A Shark Film Office Special Edition: Plane Dumb (1932)

Plane Dumb (1932, Van Beuren Studios) 

Dir.: John Foster and George Rufle

TC4P Rating: 4/9

So, I spent some time years back on this site heaping light praise upon a much-neglected series like Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry shorts, and then I ran into the film Plane Dumb. The title Plane Dumb could very nearly describe the actions of the animators as they contrived this wannabe Amos N' Andy homage. Apparently, donning blackface not only helped disguise the very white Tom and Jerry as they roamed about Africa in 1932, but it also seems to have lowered the team's respective IQs to the negative, changed their speech patterns automatically, and somehow also made their disarrayed and lighter-colored hair to instantly turn short, dark and curly. Ah, the magical properties of a common, everyday makeup kit!

I read a couple of reviews for this cartoon short years ago where each of the writers complained that Tom and Jerry were traveling to Africa "for no good reason". Let me state this from the outset: Tom's plan is to fly non-stop across the ocean to Africa so as to bring fame and fortune to the pair. As simple and understandable as that. Non-stop flight... cross the ocean... fame and fortune. If this seems like "no good reason" to the reviewers, well, then they are probably not clued into the fact that when this film was made, the world was only five years removed from Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Europe. And although Lindbergh had done it already, there were plenty of daring aviators in those days. The feat was, given the limits of technology at the time, still quite a challenge to accomplish, and many more people besides Lindbergh continued to attempt it well after he achieved the goal. Just because you are first up the mountain doesn't mean that the next 10,000 mountaineers are just going to give up trying. It's the impulse of exploration that exists to this day, and it seems like enough of a "good reason" to me. (Not that I am going to try it myself... I have cartoons to watch.)

Now that I am done with the philosophical portion of this review, let's jump back to the film, which still has "no good reason" behind its creative impulses. How else to accept the continued harassment and degradation of other races by the mass media controlled by the white establishment of the day? As said, Tom wants to fly across the ocean to Africa so that they can become heroes, but Jerry couldn't care less. He sits bored and listless in the passenger seat, but expresses worry that they might not be safe in Africa. Then Tom hits Jerry with his 'brilliant" idea to put on blackface makeup to disguise themselves on the "Dark Continent," which they do. Soon, the pair are transformed completely (as described in the first paragraph). They shake hands at the completion of their task, and as their voices switch to Amos 'n' Andy mode, they both shake hands and say at the same time, "Well, I'm sho' glad to see you again!"

Apparently, though, the disguise also whisks away Tom's abilities to fly the plane, and he loses control and dives the craft down into the ocean. The biplane's wings rise to the surface, and the now-darkened (the makeup does not wash off) pair climb onto the wings of the plan and dangle their feet in the water. "Well," starts Jerry, "I wonder how far it is to there!" Tom's answer: "'bout twenty knots!" Jerry scratches his head at this, and asks, "How come they got knots in the ocean?" Tom shrugs his shoulders, and answers, "Tropical wave gets heavy, it gets tangled, it makes knots!" To prove his remark, he points out several waves which meet with other wave crests and knot up three times in succession, following comedy's Universal Rule of Threes.

An octopus suddenly climbs up and with a huge smile, happily puts an arm over each of the lad's shoulders. Both men shriek, but Jerry is even more alarmed, and cries, "I tol' you I didn't wanna go to Africa!" "Wait a minute!" interrupts Tom, "Is we in Africa?" "No we ain't in Africa!" is Jerry's reply. Tom asks, "Does it look like we is gonna get to Africa?" "It shoooooooo' don't...," fears Jerry. "Then what has you gotta kick about?" The octopus, probably alone in his opinion, finds this hilarious, and laughs uproariously. It kisses Tom full on the cheek, but Tom takes this as an attack and punches it in the nose. (Yeah, I know that octopuses don't have recognizable noses, but this one does... a big, black button nose.) The punch from Tom ires the octopod, who briefly spanks the gangly man on the bottom, and then the huge mollusc spins his arms and wallops the pair (Tom on the rear and Jerry in the head) over and over again in bicycle fashion. The octopod then dives back into the water.

Just after that attack, a crowd of sharks are shown swirling about the pair's feet. Tom and Jerry take turns both accusing each other good-naturedly of tickling the other one's feet, but then their mood changes when shark after shark starts breaches from the water and leap over their heads. "Dinner station's in the front," jokes Tom as he ducks his noggin down against the wing. "Look here, man! These is shawks!" Jerry continues, "Will they eat ya?" to which Tom, still ducking his head, replies, "If they don't, they'll sho' mess you up plenty!" 

From below, a large sawfish skewers the plane's wings right through their center and starts to saw through, so the lads are forced to springboard off the end of the wings and then run along the top of an long rainbow of breaching sharks. "We running, ain't we?" asks Jerry, and Tom finishes with, "But we ain't gettin' anyplace!" The last shark goes past, and the pair drop into the briny drink. They struggle to stay afloat, but because we don't see Tom and Jerry swim before this in the cartoon, it is hard to tell if their inability to swim is because they are now black (which would play off the once commonly held stereotype that blacks are bad at swimming) or if they just can't swim period. (I am banking on the stereotype, given when it was made.)

A large ominous-seeming black whale zooms through the waves and then the film cuts back to the boys struggling in the water. Suddenly, they are standing upright with their feet still just below the water, and Jerry proclaims, "Hey, sista! We been saved by a submarine!" The whale pops up with the pair on his back well above the water, and Tom says, "No! This is a whale!" Jerry wonders where it is going, and Tom says, "Ask him. I don't speak whale-ish!" The whale continues to cut through the water at a high rate of speed towards the shore. They decide to try to stop the whale by sitting "on his nose to smother him". When they do, the whale spouts them high up into the air, and eventually aims them towards the shore by adjusting its spout. The boys are deposited with a rough tumble or two onto a patch of ground, where just moments before, a crowd of assorted jungle animals were watching their approach. (The lion, for future reference, ran into a nearby cave...)

After they are charged by a pair of strange-looking imaginary animals, Tom and Jerry run into the cave, which is cloaked entirely in complete darkness, so that only their eyes, enormous lips, and single-toothed mouths can be seen. Their heads swell up to fill the screen as they carry on with their "What was dat?" "Where iz we?"-style routine. At one point, Tom's eyes get all weird and googly for the briefest of moments, merely for sake of adding more weirdness to the scene. Soon enough, when the lights come back on, they get assaulted by a huge bat and then the lights go out again, leaving us once more with their lips and eyes only. A deep growl is heard in the darkness, and we assume it is the lion we saw walking into the cave earlier. "Jerry," says Tom, "turn loose my leg!" "I ain't holdin' yo' leg!" When Tom reaches the point of begging his diminutive friend with "Jerry! Jerry! Please say 'Yes, you iz holdin' me!'," then the lights come back on and the boys face off with a quartet of black skeletons. The skeletons sing in gospel fashion, naturally in four-part harmony...

"Good lord, I'm ready

Indeed, I'm ready

Oh, good lord, I'll be ready when the great day comes!"

Sitting all the way to left, the fourth skeleton takes a brief, bass solo...

"Good glory hallelujah!"

They repeat the refrain, and at the end, the bass skeleton finishes solo with "the great day comes" again. (Note: This animation and song is recycled from an earlier Tom and Jerry short called Wot a Night from 1931.) The four black skeletons then burst into pieces and lie all about the floor in front of the boys. Tom and Jerry shriek and run out of the cave in fear and end up being surrounded, from behind every object imaginable, by an entire tribe of headhunters. The lads run for their lives as spear after spear is thrown past them. For some reason, with the spears flying all about the pair, Tom and Jerry both wipe the blackface from their faces, but it helps them not at all in escaping from their predicament. They end the film in a cliffhanger, in danger for their lives with no chance of escape dangling before them. The film irises out, and not a moment too soon.

Like most of the film, the ending seems to not matter, for the only purpose seems to have been to get Tom and Jerry into blackface so they could carry off what must have been some already pretty standard and tired vaudeville routines involving the supposed behavior of blacks in the 1930s. (There are probably even more subtle digs piled in here that meant more in the time period, but I am unaware of them.) That a cartoon series that could actually be so fun would resort to gags like this for a joke here and there would be more bearable, but to need the use of such a gimmick for an entire film is unforgivable. On top of this, never once is a real laugh approached within its far too long seven-minute running time. (They don't even reach the shores of Africa until 5 minutes into the thing.)

If anything saves this film from being a total waste of time, it is a few, brief scenes, most of them involving the ocean creatures Tom and Jerry encounter. There are those marvelous shots of the mass of sharks swirling about beneath the floating wings and the tickled feet of the boys. I also like the scene with Tom and Jerry running along the backs of the voracious, leaping sharks, and the scene where the whale is seen cutting through the water, where he rather humorously filters a bunch of fish out through his gapped teeth. I also like the scene where the plane is flying above Africa, and the Dark Continent is shown with what must be about a half-mile of jungle spread out across its obviously not-in-scale relief map. It's the one part of the film that actually strikes me as being wittily designed.

I'll admit it openly. I do have a certain fascination with Hollywood films that use blackface, not just as a gimmick, but sometimes as the impetus for the plot. I'm embarrassed when I see Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, or Fred Astaire (all of whom I adore otherwise) or Al Jolson (whom I don't) don the makeup, and with it the stereotyped garb, mannerisms and characteristics that come with the disguise. But I can't turn away. It's a fascination like that with a trainwreck. You want to think better of the people involved, especially when they are entertainers you appreciate normally, but then you realize they were just as complicit in even the casual racism of the day as everyone else, including their audiences.

If you make it deep into Al Jolson's Wonder Bar, which is a horrid exercise in how not to make a musical comedy for the first 3/4 of the film (though there are several tidbits of pre-Code verbal naughtiness worth hearing), you end up viewing Busby Berkeley's production of Goin' to Heaven on a Mule, with its "Here you is in Hebbenly'Land!" lyrics and its giant dancing watermelons... and your jaw just drops. I will admit that I found some of this pretty funny when I was a teenager and young adult, but then I made a solid attempt to raise my game and tried to put all the lazy stereotyping that I learned growing up in the '70s in Alaska behind me. Along the same lines, you watch some scenes like this in older films, and wonder how some of these white stars could perform like this, especially given that they were often surrounded by real blacks with real talent, and one wonders how they were able to shut off that part of their brain that said, "This is the wrong thing to do." Or were they just too trapped in the studio system and the overreaching norms of the time to be able to do anything about it at the time?

Now, the Van Beuren Studios were not Hollywood: they were New York-based, and right across the street from the Fleischers Studio. (According to Maltin, Fleischer artists would sometimes moonlight at Van Beuren due to their proximity, which is not a surprise.) Many of the early Fleischer films, too, dealt with such stereotypes, though often (but not always) in a much subtler fashion, sometimes incorporating characteristics into their plots and drawings, but not always in the then-commonly accepted "blackface" mode.

I thought at first that perhaps the voices used by Tom and Jerry while in blackface were white performers such as on Amos 'n' Andy, but according to IMDb, the parts of the duo in this cartoon are played by seminal African-American songwriters and performers of the day, Aubrey Lyles and F.E. Miller, known by the comedy team name of Miller and Lyles. (This cartoon was completed in the year before Lyles died relatively young from tuberculosis.) This surprised me, though I have yet to find another source to back this information up, except that the film was also (according to IMDb and the Big Cartoon Database) apparently released under the alternate title of Miller and Lyles All Wet. 

No matter who provides the voice or fills the role, outrageous and incorrect racial stereotypes are just that. Van Beuren stoops pretty low with Plane Dumb, bringing us that common mode and sending it straight into the commode. The film has a few cute moments, but stinks otherwise, and a definite step down from other films in the Tom and Jerry series (but not that many steps down). They did the wrong thing in this picture, especially given that it is not only a slap in the face of another race of humans, but it is a badly done slap in the face.

But you can't look away... especially to Dixieland.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This review was originally written and published on May 2, 2006. It has been updated with a rewrite, a video link, and new photos and republished on September 21, 2017. Further revisions were done on October 13, 2017.]

Countdown to Halloween: The Haunted Ship (1930)

For the month of October, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc is taking part in an annual internet celebration known as the Countdown to Halloween. This is the fourth year that I have participated in this countdown, but the first with my Cel Bloc site. To find out more about the Countdown to Halloween, and to see a list of participating websites and blogs, go to http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/.

The Haunted Ship (A Van Beuren Studios Aesop's Fable, 1930)
Directors: Mannie Davis and John Foster
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Part of the joy of continuing this experiment has been rediscovering for myself cartoon characters with whom I was fleetingly familiar, but had discounted because they weren't as famous or prevalent as other characters. It has been a distinct pleasure to reunite my eyes with Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry, the human tall guy–little guy combo which starred in a couple dozen films in the early 1930s, though some of the films are much better than others in the series.

I will be utterly honest in my assertion that I was not aware that the original Tom and Jerry (who had their semi-heyday long before MGM's cat and mouse came along) had morphed from an even earlier Van Beuren team: Waffles the Cat and Don Dog. Starring in a handful of Van Beuren's Aesop's Sound Fables, Waffles, the more excitable of the two, and Don, the short, cool breeze who fears nothing, are close enough to their human descendants to have caused me to do a double-take when I first viewed their first film, The Haunted Ship, from 1930.

With a beginning strikingly reminiscent of the some of those Tom and Jerry shorts, Waffles and Don start out buzzing through the skies in a plump little airplane, that seems about as able of flight as a Vienna sausage. Don sits nonchalantly on the tail of the plane and casually lifts his hat to us, and Waffles, who is ostensibly the pilot because he occasionally maneuvers a small steering wheel, is more concerned with playing the entire plane's body as if it were a vibraphone. He runs two mallets back and forth in musical fashion over the exhaust pipes, the wings, and even off the whirling propeller, happily playing away, pretty much oblivious to any need to guide the plane along its way.

However, in the skies overhead, a nasty-looking cloud forms a grimace filled with evil intent, as it blows wind and lightning down on the chubby plane. Waffles blows too, not wind and lightning like the evil cloud, but a trumpet instead, as he carries his jazzy tune over from bashing the parts of the plane to playing an actual musical instrument, while his diminutive buddy Don does a neat tapdance upon the tail of the plane, displaying a daredevil's lack of fear of heights. At one point, Don even dances off the edge of the tail into midair, and then shuffles backwards to safety, with nothing more than mild surprise that we went a tad too far. However, we see the cloud overhead, where its top edge has now formed into the shape of three working figures who pump and bucket the rain through the cloud and down onto the inhabitants of the plump plane.

Waffles and Don have taken to rowing their plane through the rain, but another lightning strike causes their paddles to disappear, and a third strike has Waffles yowling and hiding in the cockpit. A body made of lightning lands on the wing, and after the fear-ridden Waffles points it out, the pugnacious Don wallops the lightning-figure on the head and knocks it off the plane. But they are nowhere near to safe yet. The pair zoom off as fast as the little plane can go with the lightning-figure running through the air after them. They hop the next cloud that they meet, yelling "Hey!" and landing back inside the plane. The lightning follows, and when they meet the next cloud, they leap and yell "Hey!" again, but land on top. They fall into the cloud, and the lightning leaps inside for the fight. The plane, now wrecked, falls down towards the ocean with the pair inside it.

Thinking fast, Waffles and Don pop open a trap door and climb down an escape ladder in its rear, both wearing life preservers. They leap from the ladder and splash into the ocean, but as the plane nears impact, they climb up the ladder and back into the craft, perhaps thinking that it might float on the surface. The plane, however, sinks below the waves once they climb back inside, and so they drift down to the bottom of the ocean, where a dapper-looking walrus sings to them in the heaviest of baritones of impending doom: "Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware! Be---ware!" As the shanty-singing mammal departs, Don blows him a quick raspberry, which forces Waffles to knock Don in the head with a hammer for his rudeness.

The pair leave the confines of their downed and drowned plane, and make their way to a sunken ship which bears the name "Davy Jones" upon it. They dive through a window and into the hold where they discover vast amounts of treasure. Their joy is cut short suddenly by a piercing noise of a slide-whistle and a door which opens on its own accord. A question mark appears above Waffles' head and then zips around to Don's tail, where it pokes him and pushes the duo towards the now closing door. (Kind of a reverse variation on a Felix-style gag.) Another whistle whines, the door flies open, and a huge black octopus ambles threateningly through it, and then moves towards the camera until it crowds out most of the frame, and then swims out of the shot. As they reach for the door again, another fearsome monster fish with a lion-like mane and jaws, slides out from underneath some furniture behind them and slinks off to not be seen again. [Note: The animation for these creatures would be used again, notably in the later Tom and Jerry underwater short, Rocketeers, in 1932.]

They step swiftly into the hall, where Waffles is confronted by a floating skull. He is absolutely chilled by the site, and yowls and screeches in place but Don merely rocks back and forth calmly on his heels. Waffles twirls about to hide his eyes, but another skull pops up in the porthole behind him, scaring the yowl-ready Waffles yet again. Don, meanwhile, only scratches his head in boredom. The skull disappears, but a large anchor chain nearby them starts moving and rattling about, and it is discovered that the arm of a skeleton is pulling it. Don, ever the calm one, pulls out a hammer and casually wings it at the bones, causing the skeleton's hand to drop the chain and disappear from view. A fish swims towards the camera, getting larger and larger and then turning, showing that its full size easily dwarfs the pair of them, and Waffles continues to shiver uncontrollably. Then a trapdoor opens under their feet!

Waffles and Don find themselves sliding down a huge staircase. A tremendous dragon-like eel, then an an odd combination of eel and ray, and finally a shark with a strange style of dorsal fin glide past them from opposite directions, causing Waffles to leap back and forth in utter fear. Finally, the fraidy cat discovers a bell, which naturally has has to ring. The call for service brings a pair of skeletons down the stairs: one whose bones are the normal bleached white, and one with entirely black bones (but a white jaw, most likely a nod to blackface makeup, to make the skull appear as if it has large lips, and therefore a racial joke). The skeletons dance in practiced formation at the bottom of the stairs and salute in attention, but Waffles pushes Don into the skeletons, and the head falls off the white one's shoulders.

As Waffles makes his escape, Don picks up the skull and hurls it all the way down the hall until it hits Waffles in the head and knocks him flat. When Waffles comes to and sees the skull floating above the floor, he jumps clear out of his clothes and reenters them through his pants legs. He starts to berate Don, but an eel breaks up his complaints when it slides out of a hole in a barrel behind Waffles and swims through his legs. Then all of the cabin doors in the hall open up, revealing a waving, dancing skeleton in each one. Waffles and Don run away from the hall and enter a bar-room. Waffles, however, runs into the wall and hits his head, and since he is all shaken up, Don laughs at him and places him at the piano. Reluctantly at first, Waffles starts banging out a tune on the keys, and Don picks up two mallets and uses a sleeping crocodile for a vibraphone.

Waffles and Don continue to play as four drunken sea turtles stand at the bar and slug down one more shot each, and then join together to sing the old standard Sweet Adeline in swell four-part harmony.

"Sweet Adeline,
(My Adeline,)
My Adeline, 
(My Adeline,)
At night, dear heart, 
(At night, dear heart,)"

At the start of the second line, a fat catfish embellishes the song with a Gershwin riff played through a clarinet formed from his lips, while two happy starfish caper by his tail.

"For you I pine. 
(For you I pine.)
In all my dreams, 
(In all my dreams,)
Your fair face beams. 
(Your fair face beams.)"

Soon, we see another crocodile with his mouth agape, and a frog, who may be meant to resemble Harpo Marx though it bears no wig, has several strings wired through the croc's teeth and plucks at them for a harp solo.

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline!
(Sweet Ad-e-liiiiiine!)"

When the turtles finish their verse, their tongues hit the floor in drunken reverie (they make a "Nyaaagh!" sound and pass out) and Waffles and Don carry off the tune with an extended vamp in a tango style. Fish sway all about them, and a lobster wields its claws like castanets, until its shell drops to its tail and its polka-dotted underwear are revealed. Two smiling eels dance to the beat, and a ten-limbed octopus shuffles its three pairs of feet while waving its four gloved hands. Don does a tap dance, and we see many fish out on the dance floor take up his lead. The turtles revive themselves, crawl out of their shells completely naked, each with a cute bellybutton, dance a quick jig and then reprise the final line of Sweet Adeline.

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline!"

With the last note, the catfish swings a bottle into the head of the baritone turtle. A full crowd of sea creatures go crazy with their applause and laughter, but the noise is enough to wake up the spirit of Davy Jones, and his captain's hat-wearing skeleton hops out of his locker looking for trouble. Waffles turns a passing turtle into a squeezebox and Don plays off the heads of three eels to start the next number, but Davy Jones intervenes. "Who are you?" a shaking Waffles the Cat asks of the skeleton, and the reply comes back, "I am Davy Jones!" Waffles splits immediately, with Davy Jones fast on his heels, but Don, who is not afraid of anything apparently, follows them and sticks his mallets into Jones' bones and sends the captain crashing into Waffles. The two of them tumble head over heels together for some distance. Outside, we get a very detailed shot of the deck of the haunted ship from above (but slightly off center) as vast numbers of sea creatures spill out of the hold and swim up towards the camera and then past, followed by Waffles and Don, who in turn are still being chased by the evil Davy Jones.

Inside the bar, the four turtles are still piled in a heap on the floor, but they revive long enough to sing:

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline! Sweet Ad-e-liiiiiine!"

Their open mouths crane forward to take up the entire screen, and we can see their uvulas shaking with the final held note. Staring straight down their gullets, we see the iris out.

When I started to watch this cartoon, I immediately thought I was watching a Tom and Jerry short, and it took me a few seconds to realize that I was dealing with a cat and dog act. But their personalities are almost the same as the human version, though if anything, Don is an even cooler customer than Jerry, though both seem to always be itching for a fight. Tom is as much a flustered 'fraidy cat as Waffles, though in Waffles' case, he quite literally is such a creature (being an actual cat, you know... well, an actual cartoon cat).

The film itself, with its concentration on small character work rather than extensive gags, is quite enjoyable, in fact, I find it to be one of the more satisfying of the hit-and-miss Aesop's Fables series. Certainly, many of the elements are repeated in later, arguably better Tom and Jerry shorts, but the sequential progression of the story actually moves along with few bumps, being a lot smoother than, say, some similar shorts from the company's same period. And there is a spooky enough atmosphere inside the ship to make this necessary for an annual Halloween revisiting. That final shot with the sea creatures flying out of the hold is certainly a unique one so far, though it does display a lack of true resolution in the story. The musical sequence stands out even larger, and I especially love the concentration on the singing drunken turtles. Somehow, their design reminds me an awful lot of Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle.

But not as much as Waffles and Don remind me of Tom and Jerry. Sure, Waffles has a tail and Don's hat is different from Jerry's, but if you squint, you could easily miss that the former are a cat and dog (except for Waffles' annoying habit of yowling). What I didn't miss is the fact that I have spent most of my life missing out on this excellent entry in Aesop's Fables.

I have a feeling I will be diving back down to The Haunted Ship again every Halloween.

RTJ

*****

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

[Note: The original version of this article was posted on June 2, 2006, but has been given a drastic revision and updated with new photos and a video link on October 19, 2016.]

The Shark Film Office Special Edition: Rabbitson Crusoe (1956)

[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.]

Rabbitson Crusoe (1956)
Dir.: Friz Freleng
TC4P Rating: 7/9
Species: a purple shark named Dopey Dick, who is a little bit dopey and kind of a dick.

Believe it or not, I still own my very first edition of Daniel Defoe's classic novel, Robinson Crusoe. Please don't read that incorrectly. I do not own the first edition of Robinson Crusoe. Considering that the novel is just a hair under three hundred years old – having been first published in 1719, and thought by many scholars to be the first true novel in the English language – that would now make me a multi-thousand-aire, at least (and I am definitely not that at the moment).

No, the first edition of Robinson Crusoe that I ever owned was – and is – a Junior Literary Guild Book Club edition from the early 1970s, itself a reprinting of a 1945 edition of the book, illustrated in a still appealing way by Fritz Kredel. I read and reread this volume multiple times as a child, and it definitely would have to count as one of my early literary influences. To this day, sitting on my library shelves, I still have a few other books from my time in that book club (the first of many) as a kid: Daniel Boone - Wilderness Scout by Stewart Edward White, 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, Paul Bunyan and His Great Blue Ox by Wallace Wordsworth (which has been missing its cover so long that I can no longer summon an image of it in my mind), and Rascal by Sterling North (also sans cover, but I remember what that one looked like). Some have made it through the years better than others, but only one of those Book Club volumes has gotten a full rereading since I became an adult (and has, thus, remained in the best shape due to my attention to it), even though I owned both a paperback edition and a more recent, handsomely bound edition. That book is Robinson Crusoe.

Though my politics and viewpoint towards the book (and mankind in general) have changed greatly since my early, youthful exposure to the story, I still find Robinson Crusoe a rousing adventure novel, not least of which is its location and setting, that of a man stranded on what we would term a "deserted" or "desert" island, though it is anything but a desert nor does it turn out to be deserted. The notion of a tiny little island with just sand and a palm tree is really the province of cartoonists, filmmakers, and sketch comedians, though when we hear the name "Robinson Crusoe," you would not be charged with wrongheadedness were you to summon up such a simple image at first. Of course, you would tend to add a slave in the form of a "Man Friday" to do Crusoe's bidding, but otherwise, the brevity of your casual daydream would be forgiven.

The book, of course, is far more robust and detailed, and the island is equally lush and laden with the resources necessary for decades of survival, as long as Crusoe and his eventual co-habitant are willing to work for them. The book was so popular it created its own sub-genre – the Robinsonade – and all further stories of humans lost at sea and abandoned to the islands of the world's oceans have Defoe's book (and its two quickly written sequels, neither of which have I ever read) as its wellspring. Do you think the novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, written almost a full century later, is named that for little reason? (The name is meant to be evocative of Defoe's book. It is not the name of the family in the original German printing, that's for sure. The family is well aware of the novel Robinson Crusoe, and mention it and its title character several times within their own adventures.)

Getting back to that original novel, Defoe really started something in the imaginations of men, women, and children all over the world. And despite what happens to the characters being stranded for so long from civilization on their own island before Crusoe is eventually rescued, the book itself evokes a romantic feeling for the notion of being lost and stranded at sea, however actually tragic such an occurrence often is for the victim. That's why when musing about getting away from the rat race of modernity, we discuss "desert island" lists, books, albums, and romantic partners. The notion of being trapped on a small circle of jungle-cropped land to choose between Ginger and Mary Ann is endlessly appealing to most men. (The answer, for me, is "both," though Mary Ann is the clear choice when all is said and done. Way cuter, smarter, and ultimately hotter than the overly made up and high maintenance movie star.)

Yes, I still recall the novel quite fondly myself, and know that at some point in the near future I may settle into a couch somewhere and give it another good read. I have yet to find a feature film version of the story that I have considered completely satisfying, though I am certain filmmakers will continue trying. (And please do...) Many of the details of the book are thoroughly burned into my subconscious by this point, that it sometimes feels that I have actually absorbed the book into my bones as well. And yet, when presented with a small story detail, such as the presence of sharks within the framework of the novel, I had to think about it briefly. "Are there sharks in Robinson Crusoe?" I wondered. My mind told me, "Well, yes, there certainly must be," but I couldn't recall for sure. Inside, a mild panic started to bounce around my brain. "Good god, man! For the sake of The Shark Film Office, you need to figure this out!"

This issue gets confused even further for me when other adaptations – and even parodies and spoofs – of Robinson Crusoe are released which do include sharks in the details. The book that I thought I knew so well starts to get muddled even further. And sometimes, these additions are so clearly out of bounds that they become ridiculous. This is fine when a comedic adaptation is meant, but sometimes creative license in straight dramatic versions can go just a little bit too far. But here is what I do know: Nowhere, in that original book, do I recall that its main character had to fend off the murderous advances of a man-eating shark named Dopey Dick.

To find Dopey Dick, you have to go to the cartoons. You have to track down the Warner Bros. short titled Rabbitson Crusoe, directed by Friz Freleng, which was released as part of its Looney Tunes series in 1956. Lovers of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show in the 1960s and 1970s will remember seeing this cartoon a zillion times, and frankly, this particular short was not of my favorites at the time. This owed nothing to the general excellence of the short's construction but more to the very company it was keeping. It is hard to be thought of in such grand terms when What's Opera, Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, and A Froggy Evening are living right next door. But Rabbitson Crusoe has grown on me over the years, and within the reasons for such a thing to occur, the most important is its portrayal of the sneaky, ravenously hungry shark, Dopey Dick.

The title of the film appears over a cartographer's rendition of an island on any ol' map. An orchestral version of the pop standard Trade Winds by Cliff Friend and Charles Tobias plays over the credits (and this is not by accident, as it will come into play later in the film). Mel Blanc's familiar voice as Yosemite Sam fills the soundtrack after the end of the credits as the story opens with Robinson Crusoe's narration of his diary. "A low tide and high rock caused my predicament. The ship's supplies used up, my only food supply was a lonely coconut tree."

Trade Winds continues to play in the background as the camera pans from a shipwreck sitting high in the water, over to a series of rocks leading to a small island whose only feature is a hut on stilts with a ladder, and then another series of rocks, and finally another small island upon which stands the lonely coconut tree mentioned in the narration. Sam continues to spin his yarn as the camera zooms in on the island with the tree, saying "Gathering coconuts was a problem because of a dangerous, man-eating shark named Dopey Dick." (See? I got it from somewhere...)

Amongst the rocks, we see a shark's large black dorsal fin swim into view, ominously swirling about in a circular motion. Sam as Robinson Crusoe, on the island with the hut, walks to the edge of the water and looks around the rocks to gauge any potential places where the shark might be lying in wait for him. A closeup on the rocks reveals Dopey Dick to have his head up out of the water as he peers around one large rock to eye his intended prey. Sam does not see the giant fish, and so starts to hop in a rather cute way across the first few rocks, almost like a small child attempting a playground skipping game. Suddenly, he spins his head around behind him to see the shark advancing on him, snapping its jaws as it chases him across the remaining rocks to the other island!

Once there, the shark follows Sam straight up the low-bending trunk of the coconut tree, almost like a toothy guard dog. Far up the tree, Sam reaches to a hook on the trunk from which a large mallet hangs suspended. He starts to beat Dopey Dick hard on the head over and over again, yelling, "Back! Back! Back! Down, ya shark-livered varmint!" (Well, he is a shark, so it stands to reason he may be "shark-livered," unless he had some form of transplant.) Dopey Dick yelps sharply like a beaten dog and beats a hasty retreat to the safety of the ocean. "Danged ol' fin-flappin' flounder," mutters Sam as he hangs the mallet back onto its hook.

Sam pulls down a coconut and walks back to the rocks. He looks about for safety's sake, and seeing nothing, gingerly tiptoes onto the rocks. Almost immediately, there is a splash and Dopey Dick is giving him chase again, snapping his huge jaws over and over at Sam's heels. Sam reaches the shore of the other island, where he has a rack filled with numerous baseball bats, sitting there for the sole purpose (presumably) of smacking Dopey Dick on the head. Sam grabs some pine and charges back at the shark, who sees Sam coming and beats it once more for the ocean. "Twenty years tryin' and ya missed me again!" Ya shovel-nosed mackerel!" yells Sam, raising his fist at the water and then swinging his bat. "No good bushwhackin' barracuda!"

A short while later, we are shown a cookbook that reads 1000 Ways to Prepare Coconuts, and we then see Sam sitting down to a meal entirely comprised of them. At first, he seems happy with this spread: "Mmm... tossed coconut salad. Fresh coconut milk. New England boiled coconut." After he sniffs his main course and replaces the lid on the serving tray, he has a change of mind though. "Ooh... I HATES COCONUTS! Twenty years of coconuts! I can't stand coconuts!" He brushes the entire meal, dishes and all, away with an angry swipe of his stubby little forearm and then starts to beat his head hard against the bamboo support of his hut. All of a sudden though, he hears another voice in the near distance singing the song Trade Winds. It is the wonderful voice of Bugs Bunny, also provided by the talented Mel Blanc...

"Down where the trade winds play
Down where you lose the day
We found a new world where paradise starts..."

When Sam looks to the ocean, he sees (as we do too) a small box floating on the waves, in which Bugs Bunny is draped casually as he chews carrots one by one, leaving the carrot tops to float lazily in the water in his wake. Sam recognizes a stewing rabbit, of course, but calls out to the rabbit all friendly-like, summoning him to shore. Bugs is overjoyed at this, believing he is "saved at last" and starts to paddle in that direction. Soon, he is riding the box at the top of a large wave that threatens to crash down hard on Sam, but all that happens is that Bugs drops out of the box into Sam's waiting arms.

"Oh, boy! Dry land!" exclaims Bugs. "It sure feels good to be dry again!" But no sooner does he say this than Sam drops the critter into a large kettle sitting atop a bed of firewood. As Sam lights the fire, Bugs asks, "What's the big idea? What's up, doc?" Sam announces his intention to make rabbit stew out of Bugs and asks, "Get the idea?" and then laughs wickedly. Bugs response is to say he does get the idea and then starts to mock Sam's laugh, losing steam halfway through at the possibility of his own demise. Bugs asks how long until dinner is ready, and Sam tells him it will be just a few minutes, barring accidents. Bugs says, "Oops!" and pours an entire ladle of water from the kettle onto the firewood, putting out the fire. "Foist accident," he says calmly, tucking his hand under his chin as he rests his elbow on the edge of the pot. Sam is livid. "D'oh! Ya stupid id'jit rabbit! Don't ya know matches is scarce on this island?"

Sam now has to march across the rocks to the shipwreck to get another match. At the water's edge, he carefully starts to step onto the first small black rock, but it turns out to be Dopey Dick lying in wait for him. The shark snaps its jaws down hard, and when Sam pulls back his foot, the front half of his tiny brown boot is missing. He sticks a single toe out of what remains and has it look around the corner of the boot for more trouble. Finally, he sticks his remaining toes out with it. "Ha! Missed again, ya hammerhead halibut!" Sam picks up a small bone and whistles to the shark as if he were a pet dog. "Here, boy! Here, go get it!" He throws the bone towards the horizon and the shark speeds off after it. Sam races across the rocks to the ship and runs into the cabin. He opens the safe and then pulls out a small drawer, inside of which are numerous matches. Sam grabs a single match and then races back across the rocks.

When he reaches his island, he races back to the stewing kettle to relight the fire. But he suddenly realizes the rabbit is no longer in sight. When he goes to look over the edge of the kettle, the shark leaps up out of it and gulps Sam down its maw in a single gulp. Well, everything but Sam's legs, which carry Dopey Dick upside down around the island in a staggered, clumsy walk. Sam finally (somehow) is able to find a mallet and start bashing the shark in the head with it. Dopey Dick quickly leaps off of Sam's body and rushes yelping once more for the water, leaving Sam to bash himself in the face with the mallet several times, after which he is left seeing stars.

Once Sam finally gets his sights righted, he starts to wonder where the rabbit went. "Yoo-hoo!" yells Bugs, sitting out on Sam's ship. "Mr. Robinson!" (This is the first and only time that there is a direct reference to Sam having this name in the cartoon.) Sam sees where the rabbit is and goes bonkers. "I'll get ya, ya long-eared galoot!" he yells, "Shark or no shark!" Sam disappears from view and then runs back into frame with a surfboard. He dives into the water and doesn't make it very far until he realizes that he is sliding straight into the open, waiting mouth of Dopey Dick. After it closes its jaws, the head of the gigantic fish is contorted by Sam's efforts to free himself, and then he zips out, still lying on his surfboard, and he paddles fast for the shore.

Back on the ship, Bugs lies draped along the bow and sings a couple of lines from the then popular ballad, Secret Love (written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster)...

"Once I had a secret love
That lived within the heart of me.
All too soon my secret love 
Became impatient to be free..."

While Bugs croons, Sam makes preparations to attack the ship. He ties a large pink balloon to himself and says, "This time, I'll outsmart both of 'em!" He holds a wet finger in the air and realizes the wind is just right, and so Sam pushes a large rock off the string that ties him to the balloon so he can float into the air. When Sam starts to float down towards Bugs on the ship and cackles maniacally in victory, Bugs kicks open a hatch and Sam suddenly finds he is floating straight down towards Dopey Dick, who sits patiently down in the water inside the submerged hold. (It's actually a nice little detail that they remembered they were running around a shipwreck.) Bugs leans calmly on the hatch's edge as Dopey Dick and Sam duke it out in the water unseen. Finally, Sam comes up the stairs beating the shark away with a club while he yells, "Down, down, down, ya sharp-toothed salmon!"

Sam shuts the door to the stairwell, and then goes after Bugs who is hopping lightly across the rocks to the island. Sam catches up to him and grabs the varmint. He throws Bugs back into the kettle, relights the fire, and then picks up his cookbook for instructions. Bugs points behind Sam and shouts, "Look, it's a tidal wave!" but Sam doesn't believe him, thinking it is meant as a distraction. (To be fair, Bugs does say it somewhat insincerely, probably his worst line reading.) Sam yells back at the rabbit, "Shaddup and start simmerin'!!" but as soon as he does, Sam hears the loud rush of water behind his back. There is a neat shot of the silhouetted pair against the massive wave heading in their direction, and then they are swept away, with Bugs still inside the kettle.

"Holy, carrot sticks!" says Bugs in astonishment. "The island's gone!" Sam swims up screaming for help as the shark chases him in circles around the kettle. He begs the rabbit to pull him in, and Bugs agrees, telling Sam to "keep his shoit on!" Bugs pulls a boat hook out of the kettle (who knew he had one of those?) and lifts Sam out of the water by his shirt. Sam demands to be pulled into the kettle, but Bugs wants to cut a deal. Sam refuses so Bugs puts him back into the water. Sam swiftly agrees to the deal, and the next thing we see is Sam slowly paddling the kettle through the water as he hangs from the end of the hook, still several feet out of the kettle. Dopey Dick follows close behind, his dorsal fin sticking up out of the water. "After all, a deal's a deal," says Bugs. They pass a sign that reads, "San Francisco – 2736 Miles". As Dopey Dick chases them, Sam starts to paddle even faster towards the horizon as California, Here I Come is played on the soundtrack. Iris out.

I find Rabbitson Crusoe a lot more fun now than I did when I was younger, and that probably has something to do with the end of my close obsession only with Chuck Jones cartoons in my early days (though, honestly, when I watched them on Saturday mornings, the individual shorts did not have credits). But I could tell the different styles apart, and it turned out that the Warner Bros. cartoons which I revered the most in childhood were the Jones' offerings. I also loved a lot of the Friz Freleng shorts as well, but this one got booted aside. Now, I find it completely endearing, and as I mentioned earlier, Dopey Dick is the main reason.

This is one of the rare earlier cartoons where the shark is a fully developed main character along with the other two in the film. He gets fairly equal screentime with the Bugs and Sam, and is given a chance to be both sinister and funny as well. Like any hungry predator in a Warner Bros. cartoon, we simultaneously want Dopey Dick to succeed in his life's mission but also want him to fail in largely comic ways. Sam is so annoying and downright villainous in his own right that he completely deserves to be eaten by Dopey Dick, far more so than Bugs deserves to be eaten by Sam. After all, according to Sam's own dialogue, Dopey Dick has been trying for some twenty years to capture his prey. Why shouldn't he?

As for design, this is one of my favorite cartoon sharks. He does get to give a couple of early menacing looks, but for the most part, Dopey Dick is kind of goofy looking. Especially in profile, with his grandly elongated snout and widely spaced teeth that hang down almost like vampire's fangs, though there are usually three to five of them. There are couple of shots where it almost appears as if his dorsal fin works like a hat atop his head rather than in the middle of back, which is easier to do when your mouth is drawn in most cases to take up anywhere from the front third to a full half of your body length. (Those shots also happen to be when he is standing on his tail and his back is arched, which further adds to the impression of a sharp, pointed hat resting atop a big bald head.) His is a really simple design, but quite effective, and adds a lot to the comedy, where he is just rubbery enough to get some good reactions to Sam's outbursts of reactive violence. Another nice touch is the constant reminder that the shark really serves as some sort of stray dog loose in Sam's neighborhood, and Sam has adjusted his own behavior (and thus, the shark's) accordingly. Naming the shark Dopey Dick after yet another literary monument, that of Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville, is also rather a fun move.

In bringing this back around to Robinson Crusoe, a quick search of the novel online finds no mention of the word "shark" within its text, and I also did searches for the word "fish," thinking that Defoe, writing in an earlier age where the word "shark" was not quite as prevalent or even immediately as prone to invoking fear, might have opted for "giant fish" or some other such sobriquet. No such luck, just some mentions of being taught to fish in his youth, etc. It really does appear that I will need to sit right back down and actually reread Robinson Crusoe once again to get my query resolved for good.

If only I had a decent copy lying around...

RTJ

[Editor's note: Rabbitson Crusoe has yet to appear on DVD or Blu-ray from Warner Bros. It was released on laserdisc and VHS back in the day, though I am unable to locate my own VHS copy for whatever reason. It does appear online in a couple of places, but I am unwilling to link directly to them in this post as they do not appear on YouTube. You can do a search and find them. If you do, keep in mind that one version out there on Vimeo is fully dubbed in Italian, which makes for a really interesting contrast against the English version. Have fun with that.]