MAMA'S NEW HAT (1939)

How to please Der Mama on Mother's Day? Perhaps purchasing her a swell new hat will be just the right amount of suck-up needed to win her favor. This is what Hans und Fritz reason at the beginning of Mama's New Hat, the 15th and last of MGM's The Captain and the Kids series, which ended unceremoniously and abruptly in the spring of 1939, apparently due to both growing unease at home over pop cultural portrayals of the suddenly evil-seeming Germans, and also with the studio's dissatisfaction with the series' performance as a whole. Whatever the reason, the series certainly went out with a muted bang, as there is great style and animated complexity, but only marginal humor, to the family's final cinematic adventure.

The boys purchase a fine hat for Der Mama, but after tripping over a brick, they find themselves kneeling in a puddle of mud. And Der Mama's fine new chapeau? Coated in muck. A laughing horse nearby, proudly sporting a neat hat of its own, catches the boys' attention with its mocking guffaw, and they devise a plan to steal the horse's hat to replace Der Mama's ruined one. Switching the hats without the nag noticing right away, they abscond with the replacement, but the horse gives furious chase to the lads. The horse swiftly loses the trail and tries to pick up their scent by sniffing about the street.

Meanwhile, Hans und Fritz have made it back home to present the hat to their loving Mama. She bestows kisses upon the heads of her "little angels"; to accomplish this, she has to the halos that have magically appeared over their noggins when she pronounced them as such. She tries the hat on in the mirror, and her reflection bounces back to her with an image of Greta Garbo, slim and svelte in a way in which Der Mama was probably never close but in her fantasies. The happy Mama takes to the streets to strut about and show off her present. Unfortunately, she almost immediately catches the angry eye of the burglarized horse, who makes several chomps and stabs at stealing its own hat back, but Mama is too quick and makes it back to the house with the horse fast at her heels. The horse barges through the door after her, but runs through the entire house, the camera following the unseen from the outside of the abode, until the horse crashes through an upstairs window, lands on the roof opposite the house, slides down the shingles towards the ground below, and ends up sprawled in Der Mama's basement.

The horse begans to stalk through the house searching for Der Mama, and when it finds her, it again begins to chase her. They run in circles in and out of two doors, but through the door in the middle come Hans und Fritz. They trip the horse and drag it into their room, leaving Der Mama to continue running in circles on her own. The boys are wearing fake mustaches, speak with outrageous French accents and pretend to run a millinery. The horse not only buys the act, trying on an endless variety of caps and headgear (including a football helmet), but it also walks out of the place wearing heels, a girdle, stockings, feather boa and thickly applied lipstick. The horse trips and falls into the bathtub where Der Captain is happily scrubbing himself. The horse bolts from the bathroom and falls back into step with Der Mama who is still running in circles. It snatches the hat from her head and tries to escape through the laundry chute, but ends up in a heap in the basement. Through the circumstances of its crash, the horse ends up with first glue on its rear, then a fan glued to its rear, then getting an electrical shock which starts the fan turning furiously and sends the horse flying back up through the laundry chute, stuck in a sideboard and taking to the air like an airplane. The horse-plane scoops up the entire family in succession, and flies out the window, its continued flight pulling all of the wiring out of the house, and eventually pulling the wiring off of the power poles and finally destroying the electrical plant on the other side of town. The horse and family end up wrapped up in the clotheslines, where a final charge of power get the fan spinning again, and the whole thing turns into a carousel. The Captain and the Kids ride out their theatrical career in fun but only mildly electric fashion.

After watching and reviewing three straight cartoons with Der Mama, I feel that I began this turn with somewhat hostile opinions regarding the lady. (I even went so far as to call her a harridan two days ago.) While her reputation as a loving mother I never questioned, her behavior towards the buffoonish and relatively harmless antics of her lover Der Captain always struck me as overly harsh, but I now feel that I have behaved the same way towards her. As I have stated before, I have read precious few of the daily installments of either The Katzenjammer Kids or The Captain and the Kids, but the image that I took away of her is of a frying-pan wielding, drawerful-of-silverware throwing shrieking harpy (though with a much lower tone of voice) who keeps Der Captain, lazy good-for-nothing slouch that he is, in a constant state of fear over her possible swift reprisal of household warfare.

No doubt my image of Der Mama has also been piled on and fueled by countless other images of distaff cartoon harbingers of domestic doom such as Maggie (Maggie & Jiggs) or Flo (Andy Capp), to name but two, and even have probably fused some of both the fussbudget Lucy Van Pelt (Peanuts) and the decidely non-domestic but violent The Fat Broad (B.C.) into this monstrously chauvinistic conglomeration in my media-suffused brain. Thus, when I have been confronted with cartoons of Der Mama in the past, my immediate reaction to her behavior is one of a steely disgust and loathing, even if she is doing nothing, but simply because she seems to represent unthinking and unwarranted authority, even when confronted with Der Captain's idiocy. (Der Captain is not even her husband, but whether he is actually her lover, the father of her boys, or simply a boarder in her home, I believe, has never been resolved.) Regardless of whether or not Der Captain deserves a bonk on the head, no one should have to live their life according to their fear of the wrath of another.

But, I find Der Mama that I am confronted with in the MGM cartoons to be a different breed of cat altogether; she is not so much the bullying hausfrau. I find her as being rather sweet, if not still the slightly stern authority figure that the other characters both adore and fear. There are moments when she is incongruously dainty (given her size) in her motions, and it seems that the animators were having a good deal of fun with her sections of the films. And I believe that I have been very wrong about my image of her.

At least, my image of her in the cartoons. I still don't know about Der Mama in the comics. She might hit me a rolling pin for talking bad about her behind her back.

Mama's New Hat (MGM, 1939) Dir: No director listed on credits
Cel Bloc Rating: 6

PETUNIA NATURAL PARK (1938)

Unlike the previous entries in The Captain and the Kids series at MGM, both The Captain's Christmas and Petunia Natural Park, perhaps in recognition that the clan were on vacations from their normal trappings, sawed through the shackles of the sepia-toned prison that the studio had oddly shut them up in, bursting free into brilliant Technicolor. Like the previous entries, Petunia Natural Park, about the highly dysfunctional family's foray into a slightly decrepit wilderness reserve, is funny and wholly undeserving of the horrid reputation that the studio's disappointment rained down on the heads of the characters.

The film plays much like a Tex Avery blackout film, such as he was currently specializing in with Warner Bros., and if he wasn't under contract with that studio, you would swear he was already working at his eventual home at MGM. This may be one of the films that Friz Freleng directed, but as the majority of The Captain and the Kids films possessed incomplete title cards without directors' credits, as this one does, it is hard to say who directed which film. Back on the Avery tack, the film is even endowed with a hearty-voiced narrator who bespeaks the wonders of the national park even as his words are betrayed by the actions on the screen.

The family Katzenjammer (though, legally, not by that name) takes to the open road for a well-needed vacation. With the pompous but lazy Captain at the wheel of a clearly faulty and sputtering jalopy, the family enters the gates of Petunia Natural Park, but only after the narrator's reeling off of the names of the local wildlife does not quite match what we view, with the elk actually being a cow, buffalo as pigs, and moose as hens. The family themselves are named as the common Screwballus Americanus as they sputter their motoring way across the screen. A stop at an inspection station, where the inspectors need far more inspecting than the family, leaves the car and Der Captain covered in touristy bumper stickers; a ride through a giant redwood leaves the family car high up on a branch; and a narrated tour of the geysers brings us to Ol' Dependale, who spits a neat, single drop into a nearby spittoon.

When Der Mama tries to take a picture of a grizzly, it acts shy and hides, and when Der Mama goes after it, several more grizzlies pop out and take her picture! Other bears, we are told, like to gather nuts by shaking trees; Der Captain is then shown hanging from a branch over some bears engaged in exactly such an activity, and the narrator says to him, "Hello, Nuts!" A baby bear then shakes salt on Der Captain's "fatted calf", but he panics and falls into a geyser called the "Devil's Stewpot". The devil swiftly kicks him out, and he runs over the hills with the bears at his heels, with the narrator asking them, somewhat creepily, to "save me a slice of the white meat, boys!" Der Mama takes the spotlight with a dance over her love of nature; she stops at the babbling brook to get in on the local gossip; and she finally disregards a plethora of "Don't Pick the Flowers" signs, unleashing blaring alarms, a squadron of police and even a fire engine at her indiscretion. Der Captain has a similar problem when he finally breaks down and gives an olive to a begging bear, only to discover that it is a cop in disguise and he has broken the "Do Not Feed the Animals" law. (The cop, of course, is Irish.)

A hand literally pulls down the curtain to change the scene to night. A fawn timidly wobbles to the watering hole, then whips out a jug of XXX and goes carousing into the night, whooping it up mightily! When Der Captain is annoyed by all of the night noises keeping him awake in the family's tent, he goes charging into the darkness after blasting his shotgun, and attacks the family car, beating it to pieces with the butt of the gun. Hans und Fritz are largely unseen until the end of the film, when Der Captain asks them to fetch a pail of water for the car's radiator, which has pooped out for good. The boys wink knowingly at each other, as they often do, and run to the nearest rumbling geyser, scooping up a good measure of the earthquaking water. Der Captain not only pours it into the radiator, which will eventually cause the jalopy to hop and shake every few feet, but he also drinks a healthy draft of the stuff himself. As you can imagine, this is a good way to end the picture, with Der Captain shaking furiously out of sight as the narrator tells him, "See you next year!" "Not if I see you first!", yells Der Captain.

One of the most interesting bits of the film is the opening title, where MGM replaced their standard Leo the Lion "Ars Gratia Artis" insert with a completely animated feline in the circle. It is terrifically done, and is truly striking looking, especially with the then still novel Technicolor leaping out at you. I wish that they had used this opening more throughout the years that their animated cartoons were in production, and as I am unaware of the extent that they used it, it would be a shame that you have to seek out this single cartoon to get a peek at it. Not that the cartoon is anything of which to be ashamed; it holds up marvelously, and there are far worse parks to visit than Petunia Natural Park.

Petunia Natural Park (MGM, 1938) Dir: no credit given on title cards
Cel Bloc Rating: 6

CLEANING HOUSE (1938)

The Captain...Katzenjammer... whoever Hans und Fritz belong to and whatever their surname happens to have been, and which of their oddly competing dual comic strips was the true narrative of their rowdy behavior for the bulk of the years that they ran against each other, I really don't care. I, myself, have only read a handful of strips from either The Captain and the Kids and The Katzenjammer Kids, and while I have found the strips amusing enough, I have not read enough to compare its worth against my personal favorite strips of either its era or even the modern one. [For the record, and in no particular order, the best comic strips of all time are Herriman's Krazy Kat, McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, Kelly's Pogo, Schulz's Peanuts, Segar's Thimble Theatre, Trudeau's Doonesbury, Capp's Li'l Abner, Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, and Eisner's The Spirit. There are other terrific strips out there, but for me, this is it. (All you Nancy fans out there can suck it...)]

When The Katzenjammer Kids creator Rudolph Dirks lost his strip's title to the Hearst Syndicate, his former employers, in 1914, he strangely retained the right to create a brand new strip using the exact same characters; the only thing that he lost in the court decision was the use of the title. For much of the 20th century, both strips competed against each other in different newspapers, and I, and I also gather that most people, would be hard-pressed to tell the two apart. But The Captain and the Kids, Dirks' new title, went somewhere that the Katzenjammer name did not: the movies. (Well, not counting a handful of Katzenjammer silent cartoons in the 1910's.) The Teutonic brood went Hollywood in the late 30's, as MGM signed on to create a series with the beloved characters in 1937, and the studio produced over a dozen films, sometimes with the briefly contracted Friz Freleng at the helm, until the public's taste for the German-bred characters seems to have mysteriously turned sour within a couple of years. (I wonder why?) The series was considered to be a tremendous disaster for MGM, and Hans, Fritz, Der Mama, Der Captain and Der Inspector were not seen on a screen again, albeit a much smaller one, until their regular blackout gag appearances on Archie's TV Funnies in the 1970's. (Yes, that Archie!)

The sad part is that the films aren't that bad despite their reputation as a flop enterprise; but this is America, where the capitalistic ideal generally holds sway over critical acclaim or artistic excellence (9 out of 10 peeks at a film box office chart will reveal this to be true.) So, the series was, and is, considered to be a disaster. The first film in the series is somewhat sly in its introduction of each succeeding character; it is great fun to watch the boys pick on the lazy, conniving no-good Captain; and while Der Mama is annoying in the way that usually makes me despise pushy harridans, she, and the other characters' fear and affection for her, is often the center of many of the series' plots, and the films could not do without her for a second. After all, Hans and Fritz will do almost anything to prove their love to der Mama and show up the blustery Captain. If the opening film in the series wanders a bit in its intentions is only due to there being one or two too many characters to support the plotline.

Cleaning House is the title, which opens on a jumping, musically-timed puffing house, and cleaning house is what The Captain and the Kids are doing inside of it, only not quite in the way that Der Mama wishes. Impish sycophants Hans und Fritz play tic-tic-toe on the window as they hang from the sill sitting inside one of Der Mama's girdles (or is the Captain's? Just wondering...); the instant Der Mama walks into the room they get back to doing what she expects of them: cleaning the window. She doesn't suspect a thing of the devilish little dears. She believes Der Inspector to be vacuuming earnestly, but he has actually rigged the vacuum with balloons so that it will float forward in time to his snoring, only pulling the machine backwards with a tug of his lengthy white beard. Der Captain has put a sail on his scrub brush and blows it dreamily through the suds on the floor, but Der Mama catches him and boots him in the rear, saying she is "sick and tired" of his lazy ways. The word "sick" registers an idea in Der Captain's brain, and he begins to complain of stomach pains, kicking about the floor. Der Mama is worried, but Hans und Fritz don't buy his lies for even a second, and wink at each other knowingly. Are they plotting mischief? Are they Hans und Fritz?

A housecall is dialed in for Doctor Quak; unfortunately for him, he shares an office with Doctor Stork, who is, you guessed it, actually a stork and obsessed with delivering babies (their office door reads "Cradle to the Grave"). Dr. Quak is looks and speaks like W.C. Fields, and is seen playing with a ventriloquist doll that looks like Mortimer Snerd but speaks like Charlie McCarthy. (Not coincidentally, Fields, Snerd and McCarthy, or rather, Edgar Bergen, were employed by MGM at this time.) Der Mama's head pops through the receiver of the phone she is in such a tizzy over Der Captain's health, and Dr. Quak pushes a button reading "Horse" to sound the alarm. But he can't shake Dr. Stork, clutching a doll because of his maniacal possession by our society's "baby" curse, and off the pair go together. But the boys pose as Wild West bandits with toy pistols and riding hobby horses, jumping out of the woods and holding up Dr. Quak's coach, robbing the startled M.D. of his medical hardware. The pair head back to their house and march through the door dressed as a doctor and nurse and begin to examine the protesting Captain, who is claiming already that he is feeling better (he hates doctors, you know). Unfortunately for him, the clearly baby-addled Dr. Stork has followed the boys to the house, and is buoyantly determined that someone has a baby delivered to them.

The boys delightedly torture Der Captain with an excrutiatingly thorough medical examination and then frighten the deceptive blowhard by sharpening an axe in preparation for surgery. They attack Der Captain, causing the house about the room to fall apart as if an earthquake were occuring, but it is only the boys Indian war whooping, bouncing on Der Captain's stomach, trashing the house, threatening grevious bodily harm and scaring the bejeezus out of their patient. Dr. Stork knocks on the door, Der Mama sees him... and closes the door in a panic! Der Captain escapes from the boys, but the kids chase after him throughout the house, causing more damage along the way. Soon enough, Dr. Stork knocks on the door again, and manages to switch places with Der Mama, at which points he too gives chase after Der Captain and the Kids. He finally catches up to Der Captain and hands his mistaken mother target the Snerd/McCarthy doll. The boys then reveal themselves to Der Captain, whipping off their disguises, and Der Captain yells, "Why, you little--!!!", but he is stopped short by the ominous voice of Der Mama. The final scene shows Der Mama stuffing her little angels faces with vast amounts of cake, while Der Captain simultaneously scrubs the floor, does the windows and vacuum's the trashed house.

A good deal of fun, I say, and I have seen far worse MGM cartoons (despite their general excellence). Hardly a call to circle the wagons, but I imagine the returns were not as swell as producer Fred Quimby would have liked to have seen, and once things got iffy overseas, it is not hard to see why the films were put to a halt. But I rather like the series, at least the six or seven episodes that I have seen, and I would never personally call the series a bust.

The forty acres without a mule on Der Mama, however...

Cleaning House (MGM, 1938) Dir: Robert Allen
Cel Bloc Rating: 6