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

Baby Bottleneck (1946)

Baby Bottleneck (Warner Bros. Looney Tunes, 1946)
Dir.: Robert Clampett
Cel Bloc Rating: 8/9

While visiting Zootopia twice upon its release at our local theatre, Jen and I were subjected cruelly to several trailers for upcoming films of variable quality. Amongst these long-running torture devices was a preview for a future Warner Bros. feature titled Storks. My friends can have all the babies they want; that is fine. But speaking for ourselves, neither one of us cares a whit for babies, or the ridiculousness of "baby culture". We are not the ones to ask if we would like to hold your newborn. When the kid can amble about and hold something close to an actual conversation, then call Uncle Rik and Auntie Jen, but not before then. So, the "wacky" antics taking place in a factory that seems to manufacture and prepare newborn brats for their trips via stork into the arms of their parents was pretty much lost on us.

That said, the animation looked fine, the film carries the Warner Bros. pedigree, and Kelsey Grammar's booming, pretension-soaked voice as the stork narrating the trailer seemed like appropriate casting. Plus, though unknown to me the first time I saw the trailer, the co-director and writer is Nicholas Stoller, who still has some cachet with me because of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, and Muppets Most Wanted. (I will ignore the underwhelming Neighbors for the time being.) And the other co-director is Doug Sweetland, who gave us the magnificent Pixar short, Presto (the one with the magician and the rabbit in the hat). However, forcing a supposedly cute, giggling, red-haired baby on us after the title is displayed at the end of the trailer did nothing to make me any more excited about seeing the film. It is more than likely that I will end up seeing Storks anyway, though, since I usually end up seeing most major animated feature film releases at some point.

So, my initial (and secondary) reaction to the Storks trailer is really not all that important in regards to my seeing it, but there was something that I did notice while watching it that I feel should be mentioned. In the teaser trailer, the Grammar stork (well-dressed in pressed shirt and tie) regales us of the importance of the stork's unique relationship to human infant deliveries throughout history. As he continues to bluster through his speech, swearing how his factory will not falter in their aims and goals, a skinny, red-haired girl struggles to keep a succession of giggling infants from falling off a conveyor belt in the human infant factory. Her ceaseless but panicked devotion to this task is completely reminiscent of I Love Lucy and the famed chocolate assembly line routine, except this particular red-haired girl never tries to stuff several babies in her mouth like Lucy did with the chocolates. But the inspiration is clear. Or is it?

Because Storks is a Warner Bros. film, and because it is animation, and finally because it deals with a baby assembly line run by storks, isn't the real inspiration for this upcoming film actually Baby Bottleneck? Second question: do you remember -- or even know -- what Baby Bottleneck is? 1946. Bob Clampett classic. Baby factory. Storks go on strike. Daffy Duck and Porky Pig are brought in to run the place. Things go crazy on the assembly line. Raymond Scott's Powerhouse is played relentlessly as the machinery goes nuts and chaos reigns supreme.

Yeah, that Baby Bottleneck. I am sure you have seen it at some point. If you haven't, I assume you must be of a certain age, but definitely not of the same certain age that I am. I saw this film a lot over several decades, and in my natural course of things, I just automatically assume that others out there have the same influences as me. How could you not? Well, that is just a silly concept from the start, because such a thing is well nigh an impossibility. Even my little brothers, who saw most of the same things and heard much of the same music I did growing up (even though we were each separated by a few years in age), don't love and don't dislike all of the same things that I do.

I often tend to write like my readers, even brand new ones, are all on the same page as I am. I automatically jump to the conclusion that everyone has the exact love for a film like Baby Bottleneck that I do, and grew up seeing it dozens and dozens of times as I did. As a result, I can sometimes seem as if I am blind to the fact that others may feel differently or have never seen a film like Baby Bottleneck. And, more and more, I should expect that to be the case, given that much of the internet audience is very often younger than I am. There are entire generations that need to discover these films for themselves, and I should welcome them in to the fold.

So, perhaps I should write about Baby Bottleneck with the approach that I will hopefully hit a goldmine of younger readers who have never seen the film before. They will see the graphic on Twitter, click on the link, read or at least skim this article, convince them that they simply must see this film at once, watch the film, then watch the film forty straight times, and become Bob Clampett fans for life. It's a reasonable assumption, because if they didn't become Bob Clampett fans for life, then they surely must have something broken inside their pathetic little shells. (Well, there I go again...)

Before my inner workings blow a gasket, let's discuss the film itself. At the start of Baby Bottleneck, after the credits flash by over a nicely decorated title background showing a baby rattle, toy block, and rubber ball, we see the front page of the Daily News, where the headlines are read by a narrator. In his newsman-style tone, he reads: "Unprecedented Demand for Babies Overworks Stork." It is now that I should point out that Baby Bottleneck was produced by Warner Bros. in 1946, at the start of a period known famously as the post-World War II baby boom. If you are wondering where the generational term "baby boomer" came from, this is it. If you aren't my age or older, then it is possible that your parents are baby boomers. Or your grandparents.

A lot of economic and social specifics are applied to the reasoning behind the uptick in births beginning in 1946, but what it really boils down to is: everybody in America was super-horny after the war ended. Soldiers leaving the European and Pacific theatres; women leaving the industrialized war machine workforce and returning to their homes as housewives again. My own mother was born in 1945, missing the distinction of being a baby boomer by a year, and I barely got in as one being born in 1964. I'm not proud of the designation; I never have been. I've always liked to point that out since I have tried hard to not actually behave like the stereotypical boomer. Sure, I have a penchant for misplaced nostalgia and a taste for trivia, like any boomer. But otherwise... no 3.2 kids for me. No worshipping of the Reaganite '80s and trickle-down economics. No home owned in the suburbs. No midlife crisis red Corvettes. Doesn't make me any better or worse. It just wasn't my idea of life.

Getting back to the start of Baby Bottleneck, people are getting their rocks off like mad and causing problems for the stork. Not storks... stork. Singular. Apparently, there is one stork responsible for delivering ALL of the world's babies. Well, no wonder he is exhausted. (People can't keep it in their pants for a second, which is doubly amazing since so much of the world is just too damn ugly to be allowed to do it. But I digress...) The stork in this film is about as close as you can get to a Jimmy Durante type, with a very bulbous and enlarged beak. We find this particular bird at -- where else? -- the Stork's Club nightspot, where he is pretty much a puddle on the floor underneath a nightclub table. Drunk off his derriere, the stork swings and attempts to pour a bottle of hooch unsuccessfully into his glass, while mumbling out loud -- in a very Durante-like voice and vocabulary -- to anyone that can hear him. "I'm mortified! I'm disgust-i-pated! I do all the woik and da fadduhs get all da credit! Ummm-briago!"

Our narrator returns to read the next portion of the paper: "Inexperienced help being used to make emergency deliveries." We next see a rather dopey looking pooch who is able to remain aloft high in the air through means of a propeller tail. In his mouth, he grips a pair of baby-bearing bundles that are tied together, and another such pair in his front paws. Tied to his collar is a string that allows him to pull a toy airplane behind him with another baby animal in its cockpit and another paired bundle hanging from the plane. The string continues from the back of the tiny plane across the screen to a small baby animal sitting on a wooden baby scooter that is pulled along through the air behind the whole lot.

A quartet of crows grip tightly to the trunk, tail, and ears of a sweet baby elephant. Next, we spy a pelican that has been pressed into service. He walks past us with his prodigiously sized mouth full of several other babies (none of them fish I might add, or there could be trouble). The pelican is only able to move along through a helpful red balloon that is tied to his tail-feathers and a small wagon riding beneath his filled mouth. Directly behind the pelican is a tiny mouse who is seen dragging along a baby rhinoceros. The mouse, straining with all his might, stops to pant several times in a hurried and exaggerated fashion before taking up his bundle again.

The narrator read, "Naturally, some slight mistakes have been made," and so begins a series of mismatched familial pairings brought on by the disappearance of the stork. A mother goose has been handed a baby skunk, and has to clothespin her nose closed to escape the noxious fumes emanating from her false child. A baby kitten is delivered to a mother duck, who implores the kitten to take swimming lessons in the pond next to them, quite against the basic instincts of her false offspring, who hisses and fights in a desperate attempt to remain dry. "Baby gorilla to Mrs. Kangaroo" reveals just that: an enormous, furry child who beats the spectacle-wearing marsupial several times in the head, much to the mother's dismay.

A baby hippo is delivered to a Scotty dog, who sits in a rocking chair singing "Rockabye, Baby" to the gargantuan child until, with the line "When the bough breaks," the rocking chair shatters under the weight. The Scotty, with the usual brogue, sticks his snout out from under the hippo's bottom and finishes singing, "The cradle will fall!" A baby alligator is delivered to a mother pig, and the reptile, not realizing that it doesn't need milk from its mother, seeks to find an open teat on the mother pig, though the other piglets keep closing their bodies together and make it impossible. The gator then uses his elongated body to push and stretch out a gap in the middle of the hungry piglets, but just as Baby Gator is about to snap down hard on his mother, she stops him. [At this point, there is an odd cut that occurs in all known versions of Baby Bottleneck, where the film jumps to the next scene just as the mother pig is about to say something. According to director Clampett in an interview conducted years before his death, the line was supposed to be "Uh-uh! Don't touch that dial!" but it was actually cut by the censors for whatever reason they felt was appropriate. The scene is now considered to be lost.] Finally, a father mouse has to deal with being the papa of a baby cat. (Different from the "baby kitten" we saw earlier with the mother duck exactly how?) The baby cat seems to be torn between catching his father and just batting at him in a way that is clearly frightening to a lifelong cat-fearer.

It is finally revealed by the narrator/paper that "Porky Pig to Handle All Stork's Problems," with the additional phrase, "Appoint Daffy Duck Assistant Traffic Manager". We see an outside shot of the Storks, Inc. building, a big blue tower that confusedly (it must be a mistake), as the camera zooms in ever closer, shows the small, silhouetted forms of numerous storks flying off in all directions with baby bundles clasped in their beaks. (Wasn't there just one stork and isn't he on strike?) 

At a bank of several upright, candlestick telephones, Daffy Duck, resplendent in a clerk's cap set at various odd angles throughout the picture, leaps from phone to phone and answers the calls of worried, prospective fathers, some of them quite famous. "No, I'm sorry, Bing! You've used up your quota!" and "Oh, oh yes, Mr. Cantor! You say you haven't got that boy yet? Well, if at first you don't succeed...!" Finally, there is a call from a famous father from the Great White North. "Who? Mr. Dionne?" (He being the father of the famous Dionne Quintuplets of Ontario, the first known identical quintuplets in history, who were confiscated from their parents by the Canadian government and exploited for the first nine years of their lives.) At Mr. Dionne's most likely outsized request, Daffy responds, "Mister Di-onne! Puh-lease!" with extra spitting at the end. The calls continue hard and quick, and Daffy slowly starts to lose his once happy composure, finally yelling "QUIET!!!" at everything around him.

Porky mans (or is it "pigs"?) the Control Room monitor board. Using his microphone like he is an air traffic controller, Porky calls the various flights leaving the facility for status updates. "Come in, Royden Stork... Come in there, Storky..." he says, invoking the actual name of one of Jimmy Dolittle's pilots in the famous Dolittle Raid over Japan in World War II. Sure enough, Porky next says, "O.K. for takeoff, Jimmy Doo... doo... eh-da eh-da eh-da, doo.. Do-quite-a-little!" Another clerk in the factory, a dog character, strides in by smashing a hole through the door to show Porky his latest invention that will help the company. "It'll speed up deliveries one billion percent! It's a Luuuuu-lu!" The dog has a large firework strapped about his waist, which he lights in anticipation of rocketing out the window. But, of course, it explodes instead, leaving him nothing but a charred, smoky mess. "Well, back to the drawing board!" he proclaims, and struts back out of the Control Room.

An alarm goes off, and Daffy yells out, "FULL STEAM AHEAD!" Porky is standing next to a conveyor belt upon which are sitting the babies of several species of animals, including a dachshund and a very Tweety-like canary bird. He pulls a lever to start the machinery, and the babies shoot forward on the belt. A large baby hippo wearing a pink bow and bonnet set is screaming wildly, but then stops when it turns to look at the camera, and paraphrases Lou Costello's famous line by saying coyly, "I'm only three and a half seconds old!" She then continues to cry at the top of her lungs.

A hand comes out of the machinery to flip babies with a spatula after another arm pats them with a large powderpuff. Another pair of machine hands ties diapers onto the babies, but is stymied when it comes to doing up a turtle child. It pauses, and the box from which the arms shoot out briefly gets a face of its own. It taps its head and considers the situation, then has a light bulb and the word "IDEA" appear above it, before it pops open the turtle shell, gently places the turtle inside onto the diaper, pins it (with the biggest safety pin imaginable), and then puts it back in the shell. A large egg is also diapered, and then another another egg gets the powder treatment.

Next comes the milking station, where each baby's tummy is filled up to capacity by a gasoline-style nozzle. Baby after baby gets fed, but once again, there are complications because of the turtle (who also, like the baby gator does not require milk). The nozzle goes straight into the turtle shell, and milk spills out of it in several places. Finally, the turtle shell pops open, as an angry young turtle uses a bucket to bail out his home. He curses wildly at the milk station machine as he does so.

A very shapely dress mannequin is next in line, which picks up each succeeding baby and pats it on the back until it gives a satisfied burp. The third recipient of this behavior is one of the eggs, which too gets patted, but when the burp comes out, a large bump appears at the top of the egg.

More babies get fed, but one of the babies is turned over the wrong direction, and gets sprayed in the rear end instead. This causes the Control Room monitor board to display the word "TILT" in large red letters, and for all manner of alarms to go off at the same time, frightening Porky into immediate action. He reverses the machine, sending the sprayed baby backwards along the belt and into a washtub. The baby is scrubbed and hung on a line to dry.

Porky starts to check the delivery tags for babies about to be sent out to their parents. There is one for Akron and another for Hollywood, but suddenly, a stray egg seems to have no tag. Porky calls Daffy to his side and asks him to sit on the egg to find out to whom it belongs. Daffy (whose cap by this point has reached comically large proportions in relation to the rest of his body) wants nothing to do with this. "Oh, no-no-no-no! Sitting on eggs is out! O-W-T! Out!" He turns his back to Porky in protest, and strides off singing, "You must have been a beautiful baby!" Porky runs up and grabs Daffy by the throat, orders him to sit on it, and tries to push his butt down onto the egg. Daffy bounces his butt all over the place to avoid touching the egg, and finally, he climbs on top of Porky's head, screaming "Sufferin' Succotash!" in the manner which we normally attribute to Sylvester the Cat. (Same voice actor, Mel Blanc, and there are always similarities in both of their voices anyway.)

Daffy leaps off of Porky's head, and then pushes him backwards towards the egg. Porky, too, tries as hard as he can not to actually touch the egg, which results in his bending completely backwards in an arch over the egg, held up only by the tip of his tongue on the ground. Daffy takes advantage of this, making his distinctive "Woo-hoo" noise over and over and jumping up and down on top of Porky's arched belly. Daffy pulls out a large board and smacks Porky on the rear end, and then capers in front of the egg before running away. 

But Porky grabs one of Daffy's legs, and the duck's leg gets pulled out to about a hundred times its normal length. At one point, Daffy runs out one door and through another, doubling back to see that his foot still remains in the pig's clutches. When Porky lets go, there is a slapping noise as the foot snaps back into his body, coiling up momentarily like a spring, and then spilling out limp onto the floor. As Porky charges the duck, Daffy tries to reel his leg back in to his body, but doesn't have enough time. He leaps onto the conveyor belt and takes several awkward steps in his run forward, one foot on the belt, and the other farther down on the ground due to the extreme length of the leg. Finally, as Porky nears him, Daffy doffs his cap, pulls a feather on top of his head, and the leg snaps back to its normal position.

Just then, Porky and Daffy react in fear as they realize they are trapped in the baby preparation machine. Porky's clothes get caught and shredded in the gears of the machine, and his pink and naked body looks like nothing more than a newborn infant. As they start to go through the normal steps of the machine -- powdering, diapering, etc. -- their attempts to escape cause the machine to go into overdrive and confuse it into thinking the pig and the duck are part of one baby. It bonks Daffy on the head with a small hammer and slaps a baby bonnet on his head. The machine's unit hands then smash Porky and Daffy together and diaper and pin them in place, with the pig inside the diaper with his legs poking out, and with Daffy as the top half of the body.

The machinery then shoots the now conjoined pair into the delivery room, where they are dropped into a delivery bundle, and then shot off into wild blue wonder in the beak of a stork-shaped rocket. We see the Earth from space with the continent of Africa highlighted by text on its surface. Next, a mother gorilla is shown knitting patiently next to a rocking cradle carved out of a tree trunk. She hears the rocket and then the whistling drop of something coming in her direction, and she knows it must be her baby. She picks up the cradle and tries to position it to best catch the infant, but the force of the fall causes the Daffy-Porky to smash through the cradle and into the ground.

Dazed and disoriented, Daffy starts crying when he sees his "mother". The gorilla picks him up gently and places him in a crib made of banana leaves. As she looks down at her baby, she is shocked to see Porky peek out from under the diaper with his big eyes, and when he says, "Boo!" she instantly leaps away. Calmly picking up her telephone and calling the local radio station, the mother gorilla (voiced by Sara Berner) says, "Mr. Anthony? I have a problem!" She starts crying wildly with a large open mouth. Iris out.

Like many of the Warner Bros. shorts of the '30s and '40s (and especially the wartime ones), Baby Bottleneck is rife with references specific to its time, most of which I have mentioned as I went along. The Mr. Anthony gag at the end is a nod to one Lester Kroll, who under the name of John J. Anthony (derived from combining the names of his sons) dispensed common sense advice to those who needed help (sometimes psychologically) on several radio programs in those days, including his most famous outlet, The Goodwill Hour.

Also, well used here is Raymond Scott's swinging composition Powerhouse, taken from its jazz band settings and given the full orchestral treatment by Warner Bros. house composer Carl Stalling. Powerhouse was used many times over here and there by Stalling from the late '40s and through the '50s, especially any time that large machinery or a factory is included in a plotline, but when I think of the film where it used most effectively of all, it is Baby Bottleneck. So powerful is my connection of song to film that even when I listen to the original version of the song, absolutely unconnected to Warner Bros. cartoons, I immediately bring Baby Bottleneck to mind.

But while then-current references and swing music may add some personality to the proceedings, what makes this film truly special are those elements that Bob Clampett showed us in cartoon after cartoon in his Warner days. A massive amount of gags crammed into a six-minute-plus short, one after the other without a discernible break to catch one's breathe. An exquisite sense of speed; not just comic timing and pacing (both of which Clampett had in spades), but a real talent for showing the immeasurable swiftness of his characters or other objects. Of having his characters move swiftly in and out of surroundings and of not just being merely "animated," but actually creating what appears to be real motion as we would normally perceive it in our three-dimensional world. On top of this, add a sense of humor so outrageous that no gag is beyond him, even being able to give his audience a taste of true surrealism (Porky in Wackyland, as his most famous example) or for allowing us the chance to believe that Daffy Duck's leg is capable of stretching to ridiculous proportions. And that he is able to set it back into place through the pulling of a feather on his head.

And about that leg... Clampett may be my favorite Daffy director. As much as I love the way Chuck Jones employed him in concert with Bugs over the years, that version of the character, despite the variations of gun blasts to his face and the redrawing of his body by unseen hands, still was largely achieved through smart but still rather staid posturing and some keen writing (as well as Blanc's vocal artistry). In Clampett's hands, Daffy is a far different duck, almost totally unhinged. It's somewhat akin to the early Martin and Lewis films where Jerry Lewis is this manic ball of energy that you swear is going to explode at any second. We can argue about whether you find him funny or not (for me, earlier is better), but Lewis -- on a physical level and as pure energetic will -- is a force of nature in many of those films. Here, too, Daffy is almost unstoppable until the circumstances of the story get in his way. He zips here and there, answers multiple phones simultaneously, stretches and twists and leaps and hops and dances. His every movement is as rubbery and unconfined as possible, aided greatly by the fact that Clampett and his animators seem to have given him about 2000 different facial expressions in Baby Bottleneck. His is the manic and bouncy Daffy that I love the most, contorting his body wildly while "woo-hooing" his way into my heart.

What is unlikely to do anything remotely concerned with my heart, apart from causing to cease beating, is Storks. Since I started writing this piece, I have since seen a full trailer for the film, and it veers wildly away from the baby factory concept (though that still seems to be the main setting) and has a great many more characters involved in the shenanigans in the film, none of which seemed particularly interesting to me. I will still probably end up seeing the film eventually, but I will probably not be that excited about doing so. Mainly, it's the babies in the trailer, each one designed to exude the maximum cuteness to the audience, and all of it fails to work on me because I do not find human babies cute the least little bit. This probably proves that I was never meant to be a dad, that is for sure, and the course of my life -- even with two marriages -- has proven that to be a fact.

And so my initial theory that perhaps Warner Bros. was "ripping off" (a term that I despise actively, but purposeful here) their own Baby Bottleneck and the late Bob Clampett? Probably misplaced, but I am going to keep a wary eye out when I do see the film. If there is even the slightest nod to Baby Bottleneck -- a drunk stork, a stork strike, a visit to the Stork Club, a pig and a duck working somewhere in the background -- my suspicions will be roused anew. And if they work in a quick bit of Powerhouse, then the truth will be known.

RTJ