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: Boo Moon (1954)

Boo Moon (Paramount/Famous Studios, 1954)
Dir: Seymour Kneitel
Cel Bloc Rating: 5/9

Paramount and Famous Studios jumped onto the 3D bandwagon in the early 1950s, as a great many studios and independent producers were quick to do as they searched for that always elusive, cinematic pot of gold. Taking their two most popular characters, the studio produced a pair of extra-dimensional cartoons in 1953; both, not coincidentally, were set in outer space (because, apparently, at least to movie producers, 3D is instantly identifiable with science-fictional settings): Popeye, the Ace of Space, with the spinach-popping sailor, and Casper the Friendly Ghost in Boo Moon, released into theatres on New Year's Day, 1954.

Apart from his non-stop, whiny search for friends, Boo Moon almost completely does away with the Casper formula: there is no crying for attention, and except for two opening scares on Earth, Casper doesn't go through the usual parade of possible friends turned horrified recipients of Casper's ghostliness. After frightening everyone out of the subway, the producers decide to give us a first taste of 3D thrills, and have Casper flight straight at the screen slowly. Just as his giant smiling face fills up most of the frame, Casper disappears.

Casper happens upon a salesman working the street with a telescope by selling views of the "Wonders of the Moon" for 10 cents a peek. At first, the salesman thinks Casper is just any other little boy, but a second glance has him leap up and then smash himself down into his shoes, while pulling his hat down on top of himself. The salesman then leaps towards the camera as Casper did before, and we see the large sole of his left shoe as he leaps out of frame. A frowning Casper peers through the telescope and sees the Man in the Moon smiling at him. From this brief slice of evidence only, and always desperate for a friend, Casper reasons that the moon seems to be a friendly place. The friendly little ghost undertakes a long, solo flight through space, using just his ghostly powers, to meet the Man in the Moon himself.

When he arrives, Casper is disappointed to find "nothing but rocks and holes," and his long journey has left him weary. Casper stretches, yawns, and lies down to sleep. As he does, tiny Moon People crawl out of the craters, declare Casper to be "a monster" and cage him on a wagon to bring him back to their Moon King. This visual allusion to Gulliver's Travels is incredibly apt, as it turns out, because the Moon King Luna, is played by none other than King Bomba himself from the Fleischer Studios feature-film adaptation of the Swift classic. It is not entirely apt, however, since Bomba played the king of Lilliput's rival, Blefuscu. (Fleischer Studios was notoriously bilked out of existence by Paramount/Famous Studios in 1942, and Paramount kept the film rights to all previously-owned Fleischer properties, including Popeye and their original Gulliver's Travels characters.) Essentially playing the same character, only facing a giant white ghost kid instead of a giant white man, Bomba/Luna is not pleased with Casper, and orders "the monster" to be sent away to the royal dungeons.

Conveniently for Casper (though he could fly out of the cage at any time owing to his non-corporeal form), the Moon Kingdom is attacked by large and vicious Tree Men, who are apparently pissed off about being on the moon when the casting call for The Wizard of Oz took place or something or other, and a violent battle commences. The diminutive Moon Soldiers launch large (or rather, small) balls of fire at a pair of the Tree Men: one is burned through the middle, and runs off pulling his two separated sections together; the other is burnt to about the width of a very tall blackened toothpick, and after his eyes pop open telling us he is still alive (no actual death apart from Casper in these cartoons), the charred stick hurries off in fear.

But the Tree Men won't be stopped. They run to a crater filled with water and suck up the liquid through their branches that serve as noses. The Tree Men squirt the water back at the castle and put out the fires creating the Moon People's only defense. The Tree Men finally break through the gates of the walled city and capture King Bomba/Luna. Casper finally gets in on the hero action, materializing through the ground of the moon, and pulling two roots of each tree under with him and tying them in bows, thereby literally rooting each tree in place. The Moon Kingdom is saved! 

No longer afraid of him, King Bomba/Luna stands on Casper's palm and awards him with a medal and the title of "Sir Friend Casper." Even though he has finally made a large group of friend that trust him, Casper decides to take off to return to Earth, and as he leaves, the Man in the Moon winks at the audience.

Of course, we will never see these "Friends of Casper" again, just as we never see any of Casper's friends again when the next formulaic cartoon rolls around. Until Spooky and Wendy show up, that is. I have two theories:

1) Casper is actually a ghost who befriends and then murders these new "friends" in the space between each film. He is unable to retain any memory of having met or killing these friends; thus, his slate is wiped clean at the beginning of each film, and the repetitious cycle of each Casper film begins anew. Casper is a serial friend killer from beyond the grave.

2) Somewhere there is a Hollywood chapter of the Friends of Casper Anonymous, where abandoned "friends" of the "love 'em and leave 'em" spook meet confidentially to work through their anger issues over Casper. There is Bonnie and Johnny, Dudley Duckling, Wheezy the Elephant, and the ghost of little Ferdie Fox; every couple weeks a rocket lands and King Luna and the Moon People arrive to join in the group hate session, and Luna details an attack plan on whatever haunted house Casper is holed up in that week. The meetings always fall apart when it is decided that Casper is hardly worthy of such attention and rage, but they all agree wholeheartedly that only a truly pathetic individual would spend even a day discussing the life and crimes of a middling cartoon character, let alone five days in a row.

Oh, I think they must be talking about me.

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

[Editor's note: The text and photos for this article were updated on 12/9/2015.]

TARTS AND FLOWERS (1950)

I'm imagining a time before television when a person would actually listen to an informational radio program giving detailed instructions, and then that person trying to duplicate the steps within the comfort of their own home while the show is still going on the radio. I know people to this day foolishly try this with their televisions, and more often, with a tape, DVD, or Tivoed version of such a show, to this day. Some people seem to believe that they learn better from seeing or hearing, rather than simply reading such instructions and then performing the task as written. To each their own; I much prefer having a hard copy written down in front of me on those rare occasion where I might try a folly of this sort. But cooking shows, the preeminent example of this type of show, have been extremely popular throughout the history of broadcast radio and television, and there will be no end to this flood.

[I, myself, love Iron Chef and Good Eats on the Food Network, but the former I watch because it is basically a Japanese martial arts movie only with chefs instead of ninjas and samurai, and the latter I watch because it is both informative and amusing, and both are certainly not meant to be cooked with in unison in your home. I suppose you could cook along with Emeril, but I always have a problem with these studio audience cooking shows: you never see anyone declare a dish to be a piece of crap; everyone is so civil when tasting their dishes, so in thrall they are to be tasting one of the celebrity chef's dishes, that if he/she took a dump on one of their plates in front of them, they would surely smash their faces into the plate and call it a masterpiece. ("I liked the way the remnants of peanuts mixed in almost a jauntily saucy fashion with the rest of the dish...") No one ever has an adverse reaction to any of the dishes proffered to them; I'm sorry, but in real life, even in a 5-star restaurant, someone (probably me) is going to have the sac to tell someone that something sucks. Big time. It just happens. I know that they undoubtedly remove any negative scenes from these shows in the editing booth, but come on... just once show me that someone projectile-sprayed Emeril because he "kicked it up" one "notch" too many.]

In Tarts and Flowers, Little Audrey, at a time where television was slowly pervading most American homes, has her radio set on a cooking show. Audrey is set on making a cake according to the show's instructions and she mainly acquits herself remarkably well, though she struggles somewhat to keep up in a time-honored comic fashion. One of these time-honored gags is to correct the listener when they make a misstep, which Audrey naturally does and to which the radio announcer follows up. Another good bit occurs when the announcer tells her to "Beat it!", and Audrey sadly and sheepishly resigns herself to leave the room, but the announcer calls her back. Audrey finishes mixing the cake batter, and slides it in the oven. But because Audrey is either caught in another one of her sugar-high crashes, or is actually narcoleptic, she falls asleep in a chair by the oven.

Suddenly, the timer goes off, and Audrey awakens to find the Gingerbread Boy kicking his way out of the oven. He tells our heroine that he is off to Cakeland because he is late and he's "got a date with a cake!", and Audrey, of course, chases after him on the journey. (It is her dream, you know; what is she going to do? Stay behind?) A cloud of flour is kicked up on his escape, and Audrey follows him blindly through the haze. She finally arrives at Cakeland, entirely built and populated by desserts, where the streets have names like "Breadway"; striding out of the "Garden of Eatin'" is the Gingerbread Boy accompanied by his bride, Angel Cake, a red-haired hottie with a human body and angel wings, though draped about her lower half is a skirt-shaped piece of angelfood cake. Gingerbread Boy tells Audrey that they have to get ready for the wedding, so Audrey goes off with Ginger to prepare her. She uses powdered sugar and cherry juice to do Angel's makeup, and squeezes icing on Angel's head to do her hair for the ceremony.

Outside, the populace of Cakeland are holding a wedding parade, with cupcakes and other treats singing of the joy that will happen on this most festive day. French pastries dance a can-can, a Maurice Chevalier-type escorts two ladyfingers to the wedding, and a rumcake staggers drunkenly after them. The parade leads to the wedding chapel, and the happy bride and groom enter it on a red carpet of rolled dough. All seems to be going well...

...then Devil Food Cake pops out of his box! He interrupts the wedding with a flash of hellfire, and kidnaps poor Angel Cake! Audrey rings the alarm; the Cop Cakes run to the rescue twirling their batons; and the Gingerbread Boy runs to a box of animal crackers and rides after them atop a horse, followed by other animals. Devil drags the kicking and screaming Angel to a sugar boat awaiting them on the Old Milk Stream (after first taking the Strawberry Short Cut); Audrey takes out a hand mixer and makes the stream too thick for their vehicle to escape. The Gingerbread Boy easily defeats Devil Food Cake, and the Cop Cakes cart the villain off in the Pie Wagon. The wedding can go on as before, but Audrey wakes up in time for the real timer to go off on her oven. She opens it up to discover, in a neatly arranged row, the Gingerbread Boy and Angel Cake, with a baby version of each set in between them.

This, of course, is amazing not only because they were characters in her dream, but because Audrey simply poured a huge brick of batter into the pan before she placed it in the oven. How she managed to get not only two entirely different recipes to separate within the oven, but also to come out already decorated is a feat that would have taken Julia Child half a vineyard's worth of wine to figure out. But it brings me to something I noticed when watching this cartoon: given that the year was 1950, I find it amazing that no one picked up on the interracial marriage taking place in the dream sequence. Not just that they are two different recipes, but that they are two different colors: Gingerbread Boy, as expected, is fully brown throughout the proceedings; Angel Cake, naturally, is white with red hair. When they enter the chapel arm in arm, it is hard to miss this distinction. If this were done in a live-action film, it would have raised a tremendous controversy in 1950; apparently, their animated pastry bearding got them past the censors (although they never do kiss, which is unfortunate, they do get to have offspring by film's end). I have no way of knowing if this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but if it was, my touque's off to them. And also, my hearty congratulations to the Gingerbread Boy for scoring such a five-star dish.

Obviously, I'm going to eat angel food cake a little more sensually from here on out...

Tarts and Flowers (Famous Studios/Paramount, 1950) Dir: Bill Tytla
Cel Bloc Rating: 6

The Seapreme Court (1954)

The Seapreme Court (Paramount/Famous Studios, 1954) 
Dir: Seymour Kneitel
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Apparently, Little Audrey finds fishing as snooze-inducing as I do, though she is actively engaged in pursuing the, ah, craft. What I don't find snooze-inducing is this sweet little revenge story called The Seapreme Court, a Famous Studios cartoon from 1954, where the denizens of the deep attempt to exact thousands of years of bad human behavior on the person of one little girl. This actually isn't a bad idea: it would be like punishing George W. Bush for over a hundred years of non-stop oil company corruption by making him read a book without pictures in it. (It should be very easily proven that the only thing that he can read with over two syllables in it is his middle initial.)

Little Audrey has nodded off beneath a tree on the shore of some form of body of water (more on that later), when she is awakened by a tug on the line she has resting in that water. She is thrilled, but her excitement wanes when she realizes she has only pulled up an old boot with a score of tiny fishes in it. She casts her line back in, and settles against the tree again, swiftly descending back into a deep slumber. She again gets a tug, and wakes up, shouting, "Oh, boy! It's a big one!" (I, myself, have woken up that way on numerous occasions, but the wife couldn’t care less what I have.)

The "Big One" pulls her under the waves and deep down into the murky depths. There is a cry for help, and a passing sawfish cuts the line between her and the pulling fish. Well, we couldn't see Audrey's mouth, but the fish pulling her down into the deep clearly mouths the repeated "Help!" over and over again, but the childlike voice that emits from the creature is eerily reminiscent of Audrey's. So, just who is the sawfish saving?

As it turns out -- it's certainly not Audrey! She is, however, the center of attention here at the bottom of whatever body of water this happens to be. Surrounded by a host of fish, one of them yells out, "There's one of those humans now!" and another fish shouts, "Yay! We finally got one!" Audrey is arrested by one of the "carps on this beat,” with a pair of crab handcuffs placed on her wrists for good measure. Audrey protests, but there is nothing that can be done; she is brought to the Seapreme Court where she is to be put on trial for the whole of all humanity's crimes against fish-kind. The judge bangs his gavel and calls the court to order...

"The Seapreme Court is now in session,
and the trial is about to begin.
The plaintiff is the fish,
the defendant is the human.
Officer Finn, bring the jury in!"

Officer Finn (the bailiff) turns the key on a can of sardines, releasing a dozen of the smelly delights. The canned jury swear themselves in...

"We're the sardine jury both tried and true!
An "oily" verdict we promise you!"

The judge fish jumps right into the trial...

"The first witness from Fish-Land,
Willie Winkfish take the stand!"

A shy fish dressed as a schoolboy (with a voice somewhat reminiscent of Kay Kyser's original recording of Three Little Fishies) tells his tale of being lured to his near capture on a hook under false pretenses...

"While swimming on my way to school,
down where the ocean is sandy,
I nearly swallowed this fishhook,
whichI thought was peppermint candy."

Audrey yells out, "Ah, that's a fish story!" But the judge doesn't care...

"Order in the court!
Order in the court!
Let there be no interfering!
Mr. Sailfish, take the stand!
Let's continue with this hearing!"

One of the sardine jurors holds a shell up to his unseen ear in order to hear the judge better. Mr. Sailfish, who has an Irish accent, tells his tale of woe...

"I was sailin' nonchalantly,
never dreaming of attack,
when before you could say O'Houlihan,
I was mounted on a plaque!"

The camera pulls back from Mr. Sailfish's head to reveal his entire body mounted exactly as described, with the plaque held up by a stool next to the stand. Little Audrey protests, "I didn't do it! I didn't!" and she stomps down hard on one of the octopus' limbs. The octopus hops around holding his appendage, and the judge calls for order.

"Quiet! Quiet!
Let order prevail!
Call in the next witness
to unveil his tale!"

A large whale now sits on the stand, his face sullen as he towers over the jury.

"It was cold December day,
and I was below the ocean's swirls,
when I was netted by a whaling tug,
and drained of my winter oil!"

It's a much nicer account than what actually happens when oil is taken from a cetacean, but to prove his story, the whale pulls a dipstick out of his blowhole to show that his oil reads "empty". Little Audrey uses the octopus' limbs to slingshot her way up to the judge's stand, and pleads, "Judge! That's a whale of a tale!" The octopus pulls her away, and the judge continues...

"Order in the court!
Now let's examine
the testimony of
the Widow Salmon!"

A salmon wearing a bonnet and pushing a baby carriage rolls up to the stand. There is a tear in her eye as she reveals a goldfish bowl underneath a blanket with about forty small salmon fry swimming about in it.

"My children and I were once happy,
and life altogether was grand.
But now I'm a poor lonely widow.
You see, judge, my husband was canned!"

She holds up the can as evidence, and the sardine jurors (themselves working out of a can) start crying and dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs. The judge closes the testimony (without allowing Audrey a defense, mind you -- are there such things as kangaroo fish? Because it seems this is that sort of court)...

"There you are, sardines of the jury!
The evidence is crystal clear.
Make haste in reaching your verdict;
it's late, and my suppertime's here!"

The jury is rolled up back into their can while they deliberate; this takes them exactly 1.23 seconds. It unrolls again and the unsurprising verdict of "We find the human... GUILTY!" is shouted by all twelve of them. The judge turns to Audrey to lay down her sentence for the crimes of humanity...

"The Fish-Land trial is over.
It was just and fair.
And now here is your sentence...
a seat in the EEL-LECTRIC CHAIR!!!"

The camera pans to the left to show eight electric eels formed into the shape of a normal chair, only with the adding threat of their natural body impulses. They light up briefly a few times to show what is in store for Little Audrey, who screams and fights with the octopus to escape. She ties all eight of his limbs together and makes a break for it, running out of the court and onto the ocean floor. Every type of sea creature in the audience swims after her in hot pursuit.

A cry of "Calling All Carps" goes out, and mountie carps head out after her riding atop of seahorses. Audrey runs into the open mouth of the whale, who happily swallows her, but she climbs up and out of his blowhole. A giant clam swallows her next when the whale's tail flicks her into it, but she tickles the clam's mouth open with a feather, sending the huge mollusk into hysterics. She is next cornered by a swordfish who engages her in a fierce duel, but as Audrey is armed only with a piece of wood from a wrecked ship, the battle is easily won by the fish, but Audrey tricks the swordfish into catching his snout in the side of a shipwreck, and she escapes once again.

Finally, other swordfish build a cage around her by sticking their weaponry in the sand and she is brought back to the court. Placed into the Eel-Lectric Chair, it begins to surge... and suddenly Little Audrey wakes up safe and sound on the shore of the water. She then notices a tug on her line, and a small cute fish leaps from the water. Feeling bad about her careless fishing ways, she frees the creature and puts it back into the water, swearing off fishing. At the last second, the fish hops back out and pins a medal on Audrey. It reads "OfFISHial Pardon", and the fish kisses Audrey on the cheek and heads back home.

The Seapreme Court is simple but clever, with the underwater scenes almost entirely done in a rhyming verse. Audrey does apparently have some confusion about the status of whales as fish (though whales have just as much to complain about humans as fish do, maybe more); I'm longing to see an episode where she fell asleep in a biology class while she should have been learning about taxonomy. (I'd like to see the ghost of Linnaeus pursuing the girl through Science Fair Land while singing a swing tune called "You Gots to Learn Yo' Orders or Else!") Also, for a stubbornly rambunctious girl who doesn't think twice when doing anything in her waking life, she certainly has a head full of guilt; this guilty conscience apparently delights in torturing her nearly to death in dream after dream in this series.

As for that body of water, she is clearly fishing by a lake, but nearly every creature in her dream is specifically an ocean-going animal (included a pair of sharks, who only get in on the final chase action, but sadly, only peripherally). I'm sure, like most kids, Little Audrey makes very little distinction made between the animals in freshwater and the animals in saltwater. Hell, we have a world that is convinced that penguins live at the North Pole with polar bears, and that the whole lot share Coca-Colas with each other. Even as an adult, though I fully knew better, I have always, when in lakes, with a large amount of respect for the sharks that must surely inhabit their waters. (I also knew too well of the isolated incidents where sharks actually were in lakes, and had attacked people, such as in Nicaragua.) I knew that I was completely safe, at least from killer sharks, but it was still scary and fun to imagine.

Of course, there are still all of those lake monsters to worry about. Growing up in Alaska, where rumors have always abounded about the creatures living in certain remote lakes such as Iliamna, that was always a very real concern. And don't even get me started on Sasquatch...

RTJ

*****

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

GOOFY GOOFY GANDER (1950)

A slight comedown in one of the better Famous Studios series, Goofy Goofy Gander, from 1950, has our dreamscaping heroine Little Audrey crashing in the middle of her English class when she is supposed to be memorizing her Mother Goose rhymes. When Audrey finally has her expected dream in this cartoon, she only really gets one thing right: she inserts into Mother Goose's place the hot mama of a teacher that had been previously scolding her in class.

While the rest of the class works hard on their Mother Goose primers, Audrey has a Dick Tracy-style crime comic called "Phony Funnies" hidden in the pages of her book. The comic stars a pair of tough-guy criminals called Pinhead, due to his incredibly thin head, and Birdbrain, who literally has a hold in his head in which lives a small talking bird. Audrey is so caught up in the action, that when her teacher asks her to recite, Audrey lashes out at her with, "I ain't talkin'! I ain't no stool pigeon, see!" Audrey is rightly banished to the corner, forced to wear the duncecap, and asked to concentrate on her memorization. Audrey is so stubborn that she grumbles herself to sleep; when she does, Mother Goose flies off of the cover, in the form of her teacher, and scoops up Audrey to take her to Mother Goose Land.

The teacher is hipper than she seems, and proves this to Audrey by saying:

We sing! We jive!
We're quite alive!
What you will see will open your eyes!

OK, so it's not the hippest dialogue, but -- well, she's hot, so cut her some slack. She then recites a new hepcat version of "Little Boy Blue", and shows Audrey that Blue plays jazz trumpet at the Club Haystack, where the cows and sheep, full of the corn and the meadow they have been feasting on, join the Little Boy in swingin' the night away! She then tells a rewritten version of Mary and her Little Lamb, only this time Mary is even more smokin' hot than even the teacher, and the Lamb is an well-off elderly gentlemen ("His hair was white as snow"), and "everywhere that Mary went", which in this case includes a jewelry store, "She fleeced him for his dough." Audrey giggles a little too knowingly for a girl so tender in age. Little Tommy Tucker is played by, of course, an incredibly skinny Frank Sinatra, singing for his supper; both teacher and Audrey faint dead away on top of the flying goose.

Meanwhile, because it is an Audrey dream, peril awaits; this time, it is in the form of Pinhead and Birdbrain, loosed from Audrey's comic and ready to turn the pleasantness to instant nightmare. They mug a piglet for a single penny, and when they discover a sideshow displaying The Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs, Pinhead imagines an egg slicer turning the eggs into a pile of gold coins in his hand. They stage a stick-up, and Audrey screams at them that they "don't belong in here!" They swipe the goose and make their escape. Audrey chases after them, but the duo crash through a wall, on top of which was perched, as expected, Humpty Dumpty, who crashes to the ground. What is not expected is that Humpty is played as Edward G. Robinson, who says he is "Hard-berled, and hard to crack up!" Assuredly, he has been unharmed by the incident. The Old Woman in the Shoe and other nursery rhyme residents join in the chase, but it is Audrey, atop the goose, who brings down the evildoers. When they fire their pistols at her, she bravely turns their bullets back at them through Little Boy Blue's horn. She arrests them, and tries to drag them off to jail. Of course, this is the point where Audrey wakes up, and she is being laughed at by the class because she is wrestling the stool that she was asleep on. Audrey tells the teacher that she is now hep to Mother Goose's jive, and then the little bird from Birdbrain's skull appears on top of Audrey's hair and announces that he's hep, too!

What Audrey gets wrong when she has these dreams is the material; I have rarely, if ever, had a dream involving the surroundings that I have fallen asleep in, let alone about a subject that I was learning. Not once in Social Studies did I dream about the Emancipation Proclamation; never in Algebra did I crash and dream restfully about the quadratic equation. What Audrey gets right in this dream is the inclusion of her teacher. Not that I ever, like the other dreams, had a dream about a teacher when falling asleep in class, but I never had a teacher that looked like Audrey's teacher. And let me tell you -- If I had gone to her class and then dreamt of her in the middle of English studies, I would have had to stay after class to clean more than just the erasers.

Goofy Goofy Gander (Famous Studios/Paramount, 1950) Dir: Bill Tytla
Cel Bloc Rating: 5

THE LOST DREAM (1949)

Little Audrey finds herself in yet another dream-wrought pickle, and this time it's all because of that nasty ol' moonlight! At least, that is what Petunia, as Audrey's always watchful housekeeper is called in The Lost Dream, the fourth film of Audrey's then burgeoning theatrical career, thinks is the problem. Released as a Noveltoon in 1949, the series still displayed the stereotypical black maid in much the manner of a Hattie McDaniel, all kerchief, heft and sass. Unfortunately, it also means a rendering of unnaturally large lips for the woman, and there is a minor effort to portray the character as not being learned in any respect. (I have yet to determine the point in time where such portrayals disappeared from the cartoon world, and I suspect it was a little while later than they did from film in general.) Petunia catches Audrey reading by the light of the moon, when she should already be asleep, and Petunia asks the stubborn girl, "Is you readin' by dat moonlight ag'in?"

Audrey relents and settles down to sleep, and immediately falls into dreams of a magical Candyland, where she chops down candy canes in a forest, drinks from a pool of soda with a giant straw as she sits in a rowboat, and dimes and nickels rain from the skies so she can buy more candy. However, as she sleeps, a magical being climbs out of her dreams and floats sadly by the window, watching as a flying masted ship sails off into the skies. Audrey is shown climbing ghostly out of her own sleeping body, and then she floats over to the dream boy. He explains that because she took so long to go to sleep, he was late, and now he has missed the last boat to Dreamland. Audrey says she will help him, and together they walk to the clouds on a shaft of midnight moonlight.

The Lost Dream explains to Audrey that he has to report in to the Sandman, who rules all of Dreamland. On the way to his castle, they watch workers scrape the stardust off of tarnished stars, and tailors sewing silver linings into dark little clouds. Meeting the avuncular Sandman (who speaks with a voice, purposefully or not, eerily reminiscent of Frank Morgan, the man who played "The Wizard of Oz"), they are told that it is OK if the Lost Dream shows his dreamgirl about the kingdom, but is severely warned to stay away from "The Black Door". You can bet every dime that you have that any time there is something that shouldn't be touched or opened in a movie, it's going to get touched or opened. You can double that money in an Audrey film; she's practically opened it before the movie has begun.

The next section of the film is basically built like this: a couple of dream gags are shown, then the Lost Dream discovers Little Audrey trying to wrest open "The Black Door". This happens three times in succession before the obvious result of the door opening occurs. But some of the gags on the way are fun; apart from some obvious bits on pipe dreams, catnaps, and faded dreams, there are a couple of doozies. The first happens when they visit the Broken Dreams Department: a cloud poofs out and shows the image of a college lad getting his diploma, walking into a job interview proudly with the paper in hand, and then walking out the other side of the building clad in a janitorial uniform and pushing a streetsweeper. Sort of sums up our crappy society, doesn't it, folks? And an unexpectedly dark turn for a Famous Studios cartoon (apart from that fox-killing Casper cartoon). There is a combination gag when the Lost Dream and Audrey visit the dual Departments of Little Girls' Dreams and Little Boys' Dreams: the Girl Dream consists of a young girl emerging from a backstage door all-dolled up like a movie starlet (the little girl in the dream looks like she could actually be a slightly more glamorous Audrey), and making all of the waiting boys outside of the door faint from her presence; the Boy Dream is, shockingly but not surprisingly, that of a little red schoolhouse burning to the ground! Boy... won't see that in a modern cartoon...

Of course, eventually that ol' Black Door has got to be opened, and when Audrey finally gets it there, the Lost Dream tries to push it closed, but a giant hoofed foot blocks its closure. Then a devilish head pops out, followed by two others of slightly less traditionally demonic appearance, and the three heads begin to sing to Audrey this song:

Oooohhh, what you did when you did what you did!
You were bad and you'll get what's yours!
You're gonna be the most sorriest kid!
After this, you'll do the things that you should!

You can only blame yourself
when everything goes wrong!
Now, you know you shouldn't go
where little girls don't belong!
You shouldn't have opened that door
though temptation was so strong!
Ooooooh, what you did when you did what you did!

As they sing this to her (in what are probably the same voices that sang the song in the previous candy addiction episode, Butterscotch and Soda), they breathe fire at Audrey's little pantied bottom; she jumps from black cloud to black cloud until they turn into giant black demons that try to snatch her out of the air; she lands on what must be a quarter-mile long tongue attached to a gargantuan green dragon; and finally runs through a ceaseless series of red swinging doors until she ends up being trapped in a black cloud by the three demons. They wrap her in their hands... and she wakes up kicking and screaming in her own bed. She doesn't hesitate to board up every inch of her window to keep out the moonlight, swearing the celestial stuff off for good, and then when a ray of it sneaks through a crack in the boards, she uses a slingshot to pop it closed, and closes the cartoon giggling.

Like the previous Audrey cartoon, this is fun, but without the psychological terrain-scraping addiction terror through which Audrey had to fight. The backgrounds are always strong in this series, and the individual characters are finely etched; however, there is already a desire to remake completely what went so right that first time. Even the fun swing tune seems too much of a repeat. But some of the imagery, and the overall quality of the effort make it worthwhile for viewing. Just don't show it to any pyromaniacal boys or college lads on the lookout for gainful employment...

Or, maybe we should...

The Lost Dream (Famous Studios/Paramount, 1949) Dir: Bill Tytla
Cel Bloc Rating: 6