all three stand starts to drop down quickly. The elevator opens into a cavern far underneath the ground, and in the clearing ahead, they see at least ten ghosts all holding hands and skipping merrily in a circle. The boys bounce up and down in time to the jaunty tune that is being played, and we then see the quartet of other ghosts who are providing the music. When the next refrain begins, each ghosts throws his respective instrument to another in the group and continue playing without incident.

We see a pair of rather loose-limbed phantoms performing a shuffle to the music, at one point holding a single finger to each of their heads and spinning about underneath. They also turn their sheets inside out and bounce on their heads for a short spell, before inverting themselves yet again and picking up their dance as before, sliding gracefully across the floor of the cavern. Another ghost dances before the boys, and Oopy is unafraid to join the ghost, singing variants of "La la la!" as the ghost drops his sheet over the top of the dancing child, and almost plays "Peek-a-boo" with the viewer.

Then, as many cartoons from this period tend to do, it briefly takes a very poor turn onto a road that should definitely go less traveled. The four musicians, formerly in all white sheets, are now shown wearing black sheets and to have large lips drawn onto their faces as they continue to perform the music for the dance. Perhaps in trying to keep up with the Fleischer cartoons, where Cab Calloway sometimes made appearances either in rotoscoped dance movements or in voice, the makers of this Columbia picture seem to make a desperate (and somewhat late) attempt to "get hep to the jive". The music definitely turns rather Calloway-esque in its jazzy hustle, and they have another black-sheeted ghost strut across the floor of the cave, slowly shuffling his "feet" casually in time with the music.

Not content with merely attacking one race, the producers have the black ghost shuffle right past a cigar store inside the cave, where another ghost sits at the front step wearing an Native American war bonnet, holding a tomahawk in one hand and cigars in the other. The Indian ghost lets out the expected war whoop and dances across the floor to the beat of a pounding drum beat. And then all the racial silliness just goes completely away with just over a minute left in the cartoon, not to be referenced again. These brief scenes could just as easily be left out as they actually have no purpose within the cartoon at all.

The action returns to the dancing circle of ghosts. In the center is a solo ghost, who spins himself into a tight screw and then unwinds, whirling about faster and faster as he does. Scrappy is shown walking across the floor, and the ghost leaps out of the circle and yells "Boo!" As he does, his voice this time is the deep, frightening voice from before, but rather childlike instead. Scrappy turns about to face the ghost, and the phantom launches into the first two verses of the song from earlier in the cartoon, only with a more babyish voice and a slight change in the final line of the second verse...

"I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
And I haunt all of the bad little boys
Who tell big fibs and break up toys!

I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
And I'm after kids who fuss and fight
And never say their prayers at night!"

While Scrappy remains blind to this fact, we are obviously aware from the start that the ghost singing this version of the song is Oopy not even trying to disguise his voice. Scrappy looks away in fear, but we are shown the sight of Oopy dancing in his costume in front of an open fire, where we can clearly see the outline of his tiny body underneath the sheet.

Instead of the trees and the owl picking up the bridge to the song, another quartet of ghost pipe into the room through four craters in the cavern floor. Each one adds a single "Ooooh!" as they enter, in ascending harmony...

"Ooooh ooooh ooooh ooooh!
Eat your spinach every day
Ooooh ooooh ooooh ooooh!
Or you can't go out and play!"

The action reverts to Oopy in his ghost costume, still dancing in front of a fire, his body's outline seen yet again. Once more, there is a slight change in the final line of the verse...

"I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a ghost!
Wooooooo!
I'm a snooky, ooky, spooky, booky,
Eerie, very sceer-ry ghost!"

As the song closes, we see the fire in the cavern suddenly change to that of the hearth in the boys' home, where Oopy has merely been finishing the ghost story Scrappy had been telling at the start. They have been there all along, safe and sound in their own living room. While Scrappy looks on in confusion, Oopy is clearly proud of the job he has done frightening the wits out of his older brother. Suddenly, some of the popcorn from earlier bursts like a string of crackers in the fire behind the little brother, and Oopy leaps without hesitation towards the couch and into Scrappy's arms. Both boys turn to look at the camera as the film irises out to The End.

Look... Scrappy is not anywhere near my favorite animated character. In fact, as far as theatrical cartoon characters go, he and his little brat of a brother could probably end up in the discard bin and I wouldn't miss him for a second. I cannot stand his design, I find most of the situations in his films rather dull, and I find his brother equally annoying. (I am OK with their dog Yippy, as I am with most dogs, cartoon or otherwise.) I'd like to say that I have suffered through most of Scrappy's films, but the fact remains that more than a handful are hard to find, and the ones that I have seen are... OK. Nothing truly offensive (apart from the types of racially obnoxious moments found in this film, for example) and the animation and backgrounds aren't bad. There is just a kind of indifference that settles around the Scrappy films where they just look like product and really nothing more. And not even high quality product. However, if better copies were available for the series, I would give it a fair shake. It's just that the scarcity of the films makes it hard to find versions where you don't have to squint and wonder if much of the detail has gotten lost.

However, taken on its own terms, Scrappy's Ghost Story has a secret weapon. The cartoon is only OK though it does have some rather charming moments (and even a couple of decently spooky ones. What this cartoon has is... that song. I'm a Ghost is so delightful and hummable that when I found it on a collection of Halloween "swing" tunes years ago, it became my main Halloween song for about a half decade. I didn't see the cartoon itself until a while later, and so I had to imagine what was going on during the song. Why did the voice in the second half change to that of a child? What were those small explosive sounds at the end where there is a scream? (No way of knowing it was popcorn until you see the cartoon.) I pretty much constructed my own version of the cartoon that accompanies the song, and sure, it would probably be better than Scrappy's Ghost Story, but I will never make it. My version would be infested with wilder, Fleischer-style gags, and freer with the more adult attitude. (This cartoon is mired in the Production Code days sadly, so the ghosts are pretty tame except for the racist stuff.)

"I got your spooky ghost story right here, buddy!"

As it is though, Scrappy's Ghost Story works just fine as a childlike evocation of telling ghost stories around the fire with your siblings, trying to scare the bejeezus out of one another. You might scare your brother, or he might scare you, and you will probably fight about it for a while. But then a bigger scare comes and you both become united in your fear and your defense against that fear. It's the way of mankind, really, so as long as we all get on the same page, we'll be just fine. 

Until your little brother sneaks up behind dressed like a ghost again...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it: