Countdown to Halloween: The Stupidstitious Cat (1947)

The Stupidstitious Cat (Famous Studios/Paramount, 1947)
Dir: Seymour Kneitel
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Superstitions... BAH! Never had much use for them. Through most of my life, I have taken the stance that most of the little, weird clichéd beliefs that people use to run their lives are silliness of the highest order. By this, I don't mean morals or laws... no, not even close. Any society needs a certain set of standards by which to maintain the peace, so I'm not suggesting anything like that for a second. What I mean are the oddball ideas that people adopt in order to corral that notorious fiend called "luck".

Myself, I have walked under several ladders, reacted to a spilled salt shaker numerous times with mere shrugs and a swift cleanup, and have knocked on wood or crossed my fingers only when in the company of others and when the use of such a cliché was a good conversation ender (and usually it was used in an openly mocking tone). I openly embrace the company of any black cat whose path I happen to cross; to me, they are just like any other kitties. And, boy, have I stepped on a lot of cracks on the sidewalk; my mother's back has always been fine, and at the pace that I walk, you can't let such little stupid things as a mere crack slow you down. And, apart from a handful of blacksmiths left in business and people who work at racetracks, just how often does one run across a horseshoe these days?

I do, however, have superstitions of my own that I have employed to incorporate into my life at various points in the far past, or that I have flirted with following over the years. A few examples:

Example A: In my youth, as a devoted follower of the Cincinnati Reds and the awesome Johnny Bench, I got it into my head that if I didn't read the Sunday or daily funnies from front to back (or left to right) without skipping a single comic strip, even the crappy ones that I hated, then the Reds would have a losing day on the ball field. How I came upon this notion I will never know; it just became ingrained in my head and I followed it for several years without exception. Sunday mornings even began to expand to giving the team luck for the whole week in my world. I would lie on the floor pouring through first the latest Peanuts strip on the front page and then all the way to the last page through Doonesbury, all the while chanting to myself that "the Reds will win this week... the Reds will win this week..." Truthfully, I didn't keep a chart to see if this was actually working, which is odd, since my usually obsessive nature would seem to merit that I would have kept such a thing. But the Reds were winning so much anyway in the mid-'70s, it was the rare day that they lost. So basically, odds were in my (and my scheme's) favor.

Example B: Some of my friends and I would always lift our feet, cross our arms, and have to touch the window nearest ourselves anytime that we would drive over a railroad track. While I had never encountered it before, it was a superstition of my friends' from their youth. It was goofy and fun to do. There were not only railroad tracks near my home as a teenager/young adult, but also a cemetery. One superstition my friends had that I had heard on my own as a kid was holding your breath when you drove past a graveyard. So after we did the railroad thing, you almost immediately had to hold your breath for about 20 seconds as well. I will admit here that if I were ever to finally get a driver's license of my own, I'm pretty sure that I would do all of this every single time that I crossed a track or passed a cemetery... just for funsies, you know. And since it can be dangerous to lift your feet, cross your arms, and touch the window while driving a vehicle, that might be one more reason why I should never have a driver's license.

Example C: Four-leaf clovers have always been a pleasure in my life. Not so much for the luck factor, but for the simple, zen-like pleasure in sitting quietly in a patch of clover and casually trying to pick one of those elusive little buggers out of the patch. It's like getting a 3000-piece crossword puzzle and deciding to start with one particular piece that has a slight variant over the other 2,999 pieces, only that piece may or may not have been packed inside the box during manufacturing. (Of course, as with four-leaf clovers in patches, there is the possibility that one might run across extra versions of that piece packed inside, too.) When I was a kid, my dad had (and might still have) a nature field guide that he would place the four-leaf clovers that we found inside to press them, and that tradition kind of stuck with me. (Note: He gave that book to me a few years, but the clovers were no longer in it. If I were a harder believer in luck, I could use that to explain away large portions of my life.)

But, despite these examples and a few others, I have never fully endorsed the "luck" lifestyle. I figure things happen just because they do, and no amount of wishing, praying, pleading, hoping, or even (as a last resort) hopping upon one foot while balancing a gourd on my forehead whilst reciting the third verse to Jabberwocky (a new tradition I have just made up) is going to make it happen. But try and tell that to the idiot cat that we meet at the beginning of Famous Studios' first Buzzy the Crow cartoon, The Stupidstitious Cat, released in 1947.

This dopey cat wakes up under a Good Luck sign (with a horseshoe, 'natch) with every part of his body that he can possibly cross, well... crossed. Limbs, fingers, toes, even eyes come undone upon his rising from slumber. Even his tail swirls around to make a knot for himself. Upon rising, the cat is stopped from getting out on the wrong side of bed by two signs pointing the direction to the proper side. After following the orders of the "right side" sign, the cat opens up what looks like a snuff box, but inside are several, supposedly lucky wishbones for him to break for even more good luck. He says to the camera...

"Break a wishbone

And if you get the big end

Your wish will come true

And your troubles will end."

Wishing for a bird for breakfast (hey, you gotta get the next wishbone from somewhere), the breaks one for just that purpose. He seems pleased that his right hand has ended up with the large end, never really picking up on the fact that his left hand also possesses the short end, thereby negating his luck either way. (It is a failure of the film that this isn't pointed out to the audience.) A bird starts to tweet and whistle beautifully outside, which attracts the attention of the cat. He tells the audience, "Whistle before breakfast, you'll...," then pauses in between words to giggle wickedly and lick his chops in predatory anticipation, "cry before dinner." What a creep...

Cue that very bird outside for breakfast. The camera zooms in on a small birdhouse atop a tree in the yard, where the whistling continues, this time in the recognizable form of a tune called Listen to the Mockingbird. From out of the front door comes a plump little crow with a straw hat, Buzzy the Crow by name, who is being introduced in this cartoon as a new Famous Studios stable character. He takes a dive off the front porch of the birdhouse to land with a splash in the birdbath at the tree's base. Buzzy starts to sing, only the voice coming from him doesn't quite match the sweet whistling we heard previously. This voice is raspy and rough, and seems to take a cue from Eddie Anderson's "Rochester" voice on The Jack Benny Show. He sings...

"Listen to da' mockingbird!

Listen to da' mockingbird,

Still singin' where da weepin' willows weep!"

Buzzy is giving himself a bath with a tremendous amount of soap suds, and sings from within a pile of those suds which completely obscure him from the camera. The cat, meanwhile, has sneaked up to the bath and decided to carry it and his prize dinner off into the house. Buzzy reaches out during this to grab a brush to scrub his back while he continues to sing, altering the traditional lyrics of the song just a tad for comedy effect...

"I'm dreamin' now of Hallie,

Sweet Hallie, Sweet Hallie,

She's sleepin' in da alley,

Where the mockingbird is singin' as she lies..."

The last line he sings as he uses the brush on his teeth, revealing a big gold tooth in his smile. He is about to begin the next chorus, but he realizes that the scenery has changed dramatically, with a wallpaper print in the background. "Uh-oh, how'd I get in here!" He flies off towards the window, saying, "Man, you gotta straighten up and fly right!" but the cat slams the window shut just as he reaches it. Buzzy hits the ground and the cat traps him underneath a butterfly net. The cat wishes to begin preparations for a Buzzy the Crow dinner, but the cat will now fall into a relentless series of misfortunes due to his rigid following of the Rules of Luck. Once Buzzy picks up on the cat's weakness when the cat picks up a pin for good luck, the entire plan is undone.

While the cat is putting Buzzy into a sandwich, the crow tricks the cat into believing he spilled the salt. The cat panics and throws it over his left shoulder saying...

"If you spill the salt,

Throw it over your shoulder.

Or you won't live

To be much older."

Of course, once he has undone the curse, he picks up the sandwich to find that Buzzy has departed, leaving a paper reading "Out to Lunch" in his place. The cat calls out "Come out, come, wherever you are" and Buzzy, in the manner of Rochester, replies, "Here I is, boss!" The cat spies Buzzy across the room and races towards him, but the bird is relaxing comfortably on the ground underneath a ladder. The cat recites...

"Hey, if you go under a ladder,

Your days will grow sadder and sadder."

The bird thanks him politely, and the cat responds in kind, and then thrusts out his hand in friendship, meaning to grab Buzzy when he does. But the only thing he grabs from Buzzy is a large black umbrella. The device pops open and whooshes up to the ceiling, and then it floats back down gently to land the cat underneath the ladder. Buzzy says...

"Uh-uh, in the house with an open umbrella

Will make you a most unfortunate fella!"

The umbrella closes just as the cat hits the floor but the snap of his rear end in a mousetrap placed there by Buzzy sends the cat back up again where he smacks into the underside of the top ladder step. Then the cat, umbrella and ladder comes crashing to the floor with the cat trapped inside everything. He pops up from the wreckage in the shape of a set of stairs, which Buzzy climbs up until he is standing on the cat's snout. He lifts the cat's eyelid up high until he is staring the cat in his big, yellow eye. The pupil of that eye rattles about like a roulette marble and then the cat comes to his senses and chases Buzzy away in a flash.

One of the more obscure superstitions today is brought up as the cat chases Buzzy. They run towards a large stand with a vase atop it, but Buzzy turns back just as the cat zips past and goes around the stand, causing it to come between the two of them. "Hey, boss!," says the bird, "Bread and butter!" The cat realizes what he has done and walks back along his path back around the stand and then gives chase once more. (What the cat did not do was say "Bread and butter" back to Buzzy, which would be the traditional way of breaking the curse. This might be why the cat gets it in the end.)

Buzzy runs across the room and hides beneath a huge cabinet. The cat can't see underneath it and so he strikes a match to see. The match lights three cigars that Buzzy has in his mouth, thereby causing another superstition to occur. The cat cries out...

"Yipe! Three on a match!"

...and then Buzzy runs out and shoves all three cigars in the cat's mouth! Buzzy says...

"And you end up in da booby hatch!"

The cigars turn out to actually be fireworks, and the cat is shot across the room where he crashes through the seat of a chair. The cat crawls out and swings the chair around his head and throws it in the direction of the crow. Buzzy warns him, "You'll be sorry!" and pulls on a cord that wheels a large mirror into the path of the flying chair. The cat races forward frantically to try and stop the chair, and he does manage to grab it just in time, so that the chair only taps lightly against the glass. But Buzzy sneaks up behind him and says, "Peek-a-boo!" Still holding the chair above his head, the cat ducks his head back between his legs to look upside-down at Buzzy behind him. Buzzy, who is standing upside-down on his hands (or, in bird terms, wingtips), is holding the pin from earlier in his talons and jabs the cat hard in the rear. The cat yowls in pain and flies up towards the ceiling as before, and then Buzzy shifts the mirror so that the cat crashes straight through it.

The cat is informed by Buzzy that he now has to serve "Seven years hard luck" to which the cat asks, "Did you say seven years hard luck?" Playing off a popular catchphrase from the time, Buzzy responds, "That's what the man said! That's what he said! He said that!" The cat angrily charges the bird, but all he does is hit an inkwell that splats him with black ink all over. The cat slides back towards the mirror and the glass swings around. He sees his reflection and screams, "A black cat!" The cat tears his way straight through the wall and then off and out of the picture. Buzzy is victorious and laughs at how the cat has allowed luck to run his life -- until Buzzy realizes from a desk calendar that the date is Friday the 13th. Buzzy immediately panics and begins following all of the same superstitions that the cat did before. He knocks wood, throws salt, kisses a horseshoe and throws it, and rubs his lucky rabbit's foot... each act, over and over, as the film irises out to a close.

Buzzy's voice was provided by Jackson Beck, who made a career out of portraying the voice of Popeye's nemesis Bluto in a tremendous amount of cartoons for Paramount/Famous. His Buzzy voice, as I sort of stated earlier with my positive reaction to the song, is my favorite part of the film. Buzzy as a a character has a pluckiness and roughness that I like quite a lot. That the films he starred in fail him ultimately, by and large, is not his fault; he is merely a pawn being handled roughly by some notoriously ho-hum hands. Getting back to the voice work and the Rochester angle, it is only at the point of Buzzy's introduction that one realizes that the cat's voice itself was a fairly thin imitation of Jack Benny, with his slow whine repeating the rules of luck suddenly becoming a tad more amusing (though not by much).

I somewhat dislike the design of the cat in this picture; I find him too rubbery, and just a tad too confident for someone who has thrown his lot in with the Rules of Luck and for someone who has a Jack Benny voice. I would have liked him to be a little more nervous (not nervy). Benny, of course, was not nervous per se; he had confidence, but only the confidence of one who is blissfully unaware of how disruptive his personality tics could be. The cat here seems to be extremely careful about what he does, until he sees the bird and he acts like a normal cat. I would have rather seen him use the rules of luck to first capture Buzzy, and then we see his plan come undone by his own rigidity to the rules.

I, too, have a tradition involving Friday the 13th: I love it. I often take the day off from work, as I have done for years and years, and go to the movies and do some shopping, or sit at home and watch my own horror movie marathons, sometimes with friends, sometimes not, and never have I met with a single bad incident or accident. Sometimes I even watch Jason movies, kind of doubling down on the Friday the 13th thing.

But I have my own sort of bad luck running for me these days. Sick with a cough for over a month, on a zillion medications, and mostly out of work for over two years. So, I am home for Friday the 13th under my own power this year. No day to take off, because I have too many days off already.

Of course, maybe I need to do something to turn that luck around. Not sure where to start, so many I can try some of those things I used to do to stop the bad kind. Right now, to prevent any misfortunes, I will indeed try hopping on one foot while balancing a gourd on his forehead and reciting the third verse to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

"And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame

came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

and burbled as it came."

Here's hoping it works. (I had better cross my fingers... and my toes, arms, legs and eyes, while I am at it...)

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

[This piece was posted in its original form on March 4, 2006. It has been drastically rewritten and edited, and given new photos and a video link on October 13, 2017.]

Countdown to Halloween: A-Haunting We Will Go (1949)

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?

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...)

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...

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.]

Countdown to Halloween: Spooky Swabs (1957)

Spooky Swabs (Paramount/Famous Studios, 1957)
Dir.: Isadore "Izzy" Sparber
Animators: Frank Endres and Thomas Johnson
Story: Larz Bourne
Backgrounds: John Zago
Music: Winston Sharples
Cel Bloc Rating: 5/9

If you are one of those who did not like Disney's film version of Pirates of the Caribbean, you have to admit to one thing: at the very least, when they promised pirate ghosts, they gave you pirate ghosts.

And even Scooby-Doo got it mostly right when he and the rest of his Mystery Machine gang ran into pirate ghost problems. Even though the pirate ghost they battle in the original series – Captain Redbeard – turns out to be a normal creep in a disguise, he sure plays up the part to the hilt. There is not a second within the cartoon where you doubt that Redbeard is not just a full-blooded pirate, but a scary one to boot. Why, even the same can be said for South Park when Korn came in as guest stars to solve their own Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery, itself a spoof on the Scooby-Doo style. Pirate ghosts through and through, without a doubt as to their abilities as buccaneers of the first order.

Even knowing that, in the world of the cartoon, all of the monsters and ghosts on Scooby-Doo are really regular people simply wearing masks and disguises doesn't dispel the fact that the characters running away from them think all of these ghosts and spooks are for real (though, by a certain point, the Mystery Machine gang really should have picked up on the pattern). Not so in the final Popeye cartoon produced for theatres by Famous Studios, released in 1957 before the famous sailor man moved to television for a long run. In Spooky Swabs, apparently in the studio's great desperation to cut costs, Famous doesn't even dress their pirate ghosts in traditional pirate garb. Instead, they give us a couple handfuls of ghosts who talk (briefly) like pirates, but by their drab, normal ghostly appearance, they could easily have been inserted using recycled animation from practically any Famous Studios' Casper cartoon. (Perhaps someone out there knows whether this is true or not.)

For whatever reason, Popeye and Olive are adrift at sea on a raft. Luckily, they are equipped with the one thing that a couple cast to the waves needs on such a journey: a checkerboard. A series of large waves toss the raft aloft and then the raft drops back down from underneath Popeye, Olive and the checkerboard. Then, in order of weight, Popeye drops back to the raft, close followed by Olive, then the checkerboard, and then finally the individuals click back down on the board. Without sparing any action outside of the game of checkers, Popeye mechanically points to an offscreen occurrence, and informs the neatly dressed and ladylike Olive that there is a ship in the water nearby.

The camera cuts to a shabby-looking sailed vessel which sits completely still in the water, which is amazing since the raft was just leaping up and down not mere seconds before on the same ocean. Olive is overjoyed, because now she "can go home and watch television!" Because there is no way he could possibly ever "motorboat" his beloved Olive, Popeye uses his corncob pipe as a propeller to turn the raft into a speedboat, and they zip hard through the water in exactly the way that Popeye should have done in the first place when they ended up adrift at sea. (He is Popeye, after all -- he can get out of any fix.) They smack into the side of the weird ship and are vaulted up and over the side, seemingly to safety. But then the camera pans to the right and down to the bow of the ship, where the name "Sea Witch" and the date 1678 clue us in to the true ghostly nature of the vessel.

Popeye and Olive call about for any "swabs" aboard the ship, and inside the ship's cabin, a motley group of ghosts wake up from their naps. "Blimey, mateys!", swears the bland ghost, sounded a bit like a Charles Laughton knockoff and trying his best to be all “pirate-y,” "We've been boarded!" While Popeye hoists the mizzen, he promises to take the craft back to "civili-skation". The ghosts are shocked by this turn, wanting nothing to do with civilization - with an extra "k" inserted or otherwise – and decide to take desperate measures to win back their ship. As Olive rests in a nest of rope attached to the anchor, two ghosts throw the massive object overboard, and when the rope unravels and follows the anchor, Olive is sent spinning into Popeye, legs akimbo, and she kicks his head and neck through the hole in the ship's wheel. Olive does her best to unwedge Popeye from the wheel, but when he pops out free, she crashes into the cabin and comes out with the wheel around her midsection.

A bit later, having gotten out of her near ship-wear, Olive fixes the wheel so that they can steer again while Popeye attempts to pull the anchor back up, but the ghosts have a different idea. One ghost paints the anchor rope with grease, and another knots a section of the rope around Popeye's ankle. When his hands hit the grease, the rope slips and burns his hands, so he lets go and the knot carries him down into the water after the anchor. Olive tries to pull him back in, but a disembodied handkerchief carried by an invisible ghost blinds Olive from behind. Popeye grabs a passing sawfish and cuts himself free, but when he returns to the ship, one of the ghosts is finally doing a real pirate thing by forcing Olive to walk the plank at the point of a cutlass. The drawback? The ghost is completely invisible, so we don't get to see him acting like a pirate.

Popeye grabs the plank and swings it back into the ship, but he does this in the style of a 3-D film, so that it becomes a perspective shot with Olive moving first out towards and then back to the ship. She lands facedown in a bucket of water, and when Popeye dredges her out, her eyes are full of water, but as she spits the water out, her eyes drain until we can see her pupils. She is then picked up from the deck by invisible hands, and the ghosts materialize as they drag her. The shocked Olive escapes their grasp and in her panic, she tries to run off the end of the ship. Popeye grabs her and swings her back in the nick of time.

Obviously one step ahead of the sailor man, one ghost flies to the top of the mainsail and cuts the fabric with a cutlass. When Popeye protests to Olive that ghosts do not exist, the mainsail ghost drops the cloth on top of Popeye, and Olive freaks out! Thinking that he is a ghost, she conks Popeye with a baling peg, and when he finally pulls off the cloth and reveals himself, there are several large bumps atop his noggin. Not giving the couple a chance to rest, the ghosts take up arms and attack the couple, yelling semi-piratey things and sea dog slogans, but Popeye, seemingly without a can of reserve spinach of his own, runs into the cabin to check out the supplies. He finds a jar marked "Ye King's Spinach", and if you ever wondered what 279-year old spinach can do to the human body, well -- it pretty much does to Popeye what all spinach does to Popeye. It makes him unstoppable, though with a different result than normal. Perhaps it is actually "ghost spinach", for once it hits the bottom of his feet, it turns him into a completely invisible whirlwind.

After spinning himself unseeable, Popeye easily cuts a swath through the crowd of swabby phantasms, and he punches each of them into the side of the ship's cabin, where they turn into nothing more than flat, empty fabric. Olive sews the lot of them into an enormous sail. With Popeye at the wheel, Olive sings: "The ghosts you did finish, 'cause you ate your spinach!" Then Popeye joins her for his concluding line, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!", as we see the ship sail into the sunset with the entire cadre of not-so-piratey ghosts catching a breeze to send the couple back to "civili-skation."

Not to be too blunt about it, this is the sort of cartoon that makes me want to rid myself of "civili-skation". It is the downfall of humanity to settle for the merely humdrum, and while humanity was spared any more of these latter-day Popeyes after this point, the fact that the series remained so popular for so long in such disparity serves as a sad reminder of how easy it is for people to merely settle. Why push buttons, why court logic, why dare show originality? Instead, take a once daring series and tie its legs together like a rodeo calf. Take away its edge, wilt away its wit, and drain away every trace of what once made the series great. The glory of the Fleischer days was long, long gone, but did anyone notice by that point in time? Did anyone care?

I know there are apologists for each and every film made in the history of the cinema, and there are plenty of people out there who would say that I am being far too harsh. Many of these same people also settle for the television Popeye series, often stating, and I'm collectively paraphrasing here, that "maybe they aren't quite as good as the early ones, but they are still OK." This is usually attributed to the fact that anything that stars their hero Popeye can't be all bad. Well, people, send me your favorite Popeye doll, and I will take a healthy dump on it and send it back to you. Then, without cleaning it up at all, you write me back and tell me that you still love your Popeye doll just as much as you did before. That is exactly how I feel about the last few years of the Famous Popeyes, and that is how I have felt since I was a kid about the sub-sub-sub-standard television Popeye pablum, and that is how I feel about any attempt to modernize the Popeye mythos.

As for the pirate ghosts (or are they ghost pirates, as the members of Korn argued amongst themselves in the South Park episode?), it is the most telling aspect of this cartoon that the filmmakers couldn't even commit to paying more than lip service to the pirate concept in the film. No hats, peg legs, hooks, or striped shirts amongst the lock, just normal, sheet-wearing ghosts; at least they had some cutlasses with which to attack their invaders. But even with the ghosts armed, when push comes to shove, it takes only one punch to each ghost for Popeye to subdue them. Punch? I'm sorry, but aren't they ghosts? Intangible spectres? Even with whatever properties Popeye took on from the ancient spinach, it should have taken far more than that to take them out. Maybe it was ghost-strength spinach after all.

As it turns out, these are apparently some real pirate ghosts that even Scooby-Doo could have captured... and even without a wayward jackhammer...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it (not that you need to...)

[This post was originally published on 5/26/2006, but was given a rewrite and edit, and updated with new images, on September 29, 2017.]

It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas: Snow Foolin' (1949)

Snow Foolin' (A Paramount/Famous Screen Song, 1949)
Dir.: Izzy Sparber
Cel Bloc Rating: 5/9

If you have seen any old animated film shorts where a bouncing ball seems to leap from word to word (or syllable to syllable) in along a line containing song lyrics, then you have probably seen a Screen Song cartoon. Screen Songs were animated shorts that were created originally by the Max Fleischer Studios (and released via Paramount) from 1929 through 1938, and were a continuation of a previous series created by Max and Dave Fleischer (under various distributors and contracts) from 1924 through 1927 called Song Car-Tunes.

"Follow the bouncing ball!" was the catchphrase that led audiences to follow along with the lyrics to a song that was featured in the cartoon being viewed. That audience would then sing along at the top of their lungs in the theatres in what I presume would be considered a jolly good time by most in attendance. For me, personally, such behavior in a movie theatre would be excruciating to behold; I like people to just shut up when the lights go down. But Screen Songs were, I imagine, pretty popular in the earlier days of the cinema when studios were looking for any gimmick to get butts in seats. Sure, it hasn't changed one bit from then to now; studios are as money-hungry as ever, if not more. But if some studio or theatre chain decides to give singing show-obsessed Americans free reign to start caterwauling along with music out loud at my local theatre, I may switch to video for good at that point. Audience participation is not for me.

After the Fleischers closed up shop in the early 1940s and Famous Studios took over what remained of Paramount's animation production (including the rights to the Popeye franchise and with many from the Fleischer staff still employed), Screen Songs somehow made a comeback. Famous Studios created their first new Screen Song in 1947, Circus Comes to Clown, which not only featured the old chestnut The Man on the Flying Trapeze, but was also the first film in the series in color.

The Screen Song series had a formula that followed a through-line from some examples in its early incarnation up to the Famous revival. The first three to four minutes of the short would usually be comprised (though there are variations) of a series of simple gags involving actions or characters somewhat related to the subject of the song being featured in the film. After the gags were done, the audience would be led into singing along using the bouncing ball gimmick. The lyrics to the song would appear on the screen, generally broken up phonetically to give the ball even more to bounce upon (and probably to make it easier for the audience to read). The ball (which originally was just a painted ball on a stick in the earliest Fleischer days, but which was eventually totally animated) would leap across the lyrics in time with the music, so it was remarkably easy to learn to sing even lyrics that you had long forgotten (or most likely, never knew). The song would continue until the end of the film, where there was often a final animated gag to close things out on a humorous note.

Since there was usually not much in the way of a story, the Screen Song films themselves are pretty generic, with the only difference being the song selection and the characters chosen for the gag section. In this way, they are also largely forgettable. But circumstances sometimes make some cartoons stick out more than others, even films of a lesser quality. Through the 1980s and 1990s (mostly, but even up to today), VHS and DVD collections of public domain cartoons, usually at incredibly cut-rate prices of only a few dollars, would appear in the cut-out bins of big box stores. I, like many people, cannot resist at least digging through these bins for supposed treasure at the bottom that everyone else has passed over. I bought a lot of cheap cartoon collections this way desperately searching for cartoons that I hadn't already found elsewhere.

And at Christmas, the fervor only grew. I can't even count how many cheap-ass VHS tapes I had with six or seven low quality prints of holiday-oriented cartoons crammed on them in the hopes of finding a rarer film I hadn't seen before. (The lists of films on covers rarely reflected what was actually on the tape, so you were pretty much working on faith here.) And one of the cartoons that showed up most often in these low- rent, dime-store collections was a Famous Screen Song from 1949 called Snow Foolin'.

Built around a sing-along for Jingle Bells, Snow Foolin' starts off with the Screen Songs jingle, an overly chipper tune belted out by what must have been some highly caffeinated singers:

"Start the day with a song
and sing the whole day through!
Even while you're busy working,
do just like the birdies do!

Though the day may be long,
you never will go wrong!
Off key, on key, any old key,
Just start the day with a song!"

After the title card is shown, with a quick bit of Jingle Bells behind it, the gag section opens with a rabbit dressed in a shirt and pants who steps out of a doorway in a tree trunk to look at a calendar that says "Dec. 20" upon it. Stretching and yawning, he lifts the paper to reveal the next date on the calendar. "December 21st," he says. "First day of winter!" He tears off the previous date, but as soon as he does, the rabbit is flattened by a massive amount of snow, as winter literally just drops down onto the landscape in a single blow. The rabbit, now completely covered in the white stuff, pops his ears out of the snow, turns around, and tunnels his way back to his door and slams it behind him.

A bear, fox, and skunk, each dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, run across the frame in front of the wintery background towards a cabin with a sign reading "Fur Storage". The bear enters, and when he comes out the other side, he is fully clad in his normal fur so he may keep warm for the cold months ahead. But when the fox comes out, he is wearing the skunk's fur. It doesn't fit him properly, he is easily twice the size of the little skunk, and he sniffs at the odd aroma emanating from it. The skunk ambles past him, and he is more than covered by the fox's fur coat, dragging the white-tipped tail behind him. This angers the fox, and he swipes his own fur away from the skunk, tumbling him over in his underwear (which is completely different from what he was wearing entering the fur storage, I might add). The skunk is then hit by his real fur as the fox throws it at him, and in seconds he is dressed properly. The skunk stands up and sniffs himself, and then turns to the camera and says pointedly, "Nauseating, isn't it?"

A trio of scowling alley cats are seen next, throwing snowball after snowball from behind a wall built of snow blocks. Their missiles are targeted at a trio of mice running across the snow, and one of the snowballs hits a mouse and covers him so completely that his legs pop out of the bottom of the snowball, and he runs blindly away. The cats continue to pelt snowballs in the direction of the mice, but then the felines duck as the sound of what seems to be cannon fire is heard. A giant boulder of a snowball rams itself into their wall of snow blocks. Looking up cautiously, they see that the mice have a snowy fortress of their own, and have enlisted the aid of a rather cute little elephant. The mice feed a snowball into the elephant's mouth, and then by swatting the pachyderm in the rear with a giant paddle, the snowball rockets out of the elephant's trunk at a highly dangerous rate of speed.

On a nearby skating pond, a mother rabbit skates by, followed by about a dozen baby rabbits mounted upon a single, elongated skate. A penguin wearing a top hat and cigarette holder has a little more trouble staying on his feet but passes by, followed by a stork who switches legs, keeping one in the air at all times while riding a single skate. A caterpillar wearing about a dozen skates zips past, and beneath him, we see through a hole in the ice, that a pair of fish are skating on the underside of the ice (in other words, upside-down).

A pig attempts a figure eight successfully, and shows off his effort, but an ostrich comes forward and does two number fours at the same time, proclaiming "Eight, the hard way!" An alligator has a third skate on the end of his long tail, but his confidence gives way to disaster as he smashes hard into a tree and ends up skating off as a quartet of alligator skin suitcases instead.

A trio of hippos speed down the hill on what a sign declares is a "Suicide Bob Sled Run". A pair of hens sitting next to the sign have all of their feathers blown off when the hippos' bobsled passes by them, and the girls are left wearing nothing but their scarves. The hippos continue their manic run at high velocity, handling the course with the grace of professionals. But suddenly, a mouse on a tiny runner sled handily overtakes them, leaving them to gasp in amazement.

At the top of a very steep hill, a kangaroo prepares to perform a ski jump. Her joey, handling a movie camera, sits in her pocket and is ready to record the action as it happens. All is going well until the mother kangaroo reaches the apex of her jump, and she starts to panic and kick her legs out as she falls to the ground below. She hits the snow-laden ground with a heavy impact, and is completely dazed from her fall. But her joey escaped the crash by being outfitted with a parachute, and he drifts down safely back into her pocket.

A mother hen passes by them singing Jingle Bells merrily. In front of her, the hen pushes a sled upon which lies a carton holding a dozen eggs. As she sings "Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh," each egg pops open in synchronization with each syllable, revealing in each slot a baby chick wearing earmuffs. Except for the twelfth egg. It bounces up and down unhatched, and the mother hen turns to the camera and asks, "And how about you folks joining in, and singing this merry old song?" As the egg keeps bouncing, she adds, "Just follow the bouncing hen-fruit!"

The egg switches to a more spherical shape and leaps onto a backdrop bearing a Currier and Ives-style sleigh. The ball starts to bounce across the words as we hear a choir sing along as well to encourage the crowd to participate...

"Jing-le bells! Jing-le bells!
Jing-le all the way!
Oh what fun it is to ride
in a one horse o-pen sleigh!

Jing-le bells! Jing-le bells!
Jing-le all the way!
Oh what fun it is to ride
in a one horse o-pen sleigh!"

Of course, most of us know the song, or at least the chorus and first verse, but I have included the lyrics here so you can see how the words were broken up for the sing-along portion of the cartoon. The song continues as the background changes to that of a different image of a sleigh...

"Dash-ing thro' the snow
in a one horse o-pen sleigh.
O'er the fields we go,
laugh-ing all the way.

Bells on bob-tail ring,
Mak-ing spi-rits bright,
oh what fun it is to ride and sing
a sleigh-ing song to-night! 
OH!"

Probably so Famous could reuse animation (it makes sense), the background switches back to the one originally used for the song's chorus, as it is played once again. Then a third background is shown as the cartoon continues on to the second verse of the song (which some, but not all, readers may not know too well)...

"Just the oth-er night,
While rid-ing in my sleigh,
I passed a pret-ty miss,
Walk-ing 'long the way.

I asked her if she'd like
to join me for a ride,
She an-swered "Yes" and soon she was
sit-ting by my side.
OH!"

A third chorus using the original sleigh background is sung, leading into the third verse of the song. This time, the background is that of a young couple basically making out in the back of the sleigh. The song continues...

"We didn't have a care,
Ro-mance was in the air,
It was a per-fect time,
to kiss my la-dy fair.

She did'n't seem to mind,
her heart was light and gay,
and now we're on our hon-ey-moon
in a one horse o-pen sleigh.
OH!"

And now is the time for the big finish. With the rising of a new set of lyrics for the final chorus, the font has changed and appears in all capital letters fully for the first time. If that wasn't enough to excite the graphic designers in the crowd, a tiny snowman leaps onto the screen, smashing the first "Jing" and then proceeds to happily squash each syllable as he makes his way across the first line. At the halfway point, his movements uncover a sleigh in the background. When the second line appears, the sleigh becomes animated, and the horse starts to walk over the top of the words, pulling the sleight and its occupants behind him. They continue across the remainder of the chorus to the song's conclusion, as snowflakes have started to fall and cover the screen.

There is an iris out that takes us out of the song portion and the scene dissolves into that of a turtle wearing a hat, mittens, and a muffler while skating across the ice. Working as a vendor, the turtle calls out, "Hot coffee! Get your hot coffee!" to everyone in hearing distance. A tired sounding, feminine voice asks for a single coffee politely, and the turtle stops below a tree branch and opens his shell from his front (the underside, that is). Inside the turtle, where we would assume his stomach to be, he has a hotplate and a coffeepot, and on the interior of his outer shell, there are five coffee mugs, three of them resting on a shelf in the middle of the shell. The turtle pours a cup, and then climbs (unseen) up the tree to hand the coffee to a cold mother bird on a nest. "Uh," he starts to ask, "I thought all birds spent the winter in Florida?" The bird takes a swig of coffee, and as the camera pulls out to reveal her nest mounted on top of a stove sitting upon the tree branch, she responds in a voice very reminiscent of actress Zasu Pitts, "Oh, dear! At these prices, who can afford Florida?"

Yes, as I stated, this is an extremely generic cartoon, and really not all that clever or funny. This is not to say that it can't be appealing, and certainly, come the holidays, when the airwaves are filled with some increasingly crass material, Snow Foolin' comes off as rather innocent and comforting. You get to see some simple, gentle humor delivered by cutely designed animals, and you get to sing Jingle Bells at the end of it. If starting the day with a song is also your mantra, then you will probably enjoy this. Screen Songs were probably made precisely for you.

As for me, I still have about a dozen copies of this cartoon. And I kind of feel obligated to watch each and every one of those copies every single Christmas. I had better get going on the next one...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it: