The Shark Film Office Special Edition: Codfish Balls (1930)

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with another of my websites, The Shark Film Office, about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.]

Codfish Balls (1930)
Dir.: Frank Moser
TC4P Rating: 5/9
Species: cartoon sharks, a gang of them with stunted bodies and sawblade-like dorsal fins.

Sharks in the early days of animation came in a wide variety of styles. I suppose that if one were to use the argument that if there are over 500 identified species of sharks in the world, why shouldn't there be that many species too in the animated shark world, only in a more fanciful sense. I guess that I would have to somewhat agree with such a musing. Why not indeed? In cartoons, mice, ducks, and cats and all other manner of animals speak like us, drive cars, fly planes, have dogs for pets, captain boats, wear clothes, and do everything else that humans do and that other normal animal species don't, so the rules for everything in the universe have already been turned topsy-turvy just in their initial conception. If something is called a shark but really doesn't look like a shark, does it really matter at all?

In my last Cel Bloc post, I wrote about the 1930 Terrytoons short, Salt Water Taffy, where I discussed how animators in the early days of the art form seemed to care little about what form a shark took on screen as long as they got across the basic idea that it was a shark of some sort. The shark in Salt Water Taffy had a full set of jaws with big pointy teeth, but he had a rather stubby body, a dorsal fin that I noted looked more like a mogul on a junior ski hill, and had a round black nose of the sort that you would normally see on the face of one of the Beagle Boys in an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Sure, it swam through the water and tried to attack a swimmer and was done in with cannon fire from a navy ship, but the shark was also released from a leash wielded by its owner, a super-grumpy octopus who strode along the ocean floor while wearing a sailor's cap and seven shoes on its tentacles.

Codfish Balls was released by Paul Terry a few months before Salt Water Taffy in 1930, by the same director (Frank Moser), and I would presume many of the same animators, though I have been unable to find information to verify that as of yet. This film, too, incorporates sharks into its plot – many, many sharks, it turns out – but except for a couple of common superficialities early on when they first appear in this cartoon (one of which disappears almost immediately), they are of a far different stripe than the shark that menaces the heroine in Salt Water Taffy.

The original opening credits on this cartoon no longer exist for the version available online, and instead has the replacement title card that was used when it aired as part of the syndicated TV show Farmer Al Falfa and his Terrytoon Pals back in the late 1950s. The cursive-style Terrytoons logo used in that card was then quite familiar to kids who watched The Captain Kangaroo Show as well for the adventures of Tom Terrific, which aired in daily installments on that series.

Codfish Balls is a pretty straightforward seafaring adventure, albeit with an animal crew but no matter, and we are introduced immediately to what appears to be a group of swarthy looking swashbucklers right from the start, as they sit around on the deck of their ship singing a couple lines from the sea shanty standard Blow the Man Down. While the pirates sing, a beefy dog with a peg leg dances along to the tune. A billy goat wearing pants while seated on a tricycle rides circles around the cabin on the deck of the ship, and is alternately pushed and chased by a rat. The rodent annoys him greatly, but every time he turns out to scowl at the rat, the little guy pushes the back of the trike forward giving the goat another burst of speed.

When they swing wildly around the corner of the cabin, the goat and rat run right under the dancing dog with the peg leg, and he spins in the air and falls on his keister as they speed away. They make another circuit around the cabin, and run under the dog again, sending him spinning to the ground anew. Infuriated, the dog picks himself up and confronts the goat, while the rat stands safely to the side. Without actual dialogue (there is little English spoken but a couple of lines and the song already heard in the film), the dog accuses the goat and then punches him hard, making him flip in place. He punches the goat twice more, and then the goat retaliates in the classic goat style, head-butting the burly dog in the chest. The dog sinks back unconscious against the outer wall of the cabin, and the ship that is tattooed on his chest sinks beneath the waves.

But the rat is not done with the dog. The dog revives himself and find that the rat has a large basket of eggs at his side, and the little pipsqueak starts throwing them at the face of the dog. Yolk starts pouring down over the dog's head as the rat chucks a couple of AAA Large at the mutt. From around the corner, another pirate with a peg leg – a cat this time – shows up, and the rat nails the cat in the face too, and then scrambles, appropriately, straight up the ratlines to the mast above. The angry cat grimaces at the rat, and one of his teeth rolls upward in his gritted grimace so he can stick his tongue – snaked, I must stress – out through the gap. The cat shakes his meaty fist upward in the rat's direction several times, and then hops towards the ratlines, balancing precariously on the railing of the ship momentarily.

The cat climbs up fast along the ratlines, and meets the rat along the yard atop the sail, where they engage in a frenetic sword fight. The cat uses his peg leg within the fight to parry the rat’s blows on occasion, and it soon seems that the cat wears the rat down. Finally, the pirate cat lunges for the rodent but gets caught in the sail, and the rat pounces on the opportunity to spank the cat in the rear end several times. Then, for some strange reason, both combatants leap off the sail and into the ocean.

Up in the crow’s nest, we see a large whale spouting in the far distance, and a different pirate cat manning the watch blasts an alarm on a horn to alert his fellow buccaneers. “Thar she blows!” he cries, and then it suddenly seems that perhaps these aren’t actually pirates at all, but whalers of the old school instead. On the main deck, another former-pirate-now-turned-whaleman blares back on another horn, and yells back, “Who she blows!” (at least, that is what it sounds like to me… you check it out; the soundtrack is very old, garbled, and loaded with distortion).

Out on the sea, the cat and the rat, who had previously been feuding on top of the sails, are now in a rowboat being paddled by the much smaller rat. The cat, who by his actions and authority is clearly the captain of the ship, though he doesn’t seem much different than the others aboard, bonks the rat in the head with every stroke as they row towards the whale. When they reach the mighty leviathan,  the cat captain cruelly places the rat onto a hook on the end of a fishing pole and angles it towards the whale. Since fishing for a whale with a pole and bait is clearly not normal operating procedure for whalers, this now makes me doubt my previous position where I changed my initial impulse proclaiming them to be pirates to one where they were whalers. Now this just makes these morons look like opportunists, and that takes them squarely back to just being pirates again. (Man, I have ever been watching too much of Cooks vs. Cons…)

The rat is not happy with this arrangement and squeaks angrily at this treatment as he dangles in front of the whale, who just sits in the water smiling away, seemingly without a care for what is happening. The cat, for his part, delights in dipping the rat into the water, and laughing merrily. But when the whale finally does open its mouth, it not only swallows the rat, but also the pole, the cat, and the entire rowboat, with a huge hungry scowl as its massive sharp, pointed teeth close down around everything in a single bite. We see a closeup of the whale thoughtfully and carefully munching its dinner, but suddenly a hatch opens up on the whale’s head!

The rat and the cat climb out swiftly, and then the pirate captain cat smacks the whale on the noggin with an oar. Dazing the whale, they leap into the water, but the whale gives chase through the waves. When the rat dares to swim in front of the cat, the feline reaches out and picks up the theme from when they first approached the whale, conking the rodent on the head to take the lead. The rat moves forward again, and the cat picks the rodent up bodily and places him behind once more. Regardless, the rat still manages to reach the ship first and climbs up a ladder. When the cat gets there, the whale grabs his tail and tugs on it painfully, but the cat gets free and climbs to safety as well.

When the cat reaches the rat again, he slaps the rodent in the face. The pirate then ties a blindfold over the rat’s eyes, pulls a knife, and pushes him towards the plank to walk to his death. They both stride out onto the plank – to the then quite familiar strains of the Civil War standard Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! playing on the score – and march all the way to the end of it, but as the rat has the excuse of still walking about blindly, we bear witness to a classic cartoon gag (you may recall Bugs Bunny pulling off a similar trick against Yosemite Sam in High Diving Hare, for example), as the rat continues apace and flips to the underside of the plank, walking normally as if there has been no change in his orientation, and marches straight back into the ship to the astonishment of the pirate cat.

With the rat safe inside again, isn’t it time some sharks got into the action, folks? Or, maybe if not sharks, how about something that – kind of, sort of – represents sharks even if they really do not look all that much like sharks? Sharks waiting for a buccaneer victim to walk the plank to gather an easy meal is a standard image of much adventure and pulp fiction. Sure as you can bet, just below the plank, we hear the ominous but familiar refrain of Mysterious Mose on the soundtrack as we see the snapping jaws of numerous hungry sharks in the water, waiting for a tasty rat meal. However, some of the sharks can’t wait that long to get a pirate snack. Several of them use a ladder to climb through a porthole inside, and then march through the bowels of the ship towards the deck to seek out their prey.

On the deck, the pirate-turned-whaler-turned-pirate-again cat captain has tied his would-be rat victim to the mast and is delighting in torturing him. Fate is clearly against him, though, as the thug turns around to see the big toothy grimace of one of the sharks, who really look more like rather stunted, sharp-toothed fish with sawblade-style fins on their backs than they do sharks, but it is clear their purpose here is in the role of a shark. In the part of the film that made me laugh out loud, the tough captain cat cries out in a rather high, girlish alarm of surprise, “ME-OW!” and runs away in fear, with the rat running away after him. They run around the cabin, and the sharks – varying between a dozen to upwards of eighteen in count – give chase in formation, three to a row.

When the sharks start to come out one by one through a porthole in the cabin, the mouse stands on top of the cabin with a board and smacks each one hard in the head in sequence. The sharks fall to the deck in a big pile as the rest pour throw the porthole and get smacked in turn. Somehow, the cat captain has ended up in the rear of the line and comes out to get smacked as well. The cat turns to look up at the rat atop the cabin, who by now has several sharks sneaking up on him from behind. Thinking quickly, the rat leaps onto the rigging and a dozen of the fish give chase after him up to the crow’s nest, where the rat hides on the other side of it and somehow traps all of them inside by closing the lid, basically canning all of the fish. (The crow's nest has a lid? Oh, cartoons...)


The rat leaps up and down in joy at the capture, but the pirates are still mad at the rat. The captain uses his pegleg to fire a cannonball at the rat (that’s a nice hidden weapon to have), and then calls over another pirate – a double amputee on crutches – and orders him to fire two cannonballs at him at the same time with both peg legs. (A doubly nice weapon to have in reserve…) The two pirates continue to fire wildly at the rat, who dances about merrily, easily avoiding their missiles. However, one of the balls finally hits the crow’s nest, which causes the bottom to burst open. The sharks all fall out from it into a giant pile right on top of the captain on the deck. The captain crawls out and shakes his fist in rage at the rat, who leaps down and lands hard on the captain cat’s head, and then both of them leap into the ocean. The sharks revive themselves and leap after the cat and rat, chasing them both off into the horizon. Iris out.

In Codfish Balls, we have a decently paced cartoon with plenty of action though little sense, but certainly with more of a through-line than Salt Water Taffy did. I joked about the pirates not seeming like pirates all the time, and that may be true, but who or what they are in an occupational sense is also not really all that important to the film. What matters is that a bunch of sailors are at sea on a tall ship, there are antics built first around the crew fighting amongst themselves, then their attack upon a whale, and then dealing with a concentrated attack by sharks.

Perhaps identity is an unintentional hidden theme behind this film. We have the pirates who may or may not be whalers, and then we also have the issue of the rat, who basically serves as the hero, even though he is kind of asking for a lot of what happens to him. I have decided to call him a rat in this description of the film's plot, but he might be a mouse. I mentioned how in Salt Water Taffy, the playful mice in that film, who sang and danced and swam about, were had unusually tall limbs for mice. I had mused on the notion that perhaps the length of their limbs had something to do with not wishing to be sued by Walt Disney for copyright infringement, though it was merely idle speculation on my part. I have no proof of this, any more than I have proof that the rodent in Codfish Balls is either a rat or a mouse. He could be a mouse; his facial design is exactly that of what I called mice in Salt Water Taffy, but he has much shorter limbs. The longer limbs on the other "mice" would actually lead me to believe that they were actually the rats, since rats are most often much bigger than mere mice.

But there is one true reason that I decided to go with the "rat" nomination for the rodent in Codfish Balls: the general identification with rats being at large on sailing ships. When I used the term "ratlines" earlier, it was to stress this link, as I called it out at that moment. While Mickey Mouse certainly had nautical adventures in his career, the difference between him and the rodent in this film is that Mickey is a fully developed and known character going into the story; he can be a mouse on a sailing ship because we understand going in that not only is he a mouse, but that he is an extraordinary mouse. This rat character has no given name within the film, nor do any of the characters, and we only know of him what we are shown from his first appearance within the film to his last. In Salt Water Taffy, given that the rodents were meant to be cuter and more readily identifiable as human in their clothes occupations, and language, I was more accepting of them as mice; here, though he is sympathetic and we root for him against the bullying cat, because of the setting and his scurrying actions aboard the ship, I only see him as a rat.

Getting back to my main purpose here, the sharks also seem to have an I.D. problem in this film. While they are drastically different from the shark in Salt Water Taffy, and even though (as I said before) this film predates that one by several months, there is a matching trait between them: a button nose. When the sharks are first seen in the water in Codfish Balls, snapping their jaws upward at the plank in anticipation of a rat dinner, they have a black button nose at the tip of their snout, just like the dog, cat, and rat have in this film, and just like the shark has in Salt Water Taffy. The difference here, though, is that those black noses completely disappear by the time the sharks decide to climb up the ladder and march into the ship. It has to be a mistake, and it may go totally unnoticed by someone – basically anyone else – that isn't running a blog where he is purposefully writing not just about sharks, but also about cartoon sharks. Sure enough, when I went back to watch and rewatch these scenes, the black noses are gone within second of the sharks first appearing in the film.

And then there are those fins along their spines. I mentioned they look more like sawblades than actual dorsal fins, and indeed they do. Maybe it was more to give them the impression of a tough haircut than anything else, but these fish really do not look like sharks one they are no longer snapping their jaws underneath the plank. This is not to say that I don't think they aren't pretty groovy. I like the way their jaws jut out as they sneer at the cat and the rat, and I like their creepy, determined march through the ship. I think they are terrific villains, and worthwhile opponents for anyone in an animated film. 

But do I think they are sharks, and not just some other form of big, scary fish? These guys seem more like oversized, ocean-going piranhas with razors on their backs to me. Hell, the enormous whale in this film seems more like a shark, with its giant fanged teeth and rapacious appetite, than these guys do, even if he has no dorsal fin at all. 

In a world where animated sharks are hard to come by, though, I will take all I can get. Sharks or sharky posers... whatever. Tell them to bring their friends.

RTJ

*****

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

The Shark Film Office Special Edition: Salt Water Taffy (1930)

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with another of my websites, The Shark Film Office, about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.]

Salt Water Taffy (1930)

Dir.: Frank Moser and Paul Terry
TC4P Rating: 5/9
Species: cartoon shark, this time with snubbed dorsal fin; appears to be the pet of an octopus and is on a rather undefined form of leash. Probably a dogfish.

Just as with live-action narrative films, there are far more animated films out there with sharks in them than you might think. The reasons one does not often think of such things, outside of a commonly held public disinterest in the animated state of sharks, are probably many, but there are probably a couple of main reason that really sum up why sharks are really second – and even possibly steerage – class citizens in the cartoon world.

The first is that until relatively recent, there have not been any really big, recognizable, regular cartoon characters that were portrayed by sharks. That state changed somewhat in the '70s after Jaws made everyone gonzo worldwide. Along with the insane amount of merchandising available, both official Jaws products and just simply anything with a shark upon it, television too had to get into the shark game. Suddenly, there were two competing Saturday morning cartoon shows called Jabberjaw and Misterjaw with sharks as the lead characters. However silly those leads were, and even with the fact that one shark talked like Curly from the Three Stooges, breathed air, and played drums in a rock band (Jabberjaw) and the other shark wore a vest, bowtie, and top hat and spoke with a kooky German accent courtesy of Arte Johnson (Misterjaw), both characters were still quite recognizable as sharks. Jabberjaw certainly looked like a great white shark, albeit a supremely klutzy and cute one, while Misterjaw was supposed to be a great white, but really just looked like a generic shark (he was entirely blue; Jabberjaw at least had the white underbelly).

But, in the animated screen of the movie theatres for several decades, sharks were supporting characters at best, and mere local color if they were lucky. And not even on a regular basis, just a part here, and a part there. Usually in a beach, fishing, or pirate adventure, if that was the story the main characters had gotten themselves involved in that time, and if so, there might be a chance that a shark would show up as the main villain or as the henchman to the villain. Or at least turn up in a film for a quick gag or two if it was that type of picture, such as the kind Tex Avery specialized in during his early years at Warner Bros. But a shark would never get called on to carry a cartoon, because frankly, who was going to have a shark in a lead role? In a hero's role? Or even in a sympathetic role? Not a lot of call for sharks as best friends, then or now. (Cue Anchorman 2...)

And then there was a problem that rather plagued early animated portrayals of sharks through the first half-century of the late, sometimes great, more often not so, twentieth: just what exactly does a shark look like? It's a question that you wish early animators asked more often, because what constituted a "shark" in the '20s and '30s would not pass muster today. To be fair, the wonders of undersea exploration did not really open up to the public until post-World War II, which on the big screen was represented through the work of filmmakers and diving pioneers such as Hans Hass and Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Much of the ocean and its wonders were even more unknown to the general public than they are today, where we regularly hear that we have still explored only a fraction of the ocean's total depths. Well, it was even worse then.

I am pretty certain that you could ask nearly any school-age kid today to draw a shark and they would give you a fairly decent approximation of its general shape and its most commonly known features: the torpedo-shaped body, the jaws, the teeth, the pectoral fins, the rudimentary build of a tail area, and probably as prominent as the teeth would be the dorsal fin. (I've seen kids draw some crazy huge dorsal fins on sharks over the years.) I wouldn't hold your breath for pelvic and anal fins or second dorsals, but I think most kids would have the basic design down pretty well. And we all have an image of a shark drilled into our heads now, especially in the post-Jaws era. There can't be anyone that doesn't know what a shark looks like, right?

Pre-Jaws, pre-aqualung (not Jethro Tull, but Cousteau and his cronies), while sharks had certainly been scientifically catalogued for hundreds of years by that point, they were very much more creatures of mythic stature than anything else. They were known more by reputation than by physical presence in our lives, unless you happened to live either where they were regularly caught and sold, or liked to go swimming in the same places they did. Kids didn't cuddle up to stuffed shark toys in those days, but sharks were also not seen as monstrous killers, but more as a regrettable nuisance to be avoided when one took to sea. Then 1916 happened, when the series of famous shark killings in the Jersey Shore area occurred (five victims, but only four died, two of them inland), and suddenly sharks were headline villains du jour, especially the great white shark – for a long time considered to be the culprit, though it has been argued since that a bull shark was responsible for the three inland attacks in the Matawan Creek area. (That is my theory as well.)

While sharks definitely entered the public consciousness a bit more following such an incident, it doesn't mean that everyone got the memo. It doesn't mean that everyone took the time to do a little research into how sharks actually look or even that they really cared how they look. In a fantasy world where mice talk, fly planes, and fight giant cats with peg legs, does it really matter if a shark's dorsal fin looks more like a mere mogul on a ski hill than have a proper arch and come to a decent point? I don't find it unusual that a landlocked animator asked to draw a shark for a few seconds of a film would take massive liberties with the design of the creature, and just draw it in any manner that would work for the film they were doing. No one is going to these films for scientific accuracy, merely for pure escapism. Who cares if the dorsal fin is correct?

So that is where we are at the start of Salt Water Taffy, a 1930 short from Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio, directed by Frank Moser and Terry. It's a combination of sea-faring adventure and beach party flick, where a singing and dancing sailor sets up the action, disappears for most of the picture, animals of various species cavort in the waves and end up in silly hijinks, an octopus and shark show up to ruin the fun, and then the sailor rushes in to save the day and win the girl. If it sounds like fluff, that's what it is, but it is of a piece of many pictures of its day. If you can't find at least a little something to smile at in this, then you are in the wrong genre, buddy.

From the outset, we have to contend with that sailor fellow, who introduces himself to us aboard his ship (on which he seems to be the only sailor) via song, using the familiar tune of The Sailor's Hornpipe (which you probably know best from the Popeye the Sailor Man theme song):

“I’m Salty McGuire the gob, 
you’ll always find me on the job. 
When a ship’s in distress 
then who cleans up the mess?
Why, it’s Salty McGuire the gob!

We sail as we lead a rough life.
We eat our peas with a knife.
When the ocean gets rough,
that’s the time we get tough!
Oh, I’m Salty McGuire the Gob!”

In between the verses, Salty dances the traditional hornpipe, showing some fancy footwork, and when he sings about eating his peas with a knife, Salty demonstrates it immediately for us. (He's a true man of his word, that Salty!)

Elsewhere, a speedboat driven by a cat wearing a captain's hat zips along with eight other cats sitting in the back. The speedboat rides straight through a big wave and when it emerges on the other side, the eight other cats are left floating in the ocean while the captain and his boat speeds away. On the beach, scores of cats wave their arms in limited animation joy, with dim shouts of "Hooray" and "Woo hoo!" heard on the soundtrack.

A hippo waterskier, actually using a large plank of wood instead of skis, is being towed by a large, razor-backed fish. She flips off the board and does a somersault into the ocean. A monkey stretches out his comically long arms in a slow breaststroke but a bird passes over him and drops an anchor, for no logical reason, onto his head. The monkey sinks and we don't see him for the remainder of the film. An elephant cranks the engine on an outboard motor and the boat immediately takes off into the air, even with the elephant inside. The elephant eventually falls out of the flying boat but her skirt fills up with air around her like a parachute. She floats softly for but a few brief seconds, but then her skirt collapses, and she drops hard into the water.

Back on the beach, singing is heard emanating from inside a changing booth that sits atop a small cart. The booth stretches up and down, growing thinner and then fatter, as the unseen singer goes up and down the operatic scale. As each run reaches its apex, another piece of clothing is tossed out the window and onto a nearby clothesline. Then a lovely lady hippo emerges from the booth carrying a tiny parasol while she wears a one-piece bathing suit. She skips and sings "La la la" as she reaches the water’s edge. When she carefully dips a toe in, the tide rushes at her, so she runs backward playfully. When it goes out, she once more dips a toe, and then runs back again.

When the tide starts to leave, she leaps at the water, and ends up stranded on the beach, though, with her eyes closed blissfully, she thinks she is under the water, and she maintains a swimming posture while resting on her belly on the sand. A tall mouse passing nearby with a pair of oars takes the opportunity and strides up to the hippo. He climbs onto her back just as the tide rolls back in and uses his oars to propel her out into the ocean. He rows out to his boat, where he hooks a crane to the hippo and tries to lift her up out of the water, but her weight pulls down the entire boat and submerges it fully into the sea.

On land, another group of tall mice are holding a race on the backs of a group of turtles. One of them is a beautiful lady mouse wearing a swimsuit, who rides apart from the rest of the pack. Her faithful turtle steed ends up getting flipped over at one point during their ride. He acts frustrated as he climbs out of his shell to turn it back over, before climbing back inside it to continue the race. When they get to a small cliff at the water’s edge, three of the turtles and their riders leap into the water without pause. The fourth turtle, the one carrying the beautiful lady mouse, stops and then cranes his neck far out over the water so the lady mouse can use his head and neck as a springboard to dive into the water. When a boy mouse pops up near her out of the waves, the turtle turns his neck into a set of stairs so the boy mouse can climb up to perform his own dive. When the boy mouse does, he slams his head hard into the mud just underneath the too shallow water. His head gets stuck momentarily, and when he gets loose, the mud has formed a brick around his head, through which he blinks his eyes at the camera.

Ominous music plays as a large hat-wearing mosquito carrying a briefcase marches into the scene (he only flies briefly before picking up a nervous stride). He pops open his case to reveal a pencil sharpener, which he uses to sharpen his long, needle-like sucker. He stops his march again to open the case and this time use a razor strop, not just on his needle, but on his rear end as well. (Why? I don't know, since they have no stinger there.) In the distance is another supremely fat mosquito completely filled up and drunk on blood. He hiccups like a lush while the song The Bear Went Over the Mountain plays lazily on the soundtrack. The first mosquito runs up and rubs his hands in admiration over the fat mosquito’s belly. “Where did ya get it?” he asks, and the fat skeeter points to a sleeping elephant nearby.

While How Dry I Am plays on the soundtrack, the skeeter flies to the elephant and lands on his belly. He undoes the top of the elephant’s pants and lifts its shirt as well, and then circles around in the air a few times before determining the best space from which to suck blood. (Get your mind out of the gutter, you sickos.) Grabbing his nose, the mosquito turns his proboscis into a hand-drill to make a hole in the elephant’s tummy. After a few seconds of drilling, he pulls out a small can of oil to aid in the process. The elephant suddenly wakes up and smashes the skeeter with a single, swift blow from his trunk. The large mammal stands up and turns his back to the audience to fix his pants, turning his head shyly to the camera and fastens them finally to the tune of Shave and a Haircut.

We are whisked back to the lady mouse and the turtle, who are cruising along happily through the water on a joy ride. However, in this universe, octopuses are apparently evil and super grumpy and grumbly. And they also wear sailor caps and have a shoe on the end of all but one of their eight tentacles. They also apparently keep sharks as pets. I am guessing, in this case, that the shark is a dogfish (it does have a black button type of nose, entirely uncommon in actual sharks), since it seems to be on a leash held by the octopus as he strides along angrily beneath the turtle at the bottom of the ocean. We never see exactly why the octopus is so angry at the lady mouse. We just have to accept that he is, in the same way that we have to accept that the monkey that was pounded with the anchor in the head earlier didn't drown nor did the elephant who fell hard into the water after her skirt failed as a parachute nor did the tall mouse whose boat was submerged by the hippo earlier. We have to accept that none of these characters drowned to death, or else this film is far darker than one could ever imagine, and thus we also just have to accept that the octopus is either pissed about an earlier unseen transgression or he is just an all-day jerk.

The shark has a strange rounded bump of a dorsal fin, and certainly not what the modern viewer would perceive in their mind if they were told to expect a shark in this film. The octopus lets go of the shark's leash, and the snarling, snapping fish is allowed to swim free after the lady mouse and her turtle mount. The large shark rises to the surface, dwarfing the turtle, and frightening the lady mouse, who throws her arms up into the air and screams. But instead of riding off easily on the turtle, who is speeding along at a pretty good clip, she leaps to the side of the reptile into the water to swim directly in front of the shark (a tactical error, if you ask me).

Re-enter Salty McGuire the Gob, who has been watching the action from the deck of his ship through a spyglass. His craft changes directions by lifting directly up out of the water and spinning about 180 degrees, and Salty mans the cannon at its bow. In a perspective shot, he fires several shots at the shark as it swims in the distance. Three large cannon bursts are fired, each hitting their target, but it is the fourth one that does the job. Both the shark and the beautiful lady mouse are sent sinking unconscious beneath the waves. They both sink downward, but Salty dives in and rescues the girl and carries her to the surface. The shark continues to sink slowly until he finally lies belly up on the bottom of the sea floor, presumably dead.

Back on Salty's ship, the lady mouse comes to in her hero's arms and asks meekly, "Who are you?" He replies, "Me?" and then launches into a reprise of his opening song, this time with the lady mouse joining him in a dance...

"Why I’m Salty McGuire the Gob!
You’ll always find me on the job!
When the ocean gets rough,
that’s when I do my stuff
for I’m Salty McGuire the Gob!”

He dips the girl, she kicks her long mouse legs high in the air, and he gives her two hard, quick kisses. Iris out.

Salt Water Taffy is most episodic, mainly a series of blackout gags framed by the slight story of its sailor host, Salty McGuire the Gob. (And what is the deal with the absurdly long limbs on the tall mice in this cartoon? I guess to differentiate them from Mickey and Minnie to avoid a lawsuit from Disney?) As I mocked throughout the description, as long as you aren't too worried about closure surrounding the fates of certain characters, there isn't a lot to hang on about in this short. Silly, light fun for the most part apart from that drowning motif.

But there is a darker undercurrent to the picture and it involves its shark character, who seems merely like a pet, but unlike the monkey, the girl elephant, and the hippo, we do get to see the shark's fate – or at least a glimmer of it – through to what we presume is its end. (That grumpy octopus? Totally disappears once he unleashes the shark...) When the fourth cannon blast hits the shark and we are shown the long slow dive towards the bottom of the ocean by the shark and the unconscious lady mouse, the film shifts tone in a brief but jarring way. The intent of the animators is to show the heroics of Salty as he rescues the girl, but as they swim away, the camera follows the shark downward to the bottom, and dwells upon the giant fish as he flips about to lie prostrate upon the sand on the floor, belly up, a sure sign for its death.

They did not need to show this extension of the action sequence; after all, they quite noticeably did not show us the outcome of numerous other gags earlier in the film. But here there is such a focus upon the circumstances of the shark's demise that it is hard for me – and I certainly cannot speak for anyone who is not already attuned to feeling sympathy for sharks, whether or not they are considered villains or monsters – not to feel a little heartsick, not to get a little emotional in a film where otherwise I felt relatively nothing at all, not even laughter.

If there is anything that distinguishes Salt Water Taffy 86 years after its creation, it is this short sequence of the shark, that really doesn't look all that much like a shark as we would recognize one today, meeting its maker at the hands of a sailor mouse with ridiculously long limbs for a rodent of its nature. Since the shark represented a dog in the universe of this film, it is not hard for me to make an even further emotional leap in my mind. This turns Salt Water Taffy into a kind of Old Yeller of the 1930s for me. Luckily, the scene takes place underwater so nobody can see my eyes welling up with tears.

RTJ

***

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

The Shark Film Office Special Edition: Bee at the Beach (1950)

Bee at the Beach (1950)
Dir.: Jack Hannah
TC4P Rating: 7/9
Species: cartoon sharks (a whole six-pack of 'em!)

Regular followers of the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc may well wonder where I have been for the past couple of months, since I have not posted a new review here since late in June.

There are a trio of reasons, the first of which involves getting my mind and spirit refreshed via a pair of short vacation trips. I started off flying back to my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska for the Fourth of July holiday, and then zipped up the California coast at the end of the same month to Sonoma County for a brief family reunion. The necessity of said refreshment of mind and spirit was due in large part to being out of gainful employment for well over a year. Not from any lack of trying on my part, for in my downtime, apart from blogging and writing like a maniac, I started my own freelance writing and editing business. Unfortunately, a serious illness hit me at the precise moment that I went live with my freelance website, which led to a secondary tailspin involving a lot of doctor visits and even more medication than I was already taking. (Much better now, thank you, but I still have to take a lot more meds than I would like.)

Which leads me to the second reason for not posting: the fact that I have, in recent weeks, actually managed to pick up some freelance assignments. This has allowed me to breathe a little bit easier on the money front, and it is very nice to feel productive in a societal sense again, even if it means that my once robust free time has dwindled down a good measure.

But the third reason for not posting on the Cel Bloc ties into something far more fun for me. Because I do still have a fair share of that free time I mentioned, I have been spending most of the past few months concentrating on finally getting my third blog, The Shark Film Office, operating at cruising speed. When I started The Shark Film Office back in 2006, it was meant to just be a little side project, only meant to be a place where I could occasionally discuss whatever film I wanted that just happened to have a shark in it. It was cool to start, but I never really committed to the idea in the beginning, and thus, I posted very little over the first couple of years. Then, like my other blogs, my professional life and personal darkness overrode my writing. I sunk into a massive depression that almost led to dire personal consequences. [You can read about that episode on my original blog, The Cinema 4 Pylon, here if you care to wallow in another's misery. Rest assured, I am much better now on that front.]

When I got back to writing again as a form of therapy over a year ago, and then worked that therapy into blogging regularly once more to ensure that I would stick to the concept, reviving The Shark Film Office was far from my mind. But once the Pylon and the Cel Bloc were up and running again, and I was having some success and happy with their new progress, I realized that what I really wanted to do was get the shark site running as a regular feature as it never had before. I dipped my toe into the water, and liked how it felt, but then a curious thing happened. I found that, in terms of interest in all thing shark related in film, the time was curiously ripe. More films than ever were being released with sharks in them annually, mainly due to properties like Sharknado and its Syfy Channel ilk, but it seemed like sharks could pop up in almost anything on movie screens and on TV. I started to rethink how I approached the idea of sharks on film, and came to the realization that sharks have been represented for over a century on film, whether in fictional epics or documentary travel films, as foils in comedy shorts and multi-chapter serials, or as hulking, mostly villainous adversaries in any number of shorts and features throughout the history of animation. I knew that it was finally time to concentrate fully on the history of these creatures in all styles of film production, and so The Shark Film Office has become a regular venture for me.

So, what does all of this have to do with a very simple Walt Disney cartoon where Donald Duck goes to the beach to catch some rays? Easy... sharks. Bee at the Beach, a Donald Duck series entry from 1950 directed by Jack Hannah, has a solid six pack of big, toothy sharks, all eager to snap Donald up in a tasty, feathery bite. And while Donald is my favorite Disney character of all time, I have to agree: he pretty much deserves it in this one.

Bee at the Beach is part of the sub-series of Donald cartoons where the fiery duck does battle with a tiny adversary in bee form, often named Spike, but now generally referred to by the noise the social insect makes when he speaks: Buzz-Buzz. (He is also called this name directly in a couple of the seven shorts in the sub-series.) In most of their shorts together, there is something coming between Donald and Spike/Buzz-Buzz [I am going to stick with Spike for this one, since that seems to have officially been his name for this short], and this cartoon is no exception. Both characters are trying to catch some rays at an overly crowded local beach, and end up parking in the sand next to each other. Let the battle of wills begin.

Spike is a happily humming buzzer as he flies along the beach, jam packed with umbrellas, but he is even happier to see a nice open spot ahead of him as he looks down. His joy is short-lived as he hears Donald Duck, wak-wak-wakking the same tune Spike was buzzing as he makes his way unseen through the forest of umbrellas. Spike zips to the spot but is send ricocheting away by the open of Donald's big red umbrella. Donald balances a picnic basket and beach towel on his arm as he finishes his song with a flourish, and then begins to set up his gear. Spike, too, has his own beach gear, consisting of a clamshell for a beach chair, and a flower to serve as his own umbrella. No sooner has he put on his tiny little sunglasses and settled back to relax than he has Donald's beach towel thrown over the top of him. As Spike buzzes angrily and burrows out from under the towel, Donald starts his run to the beach by stepping on Spike, crushing him into the sand.

While the duck floats on top of some extremely shallow water, the bee takes the time to set his gear back up and try to relax again. Donald runs back and dries himself off, wringing his wet towel over the top of Spike and his clamshell. The wet bee is angry, but even angrier when Donald brushes sand off his beach towel into a pile on top of Spike and his clamshell. The little bee spits out sand and marches to the edge of Donald's towel. He buzzes to get the duck's attention and calls him over. Donald obliges by bringing his head down low to the ground, where Spike builds a little pile of sand, and then kicks it dog style onto the top of the duck's bill. Donald is now the one spitting and snorting out sand!

The irascible fowl reaches down and blows on the bee, sending the little guy rolling away. Spike somersaults straight into his clamshell, which snaps down on top of him, causing him to wriggle and kick his little legs furiously. Donald laughs loudly in his familiar style and opens a grape soda by flicking the top open with the use of the trapped bee's stinger. This infuriates the little guy, and he flies high up into the air and then charges at Donald's straw, machine-gunning several holes into it with the use of his stinger. Soda shoots out in all directions from the straw. Spike buzzes angrily at the duck, but Donald traps him inside his half-finished soda bottle. Laughing at the bee and saying, "That'll hold ya!," Donald takes to the water in his "Super Duper Raft".

Spike is not to be stopped, however, and he uses his stinger like an outboard motor and revs up the remaining soda in the bottle until it foams up and shoots the top of the bottle off into the sky. Spike flies up high, locates Donald, and buzzes down hard and fast towards the duck stinger first, aiming to pop his life raft. He hits the water and shoots and sputters like a faulty torpedo towards the raft for a good distance, but Donald arches his rubber craft at the last moment so that the bee skitters right past him. Spike rams right into a rock just under the surface of the water pretty hard, but it does not deter him. He flies back, but takes a different tack this time. He sneaks over to the valve of the life raft and starts to unscrew its top. Donald starts to cry "Why you little--!" but the bee manages to pull the cap off, and Donald is sent shooting farther out into the ocean, past the rocks near the shore.

When Donald comes to a stop, muttering all manner of angry slander about the bee, he is sitting on the life raft at the size at which he originally saw it before he pumped it up: a small square barely big enough for the duck to sit upon comfortably. The small purple umbrella built into the raft remains as well. Donald's muttering swiftly turns to a shriek when he realizes he is surrounded by the dorsal fins of six different sharks. He starts to pump the life raft to a more manageable size and mops his brow with his hand. But Spike has no intention of Donald staying comfortable. He whistles and draws the duck's attention to his stinger, which he pulls so that it makes a springing noise. The bee then sits back on the raft so that his stinger is close to popping the rubber boat, and bounces torturously in front of the duck.

"No! No! Not that!" begs Donald, but the bee nods his head. He leaps up lightly, and brings his stinger down, popping the raft. A long slow whistling noise starts, but Donald plugs the hole with his thumb. Away from the raft, Spike rides along happily atop the dorsal fin of one of the sharks. He sees that the duck has stopped the leak, so he flies back and pops three more holes, all of which Donald fills his three remaining fingers on the same hand. Spike flies to the other side of the raft and pops four more holes, and Donald uses his other hand to stop those leaks. He leaps to the left front and does four more holes; Donald uses his left foot to plug those holes. The bee does the same on the right front; Donald follows suit. (There is a major error here, as Spike does four holes each time, but Donald plugs three holes with each of his feet. It is pretty noticeable; even when we were kids we called it out each time we saw this cartoon.)

With all four of the duck's limbs occupied, Spike sits on Donald's bill and sharpens his stinger. He drops down to the water and swims under the raft. He then cuts a square just below Donald, allowing his swimsuit-clad rear end (with a little wisp of white feathered tail) to stick down into the ocean. The bee pulls a single feather out and swims down to a sleeping shark. He waves it in front of the shark's nostrils, and wakes the shark to attention. The big fish swims up and hungrily licks his chops at the inviting meal in front of him. Just as he is about to take a huge bite, Donald leaps up, the shark breaches, and the raft ends up sitting on top of his head. The shark looks around confused, but when Donald skedaddles (at first splitting without the raft, then reaching back for it), the shark races after the frightened duck.

Donald finally resorts to running on top of the water, and the shark reaches out with its teeth and grabs the life raft. The rubber stretches out to a ridiculous length, and the shark manages to pull it just long enough to secure it over the top of a dock piling. The shark lets go of the life raft then and swims off. Donald keeps running but realizes he is getting nowhere fast, and reaches out when he sees something to hold onto, but they turn out to be two of the lower teeth in the shark's mouth. When he comes to this realization, the music stops, and the shark's tongue summons him inside with a whistle. Back at the piling, Spike lifts the rubber over the top, and it snaps back at Donald, sending him through the shark's stomach and all the way through to the end of its tail, which takes the form of Donald's body. Donald reaches out and grabs other pilings in the water, and this snaps the shark backwards, smashing the big fish against the pilings and shooting Donald into the water. However, he is quickly surrounded once more by six dorsal fins.

The sharks rear back and reach into the water and come out each pulling a section of the rubber life raft, with Donald still safely in the middle with his umbrella. "Take it easy, boys!" he begs, but when they each let go of their piece of raft at the same time, he is sent tumbling up into the air and then back down. As he nears the water toward the open jaws of one of the sharks, he grabs his umbrella and opens it, which allows him to slow his fall ever so slightly. The shark misses with his snap, and the force sends Donald upward again, and the duck start to blow quickly into the umbrella to hopefully keep him aloft a little more. But the umbrella fails him after only a few seconds, folding in on itself, and the poor duck falls back down straight towards the wide open, waiting jaws of the shark.

Donald spins himself about and opens the umbrella inside the shark's mouth to prevent himself from being eaten. He is sent upward again, and when he comes back down, the shark takes another chomp, but Donald hides inside the bowl of the umbrella; another chomp, and Donald is wearing the umbrella like a pair of bat wings. He manages to stay aloft through another chomp, and Spike heads to the lifeguard stand. The bee watches through a spyglass as Donald flies off into the distance with the sextet of sharks still leaping and chomping at him. Spike has himself a belly full of buzzy bee-laughter. IRIS OUT.

It is a fairly grim ending no matter how you slice it, I guess. Not that Donald is any real trouble, because he is Donald and he will get out of it eventually. But if you take it strictly as a story, I would guess that the punishment of potentially being devoured by six giant sharks far outweighs the crime of some light bullying at the beach. In this sense, Spike could be regarded as a major asshole. There is also the bee-duck dichotomy at play here. Spike is a bee, and most people, especially my wife, have no regard for bees, even cute ones drawn by the artists for worked for Walt Disney. Donald is a duck, and although he is portrayed quite often as a bully, a coward, a braggart, and a terrible uncle to his nephews, he is still Donald Duck and beloved by hundreds of millions of people the world over, including yours truly.

And yet, Donald is a big asshole in this one. He often played a variant of the Ugly American in his films, and he is definitely that right here. He is the sort of oblivious cretin in this film that I cannot stand in real life, and so, just accepting Donald as an actor in this film playing a role and not as a symbol of anything in his own right, one could say his character rather deserves his fate for not just picking but stepping on the little guy the way that he did. He is the bully and oppressor, and this is the fate of the bully. On the other hand, and this is probably the way most people approach the film, no one really deserves such a cruel end, especially for some sand kicking.

As for the shark scenes, until Saturday morning TV introduced the animated shark-starring shows Jabberjaw and Misterjaw on the same day on September 11, 1976 (and on my twelfth birthday, nonetheless), sharks had mostly been relegated to bit parts in animation. They were always waiting offshore anytime the actual star(s) of a cartoon set foot into or onto the water in a beach or seafaring setting. Most often they were used for menace, as is to be expected given their general public outlook upon them for centuries, though sometimes they could be used for more silly purposes. The use of the shark is hardly ever more than a sight gag or two, usually playing off another gag that leads to the shark, or in other circumstances, sharks might be used as the kept henchmen of a bigger villain (octopuses and gorillas also get these parts as well). And rarely, if ever, do the sharks in cartoons look anything close to real sharks. This was especially true in the earlier days of cinema, before we started to get real underwater looks at the life in the ocean.

But then, every once in a while, you can run into a cartoon with a shark (or sharks) involved in a more extended suite of gags, such as in Bee at the Beach, where they get a couple of minutes of screen time to mess around with Donald and Spike. Sure, they are still menacing and it is implied that they are capable of great danger and potential death, but they get to be funny as well. I quite like that the main shark gets to show that he is thinking about the best way to trap Donald when he pulls the rubber over the piling, and also gets a grandly comic moment when Donald is hiding on top of his head and the shark does a slow burn when he realizes where the duck is actually to be found. And for pure cartoon shark moments, I really enjoy the POV shot when Donald is falling towards the shark's gullet. I think it is one of the better shark moments in any theatrical short from the earlier days of animation. Just as the extended shark sequence in this film, while the creatures are still pretty far from looking like actual sharks, is one of the better and most fun examples of how to employ sharks in an animated short.

You know, in fact, I am going to award them that duck dinner. I think these cartoon sharks worked hard for it and they deserve a fine fowl repast. Just as much as Donald, or at least the character he plays in this film, kind of deserves his fate for picking on the little guy.

RTJ