🐷A Pig at the Opera (Pre-Code cartoon)

 

This slightly naughty pre-Code cartoon features a character jumping up and down on an operatic pig`s huge bosom, I wonder if this sort of animation was actually meant for children. Perhaps, like pre-Code Betty Boop and those military characters (Private SNAFU or whatever his name was), they were geared towards the adult audience eating their popcorn and waiting for the Gary Cooper movie to begin.

Olive Oyl's Beauty Treatment

 

Olive Oyl's beauty routine, which is as detailed and transformative as Cleopatra's. Well, maybe not. But she could lend herself out as a cooling device. 

The Picnic Panic: deeply surreal

I have always found this old cartoon gorgeously surreal. The deeply-saturated colors, the shining pastel faces of the little girls, the hokey music and chorus - not to mention the unlikely characters - lend it a certain unrealistic charm. Of course animation is an obsession with me - I even try my hand at it myself sometimes, with disastrous results. 

I kept wondering WHAT the opening song reminded me of - it drove me crazy! - until it occurred to me: By a Waterfall, Busby Berkeley's incredible aquatic number in Footlight Parade, one of my all-time favorite movies. It's also a little like Wedding of the Painted Doll from Broadway Melody, which I will also post below. The fragment of animation looks very similar to the first cartoon, but as usual with YouTube, it's just a bleeding chunk. I can't trace it back to anything.

Special bonus video! Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell sing Pettin' in the Park, which has a similar dut-da dut-da dut-da dut-da DA-DAA rhythm to it. They also sang an awkward version of By a Waterfall, but I couldn't find it anywhere. You think Elizabeth Holmes has a deep voice? Wait until you hear Ruby Keeler. She can no more sing than she can dance, and yet she was a huge star. Maybe it was those puppy-dog eyes.

And just one more! This is one of my favorite numbers from Footlight Parade, Honeymoon Hotel. Even by today's standards, it's pretty racy, though in a cheerful, lighthearted way that makes it a lot more fun and less "illicit" (though it's all about forbidden sexual rendezvous(es) and how nobody feels any guilt about them at all).

As always, it's a good idea to watch these on YouTube rather than these little squares (which actually serve as thumbnails that play). Click on the bottom right. You can also go full-screen - click on full-screen! - but it might turn out kind of blurry 'cause it's old-fashioned low-rez.)

Black and white in colour: the enigma of Jingles

One of the strangest things I've ever seen. This purports to be a Christmas cartoon, and has a Christmas beginning sort of stuck on, but after that it's just bad animation. But it's fascinatingly bad. It doesn't seem to have a label on it. It's one of those no-name things, like that atrocious Wizard of Oz cartoon that no one can trace. 

I think this must have been a dry run for something, because it announces itself as A Musical Sketch in Color. Below the title is a reference to Mendelssohn's Spring Song - even less Christmassy! It's possible this was GOING to be a color cartoon, as it mentions something called Brewster Color, but it wasn't quite there yet, so "whoever" slapped a different label on it and hustled it out as a Christmas thing. It's shorter than most cartoons of the era, which were closer to eight minutes. 

This has elements of Fleischer in that material objects constantly come to life, usually in the most florid manner possible. A train turns into a caterpillar, which turns into a violin-playing butterfly. A bug plays a spiderweb like a harp to impress his ladybug love. It's bad Disney, or worse than that, a badly-smudged copy of a copy of a Fleischer cartoon that wasn't quite finished yet, but needed to be released because the bank was about to foreclose.

I actually like bad animation, in moderation at least. I've watched this a lot of times because it's so odd, so incomprehensible. I can't find any backstory on it at all, except a couple of names that lead me nowhere. Not exactly giants in the field of animation.

BUT WAIT! Suddenly, there's more.

If you ditch the Jingles, which never belonged there in the first place, and keep sifting through YouTube, you'll see that this was, indeed, a color cartoon by someone named Cy Young. The proper title was Mendelssohn's Spring Song. Young must have been a bona fide animator, though I can't find much about him. This cartoon appeared in several different places on YouTube, but  under the Spring Song title which did not match the only title I knew (the nonsensical Jingles). The main colors in Brewster Color appear to be red and green, so maybe the Christmas connection works after all.

But look what else! This, from an old undated website written by an animation scholar:

Mendelssohn's Spring Song-1931- A "Jingles" cartoon (only one made) animated by (Sy) Cy Young and a handful of art students. Young went on to head the special Effects department at Walt Disney Studios, doing some amazing work on Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi. Reportedly, this is the film that gave Disney the idea to hire Young. Animated in New York, it was the first animation experience for Lillian Freedman, who was the first woman to work as an animator in the Studio system, at Fleischers. Brewster color was a two-color process that was patented in 1931 but only used in a handful of cartoons. (perhaps this film was a test?) Young moved back to New York after the strike at Disneys, working on commercials. Shamus Culhane told a friend of mine (Les Brooks) that Cy changed his name to "SY" to protect his ethnicity (sy, after all, could be Sylvester!). Cy commited suicide in 1959. Transferred from the only known print.

I am still confused by "A Jingles cartoon (only one made)", implying a series. But what kind of series: Christmas cartoons? If not, why is the theme music Jingle Bells? Some prints have two title pages, which is even more nonsensical. I wonder if this was ever shown anywhere. Or was it a sort of audition for Disney (which obviously worked)?

The tie-in with Disney and Fleischer interests me, because to me this just doesn't have the quality or charm of either studio. But Disney must have seen something in it, perhaps something he wanted and needed. Is it possible all those twittery florid nature cartoons sprang from this? Did he even invent the genre? 

At any rate, Cy Young had a sad end. Though this snippet didn't say so, he was Chinese-American and no doubt felt the sting and limitations of racism. It's yet another anomaly that he changed his name from Cy to Sy. How would that disguise his Asian heritage? Cy isn't Chinese at all.

But this, at least, is something to remember him by.

Out of the inkwell, into my dreams