It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas: Jack Frost (1934)

Jack Frost (Ub Iwerks, 1934)
Dir.: Ub Iwerks
Cel Bloc Rating: 7/9

I miss frost. Since leaving Alaska, I mostly get to experience a very modified version of "winter". Winter in Southern California where we are is, at the lowest, in the low 60s during the day, and into the mid 30s at night. And that is if I am lucky. It's usually still in the high 70s most of the time, though we did have a nice run of much chillier weather through the long Thanksgiving weekend, and another one coming up this weekend (at least it is forecast that way currently).

But apart from a work retreat a few years ago up to Big Bear, the fun I used to have with snow and frost is no longer a factor where I live. A couple of quick trips up to Alaska keep me remembering how I spent my entire life: shoveling snow, snowball fights, sledding, scraping car windows, slipping on ice and falling, more snowball fights... OK, so I like snowball fights. (I'd say "so sue me," but you probably would if I hit you with a snowball nowadays.)

Yeah, leaves fall here, then the leaf-blower guys come along and blow all of the color away, and with it goes autumn. Then the next week, you're taking a walk along the beach like winter never comes around. And then, without anyone blinking an eye except for me, you are suddenly celebrating winter holidays without winter ever actually coming around. Definitely a form of seasonal shock at work here.

Seasonal shock hits the residents of a small woodland area in the 1934 Ub Iwerks film, Jack Frost, though in the opposite way from me. Here, they actually get a fall and a winter, and they are, for the most part, prepared for it. We first see the critters of this fairytale forest prancing about in a way that only cartoon forest animals can, with the predators happily playing without malice or evil intent with other creatures that usually constitute their prey. With squirrels and bird leaping about joyfully in the trees on a fine summer day, the bears, foxes, and lynxes play a friendly game of leap frog.

One small grizzly cub has a good go of it leaping over the other larger animals, but has a bear of time when he gets to his own father, many times his size and the largest animal at the party. He tries and tries, but can't quite leap over the bigger grizzly, but then he gets an idea. Since some of the animals are done up in modest clothing in the manner of Thornton W. Burgess' Old Mother West Wind books (an early influence of mine), the cub pulls on the suspenders worn by the bigger grizzly and propels himself up and over the bear. However, he is flung into a nearby washbasin, and spins around and around on the handle of the mangle before dropping into the water. The cub spits out bubbles when he surfaces, slaps the water, and giggles.

As he shoots the soap out of his paws up in the air, the cub hears a wild wind and sees crisp leaves blow past him. He cries out, "Jack Frost!" and all of the other animals lift their heads one by one to look up into the trees. There on a branch is a gnomish looking fellow, holding a painter's color palette. Jack Frost bows to his constituents, and with a brief fanfare as an introduction, he starts to dance as he sings:

"Hi-dee-hi!
Here am I,
Jackie Frost,
quick and spry!
Listen to me, while I say...

Summer's gone,
play no more!
Winter's knocking 
at your door!
Better go and store your food away!"

A group of beavers by a pond start to dance and slap their tails together. Their response in song is:

"Thanks, Mr. Jackie,
for your advice!
We'll hurry home to our wives."

Squirrels pick up the tune as they gather nuts and fling them up to other squirrels in the trees:

"Well have our cupboards
filled with supplies
when Ol' Man Winter arrives!"

But the little grizzly cub is having none of this nonsense, and he growls out "Bah!" He continues to soak in the washbasin as he sings:

"I don't have to worry!
I don't have to care!
My coat is very furry,
I'm a frizzly grizzly bear!"

What the cub doesn't notice is his mother walking up behind him and scowling down at him. She sings, somewhat presciently:

"If you meet Ol' Man Winter,
you'll sing a different tune!
It's time that you were safe in bed,
for he will be here soon!"

Mama Bear leads her cub into their home inside a tree, which I think probably rivals Doctor Who's TARDIS in terms of being bigger on the inside. She dresses the bear in pajamas and tucks him into his carved-log rocking bed, but as she tucks, the cub scurries down to the end of the bed and climbs out without her noticing. He starts to tiptoe away, but she catches him, and swoops him onto her lap. Mama Bear lifts the pajamas over her cub's head, and swats his bear behind hard several times. She puts the now loudly crying cub back into bed and leaves the room. Rock-a-Bye Baby plays on the soundtrack as he continues to weep and snuffle his nose.

Mama and Papa Bear fall fast into hibernation mode, snoring so loudly that the image of a handsaw cutting through a large log materializes over their heads. Sawdust rains down towards their open, snoring mouths, but they blow it away again and again on their next snore. Finally, the log is cut all the way through, and a section of ghostly log somehow hits Papa Bear square on the forehead. Stars swirl about his noggin as he sits up and smiles, still deep in his slumberous state, and then he lightly settles back down into his pillow for his long winter's nap.

The cub has had enough, and he decides to run away. He crawls out of bed, lays out a bandana, gathers a few toys into it, and makes a bindlestiff. Throwing it over his shoulder, he says with a sniff, "You'll be sorry!" but then turns back to blow a kiss in his parents' direction. Music box sounds are heard, and the cub looks towards his window and smiles. Outside, Jack Frost is painted a frosty scene on the window, sticking out his tongue as he concentrates on his happy work. He capers off to another duty, and Billy opens up the window and follows him outside.

And thus begins the best part of the film. Jack Frost has a quartet of pumpkins before him, pumpkins that seem to have no color to them at all. He points his brush at each one in turn, and they first are colored orange, and then a second point at each one creates a smiling Jack O'Lantern grimace. Billy Bear strolls up to Jack, and the gnomish creature admonishes him in song:

"Billy Bear,
have a care!
Ol' Man Winter's in the air!
You'll be sorry
if he catches you!"

But the cub's response is the same as before:

"I don't have to worry!
I don't have to care!
My coat is very furry,
I'm a frizzly grizzly bear!"

(It must be pointed out that when Billy gets to the "I'm a frizzly grizzly bear!" portion of his verse, that he lifts up his fists and throws a few fake punches.)

Jack saunters off, and the four pumpkins grow legs and start dancing before the now named Billy Bear. They hop atop each other to form a stack, and begin howling at Billy, scaring the young bear off and away. He runs up to a scarecrow who is slumped in a lifeless sleeping pose on a stake. next to a mostly empty cornfield.

With the blowing of the autumn leaves, the stake supporting the scarecrow disappears, and the scarecrow casually springs to life! He starts to dance and sing, but there are no words. In a voice very much meant to sound like the famous jazz bandleader and singer, Cab Calloway, the scarecrow sings in a nonsensical but musical scat language. His dancing takes himself and the bear cub over to a group of trees, barren of leaves, who bob back and forth in time with the music and provide backing vocals to the scarecrow. When the scarecrow finishes his scat singing and twirling, Billy Bear either took the nonsense to be a further admonishment of his being out with Ol' Man Winter on the way, or he is just plain stubborn. The little cub sings yet again:

"I don't have to worry!
I don't have to care!
My coat is very furry,
I'm a frizzly grizzly bear!"

As he finishes his verse, Billy nightshirt is whipped up by a blast of freezing air from out of nowhere, and he stumbles about blindly. Snow has started falling, and the scarecrow reassumes his position when Billy first walked up to him, his arms stuck straight out as if resting once again on his stake. In my favorite part of Jack Frost, the scarecrow is slowly covered by freezing wind and snow, and gradually transforms into a stereotypical snowman. Billy is frightened by the transformation (as he should be, because it is actually kind of chilling), but before he knows it, there is another swirl of arctic wind, and Ol' Man Winter appears!

He is tall and blue and thin, and he has wild white hair and a long beard icicles hanging off of it. He has gapped teeth and a wicked grin, and he arches his arms over the top of his head as he tries to grab Billy Bear. The cub starts running in place to build up speed and then zips off as fast as his little legs can carry him. But Ol' Man Winter gives chase, and he stays just far enough behind Billy to blow freezing air at him with his breath, bowling the cub over in the snow and causing him to roll up into a snowball. The snowball grows ever larger, and its largest point, it rolls and smashes into a tree.

Billy, no longer encased in snow, sees a small door on the side of the tree and tugs on it hard to open it. We don't see what creature lives inside, except for a large nondescript foot that sticks out and boots Billy away. Billy runs to the next tree and tries that door. This time, a large white first is propelled by what seems to be one of those extendable, mechanical arms and punches Billy in the face. Sent sprawling once more, Billy sees a third door and runs inside. Seconds later, he runs out again, for it is the home of a skunk. Billy stands away from the door as the skunk comes out and invites the cub back inside where it is safe and warm. But Billy pinches his nose in disgust, and upsets the very friendly skunk, who has no idea of her offensive smell.

Ol' Man Winter runs at Billy Bear once again, and the skunk ducks back inside her home. The chase leads Billy to a log, where he runs inside to hide, but Ol' Man Winter knows exactly where he is. He ducks his down close to where Billy hides and says, "So, you would run away from home!" He points a claw at the log and icicles drip down from the top and form bars as if in a jail cell. Ol' Man Winter then disappears in a whirl of wind and snow, and Billy is left to his fate.

Suddenly, Jack Frost arrives to the rescue. He sings:

"You would roam
all alone.
I told you not to leave your home!
But you were a frizzly grizzly bear!"

Billy, weeping and snuffling his nose, sings his apology:

"Gee, Mr. Frost,
I'm sorry!
Oh, help me out --
please do!
Take me home
to my nice warm bed.
I'm freezing
through and through!"

Jack Frost takes his magical paintbrush and dabs some paint on each of the bars trapping Billy in the log. The icicles transform into candy sticks with delicious looking stripes of varying colors wrapping about them. Billy Bear starts salivating and hungrily licks at the candy icicles, slowly melting one of them away enough so that he can tuck his body through the gap and escape the log. He is free! Jack Frost sets his color palette on the ground, and both of them climb aboard it as if it were a sled. Jack uses his brush to row the palette across the snow, but a rainbow trail starts to appear behind the palette and they are rushed up and through the air!

Jack Frost and Billy Bear fly over the forest, causing a fully arched rainbow to appear in the night sky, and then they land at Billy's window. Jack tucks the sleepy little bear back into his log bed and pulls the covers up tight. After he climbs back outside and closes the window, Jack Frost picks up his brush once more and starts to paint on the window. This time, he draws a single large word in cursive. The word is "Finis," signifying the end of the story. As the music swells, Jack looks at the camera and winks to the audience. Iris out.

I had seen this Iwerks cartoon numerous times since my youth, but a large segment of today's population probably knows Jack Frost best from its appearance as one of the films that the King of Cartoons played -- albeit in truncated form -- on Pee Wee's Playhouse back in the '80s. Stuck alongside much more memorable cartoons that were used like Balloonland or The Sunshine Makers, this one has always seemed like an also-ran to me. Watching it a few more times recently, however, has raised my opinion of it a notch or two. It tells its story well, and the transitions between seasons are very well illustrated, especially in the transformation using the scarecrow. The least successful part is of the rather generic forest animals at the beginning, and I think maybe I picked up on that blandness when I was younger and discounted the film as a whole.

I also think that Ol' Man Winter is never portrayed quite as scary as he could have been, especially given how well Iwerks and company would bring off the Pincushion Man in Balloonland a year later. Maybe Winter was an early run at such a character, and they packed what they learned into the later villain. Still, I know several people who swear by how frightening they still find Ol' Man Winter in this cartoon, and I will admit he is pretty creepy. Also creepy is Jack Frost, who is the hero here, but that doesn't make him any more appealing as a cartoon character. I can also see some people nowadays being taken aback by the spanking laid down on Billy Bear by his mother, though I don't remember thinking anything about it when I watched this as a kid.

Getting back to the topic of winter, it is now December 8th, and I will be spending the day at Disneyland taking in the "Xmas atmos," as Blackadder's Prince George would say (he claims Jesus always ruins it for him). That's right, it's forecast to be 81 degrees in the middle of the afternoon, and I will be celebrating Christmas in a theme park while dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. It's hardly winter at all, the snow is all going to fake (except in the Frozen area that takes place inside), and the only frost that will be seen is painted onto windows and doors. Sure, Jack Frost painted his frost onto things as well, but that was the real deal... only in a cartoon.

Man, I miss frost.

In case you haven't seen it:

Countdown to Halloween: Balloon Land (1935)

Balloon Land (An Ub Iwerks ComiColor Cartoon, 1935)
Director: Ub Iwerks
Music: Carl W. Stalling
Cast: Billy Bletcher (The Pincushion Man)
Cel Bloc Rating: 8/9

It's strange how what frightens us as a child doesn't necessarily affect us as adults, or at least, doesn't affect us to the same degree as it once did. Monsters come and go, and we learn how to deal with them, and our nightmare villains slowly get displaced by scenarios laced with elements from our personal realities, wherein our subconscious attempts to allow us to deal with things that might be bothering us or bring us about to learning how to approach the problem when we awaken. The other night, I had a dream that may seem banal to most who would hear of it, but it felt very real to me. Enough so that I woke up shaking and filled with loathing for my own inability to handle the situation. What makes it so odd is that there was no one with a knife or monstrous fanged creature making me feel small and afraid. It was simply a wildly embellished variant on a problem I have at work in how I deal with certain situations. (I am unable to discuss the details, first because of non-disclosure agreements, and second because the details are actually unimportant to the nightmare.) Though I woke up sweating and upset, I did get a solid reminder from the nightmare to curb some of my personality tics when they spring up at inopportune moments in the business world. Personal growth through subconscious fear and intimidation, I guess...

Growing up though, far removed from business-related nightmare imagery, there was the Pincushion Man. Having seen Ub Iwerks' gorgeously designed Balloon Land cartoon a few times in my youth — released in 1935 to a world unprepared for its horrors, though far greater and more real horrors were already occurring — my concerns were not with what an exquisite piece of animation the film happened to be, but placed more with wrestling with my sleeping self as the Pincushion Man would spring to life every so often in my nightmares. While I have had many a restless night in my lifetime, as far as animated characters go, only four of them have ever led me to nightmares, and all of them when I was quite young:

1) The Big Bad Wolf, as Disney interpreted him in The Three Little Pigs and its followups, which I saw occasionally on The Wonderful World of Disney as a kid. Other animated wolves didn't bother me as much as he did, with that malicious glare set hard in his pig-craving eye, though my fear of him came as a direct result of my werewolf fetish, which in turn came from my living in wooded surroundings and from seeing far too many werewolf movies as a kid. (The same circumstances brought about my Bigfoot fascination. Well, that... and The Six Million Dollar Man.) The wolf never bothered me when I watched the cartoons, but leave me alone as I walked home through the woods on a dark winter's night? Forget it... Is it a surprise that the nightmares would follow?

2 & 3) Monstro the Whale and Stromboli the puppet master from Disney's Pinocchio. Monstro was certainly the progenitor of my water-fear, long before Jaws and the Land-Shark came along (I'll explain at a later date), and Stromboli formed much of the basis of my vision of humanity at its cruelest, and when he throws the axe into the remains of the burnt puppet in the fireplace, he opened up a lifetime of woes for my subconscious. I saw this movie way too young (it was one of my earliest films). For a relative comparison, I equate him along the lines of the Child-Snatcher from Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, also a touchstone of my youth (though it does not hold up like Pinocchio does, not by a long-shot...)

4) The Pincushion Man. It was years until I saw this stand-in figure for Death itself on a television screen again, and it was in The Pee-Wee Herman Show, not the Playhouse, but the original HBO version of Pee-Wee's wacky little world. The short itself was truncated, with no credits and only about half of the film shown, but I immediately recognized the fiend responsible for the mayhem in the short as the one and only Pincushion Man, who pulls pins from his puffy midsection and throws them through the bodies of the citizens of Balloon Land, all of them quite literally balloon people made out of rubber and filled up with air. He is the Bringer of Doom to their people, and all are warned of his ominous presence when they leave the seeming safety of their gated kingdom. He was also the Bringer of Nightmares to me, though I had no idea he would when I used to watch the cartoon once in a while as a young'un. But that's the way that nightmares work: you never seem to really know what is going to affect you as you sleep, and much of the time, you never really understand why you dreamed such a thing. With the Pincushion Man, there were no questions. My young mind immediately recognized him as a source of pure malignant evil.

In Balloon Land, which starts off on one of those idealized fairy-tale cloud-worlds with tens of balloons flying up into the air about a grand castle filled with rubbery balloon towers and buildings, this evil will find a way into even the most secure of strongholds, in the way that evil usually does: through backstabbing trickery and sneakiness. But first, we meet the happy citizens of Balloon Land, and it is a slight surprise that the earliest faces we meet are the celebrity faces of Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and Charlie Chaplin, all blown up and acting like their real-life counterparts. We next meet a Goof, whose head floats on a string above the rest of his body, and the establishment of his character at this early point proves important as he plays a huge role later in the film. For now, though, we have simply met a Goof. A man and his wife dance about with their baby balloon between them, and when he starts to float off, they each grab an arm to protect him. A bird, dog, duck and pig make their respective noises in time with the happy music.

But there is work to do in Balloon Land, as well. A rubber tree plant uses its limbs to squeeze its "head", and it squeezes out "sap" into buckets that are manned by various balloon people. Another man works a waffle iron set just below another tree from which some of the same substance drips. As each one drops onto the iron, they are turned into what I can only seem to think are whiffle-balls. When he opens the iron, each one bounces into a large bin. The buckets from the other tree are transported to a large machine, poured in, and then the machine converts the raw materials into new balloon people. An smiling attendant at the other end blows each person up with air, bringing them to life with solid statements of reason. As a balloon man is given life, the attendant sunnily warns, "Beware of pins!" A little boy is next off the line, followed by a little girl, and the attendant informs them at great length of the dangers of the world, and luckily for us, he does so in song:

"Now, beware! Have a care!
You're just filled with air!
A single pin would rip your skin!
And the Pincushion Man in the forest there,
Would pop you both if you don't take care!"

The little boy, puffed up with more prideful air than is probably good for him, isn't buying any of these scare tactics. His response is typically tough for a disbelieving youth:

"Oh, such trash! In a flash,
I would settle his hash!
I'll bust right in and twist his chin!
I'll get rough, I'll get tough, I'll just call his bluff!"

The little girl, however, is scared enough for the both of them, and she finishes the song with her cry of "Oh, no! Oh, no! Please, oh please, don't go!" But, like all kids, they forget the warnings and head off into danger. They bounce over the wall and peer into the forest, rethinking their agenda, but an owl-eyed balloon tree hoots behind their backs and pushes them forward. When another tough tree grimaces at her, the girl says "I'm scared," and the boy counters, "I'm not... much!" Then the tree waves his arms at them and they run off. There is a large rock balloon in the forest, but a skinny green hand reaches up over it bearing a long straight pin. It slams the pin down into the rock, and as the deflated remains fall to the ground, the Pincushion Man stands before us, all dangly limbs and pincushion pelvis, with a variety of pins set into it. He wears a thimble as a hat, and his body, most likely in an ironic statement, is that of a safety pin, though sometimes the pin part pulls away from his nose, and when it does he often grabs at his pointed appendage (which sticks upward on the front of his body, and there is definitely something lightly phallic about its protrusion). As he marches through the forest coldly popping various flowers and trees, he recites this poem:

"I'm the old Pincushion Man,
Terror of Balloony-Land!
Folks all hate me! How they hate me!
Tickles me the way they rate me!
Always have a pin at hand,
That's the reason I am panned!
How I stop 'em when I pop 'em!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

The kids, though, have not met him yet, and as they sneak about the woods, the boy says "Aw, that Pincushion Man is a fake! I'm not afraid of his pins!" Unfortunately for him, the Pincushion Man has heard this, and sets up an ambush for the two. He leaps about from behind a tree and yells, "So, you're not afraid of pins?!" He stabs at them a number of times, and when the kids back up to a balloon cactus, he pops the flowers set all about their heads. They run away with the Pincushion Man hot on their heels. 

The kids are able to knock him back by pulling a small tree down and hitting him with it, and as he is somersaulted backwards, they run for the Balloon Land gates and bounce over the wall. He bangs on the door while yelling to be let inside, adding "I'll get mad in a minute!" for emphasis. It is here where we meet the Goof for the second time. He opens a small spy-door and as his head floats out above his body, he tells the Pincushion Man, "Hoo Hoo! I'd better not! The folks'll blow up if I let you in!" Seemingly, the Goof has some sense after all, but it is only the most fleeting sort, and the Pincushion Man is able to easily sweet-talk him in a soothing version of his usually gruff voice. "Nonsense!", he says with a light accent to his speech, "I'm your friend! I vant to geeve you something!" The Goof hardly hesitates as he opens the door, and the horrors begin...

"WWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!"

The Pincushion Man leaps in and definitely gives the Goof something all right -- a popped body, and his speech is interrupted as his head floats off unharmed. The kids spy the villain and make their way to the alarm, which consists of balloon quadruplets sucking on bottles (I would imagine that you wouldn't have to get the air out of those bottles). The boy and girl pull the bottles from the babies' mouths, and they cry loudly, their heads moving toward the camera and filling up the screen, their uvulas waggling in toddler unison. (I hate crying babies, but it is one of my favorite moments in the film.) As the townsfolk head for shelter, the kids run for a house, but they can't quite fit in the door together. Rather than step back and let one go in first, they both decide to let some out of their valves, and dodge into the shelter. The Pincushion Man can't get to them, so he turns around and throws a pin expertly through the legs of a hapless man passing behind him. The victim shoots around through the air while the life is literally sucked out of him.

The villain starts to throw pin after pin in the chaos of balloon bodies trying to escape his rampage. A clown balloon laughs uproariously at the Pincushion Man's multiple failed attempts to stick him, but he laughs no more when he is left with only a pair of large feet. A caterpillar balloon continues to flee as a series of pins pop each section of its body; at last, only its head is left, but as it starts to cry for help, a final pin seals the caterpillar's popped fate. The kids make it to the guardhouse, and they alert the captain of the guards of the Pincushion Man's evil presence. After the captain's mustache twirls wildly in and out, he has another guard sound the alarm on his bugle. The guard exhausts himself of air, so hard does he blow out the call. Guards make other guards by blowing up new ones from boxes filled with balloons.

They march out onto the street, but the Pincushion Man is ready for them. He deftly pops one after the other as they charge towards him. Another rubber tree plant spits out more sap into buckets, and the guards use this substance in the attack. Some of the guards are armed with huge slingshots, and they fire the sticky stuff at the Pincushion Man, covering him in the sap. As the villain struggles with his newfound stickiness, with the stuff hanging from his nose and also tying his hands up momentarily, one of the guards is twisted over and over again with his arms outstretched. A bucket of whiffle-balls is poured out as they release him, and he spins and spins, knocking the balls at the villain like a rapid-fire weapon. The Pincushion Man catches a bunch of the balls on one of his pins and throws it down angrily. A catapult is loaded up with sap and fired at him, and his entire rear becomes covered in it. The attack methods are all repeated over and over, and soon enough, the Pincushion Man is nothing but a rolling ball of sap, whiffle-balls and wildly waving limbs. He rolls to the very edge of Balloonland, and after a couple of desperate grabs at the grass and flowers to save himself, he falls off into the clouds, never to be seen again. Back in the town, as balloons float and bounce about in victory over their vanquished foe, the boy balloon and the girl balloon kiss for the first time. They both are embarrassed by their action, and act shyly as they blush. Fade out.

It might seem silly now, but this cartoon really affected me as a kid. The Pincushion Man isn't just full of bluster and ego, merely threatening to kidnap, kill and/or devour in the fashion of most cartoon villains; he is the real deal. He threatens to pop the balloons, and he does. Given the people that inhabit this particular land, life and death to them means the difference between being full of air and being popped. The Pincushion Man is a bringer of death to them, and this is shown, no apologies asked. We think that it is all cute because it is an imaginary world, but when you really think about the subtext behind his actions, it is actually pretty horrible. The Pincushion Man kills.

Now, while I have been accused of being full of hot air, I am not a balloon. So, you would think that I would have nothing to fear from such a villain. But it isn't hard to imagine that getting stabbed, even in non-rubberized form, would be pretty painful and possibly deadly, just as with a knife or other sharp object. In my mind, the Pincushion Man became a very real villain, and I was chased about in a number of dreams in my youth. The strange part is, while the balloon world in the film is fully and deeply realized to glorious effect by the amazing Mr. Iwerks and Co., I didn't adopt any of the other characters into my dreams. Only the villain made the switch from public fantasy cartoon to private nightmare world.

After a few years, especially with not seeing the source again for so long, the Pincushion Man receded in my rogue's gallery, as did wolves of all sort, both lycanthropic and real. Whales became an interest, and sharks, an offshoot from my Monstro fear, became a passion. Only Stromboli remains, and while I have never quite worked out my fear of him (I figure that I see him as a sort of god-like figure due to the control that he has over his subjects, and the callousness with which he displaces them), he is the only one that still brings a chill to my spine whenever I watch him on the screen.

After all the horrid creatures, monsters and demons that plagued my dreams through my youth, they have all been vanquished by time and understanding, and now it is only the human figure that stands revealed as the true monster. The question is: what does the evil puppet master Stromboli represent in my head? What is is that I am afraid of, exactly? Is he my fear of humankind? Is he the reason that I have rejected all worship of gods? Or is he (for I have played the actual part of puppet master in my life) my own fear of myself?

Now, how the hell am I going to sleep tonight?

[Editor's note: The text and photos for this article were updated on 11/4/2015.]

Humpty Dumpty (1935)

Humpty Dumpty (An Ub Iwerks ComiColor Cartoon, 1935) 
Dir.: Ub Iwerks
Music: Carl Stalling
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

I'm not going to get into the supposed and varied sources of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. There are enough places that already deal with the whys and wherefores and whats, and I feel as much need to make sense of it all as do the animators who have brought cartoon life to the character over the years. Cannons, kings, blah, blah, blah! 

The disparity between how much information we actually have about Mr. Dumpty, given the brevity of his poem, and the amount of times he has been employed over the many decades in comics and animation is astounding. This is all the information anyone gets from the start:

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
couldn't put Humpty together again."

The poem tells you so little, not even the seemingly necessary fact that Humpty is, indeed, an egg; though as this poem is meant as a riddle leading to that conclusion clears that mystery up for good. It is taken for granted that Humpty is an Ovoid of Notorious Balance; what has not been mentioned is that his skills clearly qualify him for most junior varsity gymnastics teams. (Were he created today, Humpty would possibly be some sort of a combination of idiot narcissist and daredevil, probably the forerunner in the quite narrow subgenre of X-Treme Dairy Products.)

Lewis Carroll was obviously bemused enough with the situation to clear it up for good in Through the Looking Glass, which is one of the early instances of Humpty being given more life than he possessed previously in this tidy little quatrain. In fact, Carroll skewers the structure of the poem by having Alice comment "That last line is much too long for the poetry" (given by Carroll as "couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," thus making it more ponderous than before).


In 1935, Ub Iwerks, like many studios in the 1930s, took to spending a good deal of time and money trying to compete with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies series, and started a series, produced in the red-and-blue, predominant, two-color Cinecolor system, called ComiColor Cartoons. Like all of the Symphonic copycat series (and “copycat” is not a putdown, mind you!), the ComiColor shorts were generally cutesy and childlike. They were also severely lacking in the story department.

This does not mean that there weren't some good cartoons in the bunch, along with some excellent characterizations and quite memorable moments. One such cartoon (fun to watch, but with a story so weak you can hear its knees quaking from the strain) is the Iwerks updating of Humpty Dumpty, brought into the modern world with cheap melodramatic devices and poppy jazz. After all, when even the toddlers of the world have your source poem memorized, the only way to go is to set it finger-snappin’ music...

The film opens on a storybook where the credits are presented, and when the page turns, we are shown a window with wooden doors that open up and introduce us to the three main characters. As this is an update, the first egg is Humpty Dumpty, Jr., the son of the late wall-tumbler; the second is his lady love, the beauteous Easter Egg; and the third is the foul-mouthed villain, The Bad Egg. He is quite literally foul-mouthed: a stench wafts from his maw as he sneers at the audience, who cascade him with "Boo! Hiss! Boo!" which is apropos. The action proper begins with the camera showing us a picture of the late Humpty Dumpty, and a choir sings us a chiming version of the poem. It pulls back to reveal his son, Junior, who sits precariously atop the lip of a vase, and continues singing his story:

"My old man may have sat on a wall;
He slipped and had a very great fall!
But I'm Humpty Junior, 
I'm just like my pop!
I climb where I please!
They can't make me stop!"

His mother, sweeping the counter with a broom and worried beyond reason, intervenes, but almost causes her son's death inadvertently. She yells, "Junior! Come down from there!," and Junior is startled enough to lose his balance and fly down towards the ground. Luckily, his mother catches him in her apron. She tells him, "You be careful! That's how your father got cracked!" Junior slinks off, all the while hanging his head in shame.

Enter the heroine, Easter Egg. She skips along cutely, tapping various kitchen items with a stick, and Junior thinks fast and greets her with an armful of greens that he has plucked from a dinner plate. A light jazz number kicks in, and Junior serenades her:

"The moment you arrived, I had a feeling
I'd never be contented 'til we met!
But otherwise it ain't quite so appealing
So won't you join me in an om-e-lette?"

She then joins him in the chorus, as they rock back and forth as they literally spoon within a tablespoon:

"Oh, spooning in a spoon!
We don't need a moon!
Poached or fried or on the side
Morning, night or noon!
Scrambled in a tune,
Deviled with a croon!
In a cup, you're sunny side up,
Spooning in a spoon!"

As they cavort and sing, a kick-line of leggy she-eggs join them through the course of the tune, while The Bad Egg lurks jealously about in the background, peeking and sneering at their act, resplendent in traditional villain's curled mustache, tails, spats and top hat. The pair of love-eggs (I suppose that would make them pre-lovebirds were they fertilized properly) kiss sweetly and repeat the second half of the chorus, but then the villain stomps on the spoon handle, sending the pair flying into the air and onto their oval keisters. The Bad Egg tells Junior to "Scram!" and pushes him down, kidnapping Easter Egg, and carrying her off for his own twisted take on the process of love. Junior attacks him but only gets punched in the eye and knocked down again.

The Bad Egg carries Easter high up on the kitchen shelves where he puts the moves on her, but she runs and tries to stop him with anything in her path: a box of matches, a tomato can, and pepper, which she blows in his face, causing him to sneeze. Junior reaches the top shelf and charges the pair, but the Bad Egg roughly throws Easter off the shelf and down into a pan full of boiling water. She screams for help as Junior battles the villain, but finally the lovestruck hero breaks away from the melee and rushes to her aid.

Junior fashions a lasso out of some leftover spaghetti, but by the time Junior pulls her out of the water, she has become hard-boiled. To his surprise, she now speaks and looks along the lines of a Mae West. "Aw, scram!", she tells Junior when he tries to embrace her. The villain laughs at this turnabout, and Junior strides towards the heel to exact his revenge, but Easter pushes him out of the way. She hitches up her skirt toughly and starts pummeling the villain with a number of sharp blows to the face.

Junior, excited as usual, shadowboxes off to the side to Easter's every successful punch at the villain's face, but in his fervor, Junior slips and sends himself into the boiling water. At first, he calls for help, but he ends up getting hard-boiled as well. Crawling out of the boiling pan, he delivers a roundhouse punch that sends the Bad Egg flying. Junior then strikes a number of matches and throws them at the creep, surrounding him with flames and burning his rear end. Finally, Junior dumps the entire box of matches down on the Bad Egg. There is a large flash as the matches all catch on fire simultaneously, and when the smoke clears, the villain is revealed to be completely blackened and sick from smoke inhalation. 

The Bad Egg collapses exhausted into the tablespoon, and Junior stomps on the handle to send the Bad Egg sailing to the ground below, where he smashes to bits. As an explanation for his foul breath, a couple dozen skunks run out from the broken shards of his remains! Junior spits into the spoon's cup and it tosses him to the shelf above, where the two now-hardboiled love-eggs meet up. He embraces Easter and they kiss passionately, and then the film cuts back to the opening storybook window, where we see a replay of the chorus to "Spooning in a Spoon" before the book closes. Finis.

When I was a kid, I loved to make finger puppets, and I would do this by measuring a piece of construction paper into rectangular sections and then drawing clothes and faces onto the rectangles, cutting them out, rolling them, and then glueing the opposite ends together to form tiny little puppets. I would often have a hundred of these figures stored in a box by my desk, and each one was different, with distinct faces, clothes, and some even had arms, legs and other props glued onto their outsides. But there was one way in which they were the same: they all had tremendous facial areas that took up about 2/3 of their body lengths, mainly so I could get as much in the area of facial expressions as possible so that they could be seen by an audience (usually my brothers).

It is the same trick here with the eggs in Humpty Dumpty. Their faces easily take up most of their bodies, with only the bottom third left for the torso, arms and legs. Their eyes and mouths are huge and extremely expressive; as a result, with the wildly melodramatics at large in its action, this film would be an excellent example for drawing study.

The problem, though, is the close sticking to melodrama: the only real surprise in the film is the way the formerly innocent, childish eggs "grow up" and get "hard-boiled", though in retrospect, given the "tough guy" stance in most films of the period, maybe it's not really that surprising. But the film remains a visual delight even if there is that much going on storywise. The colors of the piece are remarkably vivid and the line work on the characters is sharp and clean. Overall, the film is politely entertaining, if nothing over which to fall off a wall.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This article was updated with new photos on 12/28/15.]