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.]

Countdown to Halloween: Balloon Land (1935)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"WWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere in Dreamland (1936)

Somewhere in Dreamland (A Max Fleischer Color Classic, 1936) 
Dir.: Dave Fleischer
Animators: Roland Crandall; Seymour Kneitel
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Just how cute is too cute? Just how schmaltzy is too schmaltzy? These questions were apparently never considered when Fleischer Studios were cobbling together their ode to Depression-era depression, Somewhere In Dreamland in 1936. 

Rife with enough opening sadness to make you slit your wrists about four minutes into it, Dreamland features two cutesy-wootsy, hardscrabble waifs (with piercingly eerie beads for black eyes) who fall into a slumber and encounter a magical land far removed from the harsh realm in which they barely get by with their doting but worried mother. How hardscrabble are they? The boy walks around the snowy streets of their burg completely barefoot (and never seems to notice it), and when they go to bed at night, the blankets that they pull up in a meticulously neat fashion are moth-eaten collections of wayward strings, with all of the inner panels long eaten away.

The boy and girl drag a cart through the streets of the town collecting stray pieces of wood (presumably for their stove), and as they make their pathetic way, they attract the notice of first a toymaker, then a grocer, and finally, a baker. When the kids reach the bakery, the boy and girl stare with drooling mouths into the window at a massive collection of cupcakes, muffins and other baked deliciousness, but reality smacks the kids across their brains when they realize that their dreaming is all for naught.

Meanwhile, the baker has run inside his shop to prepare a gentle surprise for the children: two gorgeous looking cupcakes, but the children have disappeared long before the baker steps back out of his shop, having gone around the corner with their cart to return home. The three men confer on the matter, and one of them claims to know where the children live. If you are thinking an evil cabal that plans to cook the children in a pie, then you are in the wrong cartoon.

Meanwhile, the kids greet their mother at home, and their home is the very definition of the word "ramshackle". (Cinematically, possibly the only place more sorry-looking could be Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard's "home" in Modern Times, but that home has Paulette living in it, so how sorry-looking could it actually be?) Their mother, who looks like a far more sedate and prematurely aged Olive Oyl, does her best to feed her children what little food she can proffer: 2 mugs of hot milk and a small loaf of bread that is as hard as granite. The mother has to use all her strength to snap the bread in twain.

The girl solves this problem by smartly dunking her bread in her milk, and the boy follows suit; he complicates matters when he declares, "But I'm still hungry, mama!" The woman begins to weep openly, and the boy manages to console her by saying, "Ah, that's alright! I was only foolin'!" Mom kisses the kids off to bed, and after they change into their nightgowns and pull up those tattered blankets I mentioned previously, the little boy starts to sing the title song in an almost possessed manner with incredibly broad, descriptive hand motions:

"I'll see you somewhere in dreamland
Somewhere in dreamland tonight!
Over a bridge made of moonbeams
We'll find our clouds are silver-lined!"

The little girl takes over the second verse, and her brother rejoins her on the closing line:

"Each little star is a castle
Shining a welcome so bright!
Dreams will come true
For me and you
Somewhere in dreamland tonight!"

Once the kids fall asleep, their blankets dissipate, and their dream-selves float up and away to the pillowed gates of the land of their impoverishment-influenced dreams. When they arrive, and as the title song is now repeated by first female and then male voices, the kids immediately run to a tree on which they find new clothes to replace their tattered nightgowns. The kids change behind two giant hatboxes, and then skip along the cookie-laden pathways to a field full of lilies, underneath which grow magical ice cream cones. The kids pick the flavors they like best, and one of the lilies tips over to pour chocolate or butterscotch sauce over the frozen treasure.

Licking their dream-cones happily, the kids skip joyously past giant cakes, cookies, and other treats, and then pass a sign proclaiming a "Syrup River" as they come to an arch made of ribbon candy. One of the kids says, "Ain't we got fun?" as they climb aboard the animal cracker horses that surround a chocolate merry-go-round. As the kids twirl about, instead of grabbing the traditional golden ring, they grab a doughnut. While the sister only takes one, the brother grabs a handful of them in a flurry of greediness!

They run off munching and stuffing their faces, but the next sight makes them drop their sugary booty in awe: a popcorn field, where the cornstalks shoot the corn high into the air until it comes down like rain, and buttercups are employed as reservoirs of golden butter into which each popped kernel is dipped. After feasting to their hearts’ content, the kids skip along past a great number of toys, and they each pick out their favorite items with which to play. Their arms loaded with swag, they finally chance upon a tree with pillows hanging from its branches, and a pair of beds so comfortable-looking, the kids can't help themselves but to bounce high upon the mattresses. They eventually fall back to sleep, and then they are awakened by their mother come the morning.

The kids get out of bed, and at first, are disappointed when it turns out their dual dream was just that: a dream. But from their beds, they can see the kitchen table, and after rubbing their eyes, they find that their dismal abode (apart from their bedrooms) has been transformed overnight into a cornucopia of food and toys. A large turkey rests upon the table, streamers hang from the ceiling, and there are dolls, airplanes, hobby horses, and other toys scattered all around the room. "For us?", the kids twice ask the three kind merchants, who were hiding on the other side of the wall. "For you!", they twice concur. The kids dive right into plates of delicious ice cream, but then the boy pokes himself in the butt with his fork to make sure it is all not still a dream. He is delighted to find out that he feels a sharp pain, and the kids squeal with delight as they continue to gorge themselves on cupcakes and ice cream. Dissolve to the Paramount logo to end the cartoon.

The Fleischer Brothers briefly tuck the three-dimensional tricks into their backpocket for the first half of this one, with the opening four minutes pretty much portrayed in straight 2D animation, perhaps to add more grimness and focus to the despair of the children's world, meant to reflect reality (though it is still far from it). But, once the kids are floating into their fantasies, the guys snap the special effects hankie back at the film, sharply delineating their sugary dreamland with idealized versions of all manner of desserts, fairy castles, amusement rides, and toys. Especially memorable is the conjunction of ultra-dimensional animation in the chocolate cake merry-go-round scene, certainly the most remarkable bit of animation in the film. It is telling of the film that there is not enough of this world, such is the saccharine success of the vision, and like the kids in the film, we are left wanting more.

I know that the movies were a major source of psychological relief during the Great Depression, and many of them were apt to show such conditions, and then have the characters reach some sort of turning point by which their lives would become better; this film certainly offers no divergence from this “moxie buildin’” mold. Films featuring grand acts of paternalistic altruism by those better off, such as the empathetic shop owners in this film, may have been produced in that age, but just as likely were films showing far more successful businessmen as cruel and selfish individuals. But none of that in the Color Classics series. As sad as the Fleischers want to make you feel, they also have a need to leave the audience cheerful by film's end. So, no matter the amount of pathos ladled on like so much gravy, the audience is still going to come out with a warm feeling in their stomach... and only the slightest case of heartburn.

Just like the kids in this film, we all gotta dream, and no matter the candy-coated fantasia that we travel to in our sleep, sometimes when we wake up, the world actually is just a little bit better than before.

You'd better poke yourself with that fork, kiddo, because obviously, you are still somewhere in dreamland...

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This article was updated with new photos and edited on 12/12/2015.]