Hello my friends and welcome back for another selection of classic cartoons.
First up comes a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, The Wacky Wabbit (1942). This film was directed by Bob Clampett. The Warner Brothers directors all had their slightly different versions of Bugs Bunny. While Chuck Jones' Bugs would only attack once provoked, Clampett's made characters his victim simply for his own amusement. Elmer Fudd had done nothing to Bugs in this cartoon, but Bugs picks on Elmer simply for the heck of it. Yet Bugs does not come off as an unlikable or evil character here. Part of this is that he comes off as a childlike prankster instead of malicious. He is having so much fun with his pranks that we have a lot of fun watching them. A review in The Film Daily stated "Bugs Bunny grows in stature with every new Merrie Melodie release. He bids fair to become as funny as any character now in animated cartoons. The smart showman should grab this short."
Up next is a Silly Symphony, you are probably not going to see on Disney+ anytime soon for reasons that become abundantly clear from the title, Cannibal Capers (1930). For the previous couple years, two of the main contributors to the Disney shorts had been director/animator Ub Iwerks and musical director Carl Stalling. These two had played an incredibly important role when it came forming what a Disney cartoon was at this point. The two both left around the same time and rather suddenly. It would have been understandable to think this would be the beginning of the end of Disney animation. Yet as we all know this could not have been further from the truth. The fact that Disney cartoons would still remain of the high quality they had been earlier was already evident from this short, the first Silly Symphony without the work of these two men. Burt Lewis takes over the music and does an excellent job with a very peppy and fun soundtrack that is simply a joy to listen to. The direction is taken over by Burt Gillett, who would become one of the finest directors of Silly Symphonies (he directed the infamous Three Little Pigs (1933)). The animation is done by a crew of legendary Disney animators including Les Clark, Norm Ferguson, Dave Hand, Jack King, Ben Sharpsteen, Johnny Cannon, Tom Palmer, Wilfred Jackson and Floyd Gottfredson (who is better known to Disney fans for his work on the Mickey Mouse comic strip). The cartoon also features some of those early cartoon-y impossible gags (that I love), which would be absent from later Silly Symphonies.
Now one of this world's greatest intellectual minds, Mr. Peabody, gives a history lesson on the pony express.
While I love Disney's version of Cinderella, if there is one thing that version is missing it is clearly Mighty Mouse. Luckily the Terrytoon, The Magic Slipper (1948) has Mighty Mouse.
As promised here is the next episode of Ruff and Reddy. Come back next week to see what happens next to our heroes.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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