Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: June 24, 1938
Stars: Hunky and Spunky
Rating: ★
Review:

Hunky and Spunky © Max Fleischer

Hunky and Spunky are two donkeys. Hunky, the large black one, teaches her child Spunky, a little brown one, to open cacti by kicking them apart.

A little later Hunky goes to sleep, while Spunky plays with a little rabbit. Unfortunately, he’s caught by an evil red-nosed man who uses the little ass to carry his heavy load. Luckily, Hunky comes to the rescue to Hunky’s cries for help. She kicks both the man and his house to another hill, and all is fine.

Absolutely nothing is remotely interesting in this cartoon, let alone funny. The two characters form arguably the most forgettable cartoon duo of all time. Even Fleischer’s tabletop is not present (I was wrong about this as Chad points out below – the cartoon starts with a tabletop scene). The result is a sweet, but utterly boring cartoon, which starts and ends with a gentle country song.

The Fleischer studio had outstayed the Van Beuren studio and Ub Iwerks’s studio, but with films like these one almost can feel them losing the game, not only to the leading Disney studio, but also to the much peppier Warner Bros. studio. Nevertheless, ‘Hunky and Spunky’ got an Academy Award nomination (which it luckily lost to Disney’s ‘Ferdinand the Bull‘), and so this ill-conceived pair would star no less than six other cartoons, and lasted until 1941.

Watch ‘Hunky and Spunky’ yourself and tell me what you think:

‘Hunky and Spunky’ is available on the DVD-set ‘Somewhere in Dreamland – Max Fleischer’s Color Classics: The Definitive Collection’

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