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Directors: William Hanna & Joseph Barbera
Airing date: December 14, 1962
Stars: The Flintstones
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
‘Dial “S” for Suspicion’ starts with Fred having applied for a job at the exclusive Stone Valley Inn. As Fred has lied about his degrees and his ability to speak Spanish, one can guess where the episode will head to, but the story takes a surprise turn, in which Fred gets suspicious about his wife to downright paranoid.
It’s almost unbelievable that this sophisticated comedy of errors comes from the same writers as the silly slapstick from ‘Nuthin’ but the Tooth’. When the different characters are played against each other, the Flintstones episodes are so much finer. Fred’s paranoia is enhanced by the score, which features some eerie organ music in several scenes.
The stone age gags are less inspired and consist of a monkey and a mammoth functioning as a shower, a long-billed bird as a can opener, and a particularly silly checkerboard turtle. The designs, too, are erratic, and in some scenes, Fred’s design is downright poor.
Watch an excerpt from ‘Dial “S” for Suspicion’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is The Flintstones Season Three episode 14
To the previous The Flintstones episode: High School Fred
To the next Flintstones episode: Flashgun Freddie
‘Dial “S” for Suspicion’ is available on the Blu-Ray ‘The Flintstones – The Complete Series’ and the DVD-box ‘The Flintstones Season 3’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: January 27, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Dooley
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Misguided Missile’ starts with a familiar Woody Woodpecker trope of Woody being hungry and looking for food.
In the first scene we watch him picking with a bunch of pigeons, until he says ‘this is for the birds’, and tries to steal a man’s lunch box. When this fails, Woody immediately turns his attention to the ‘Jobs wanted’ page in the newspaper the man is reading, looking for a “Job for Goldbrickers”, as a super salesman selling insurance. Woody even dresses like a skunk to get the job, in a sequence that is reminiscent of a similar scene in Carl Barks’s comic ‘Land of the Totem Poles’ (1950).
In his new profession as a travelling salesman he tries to sell Dooley an insurance policy. This sequence forms the highlight of the cartoon, as Woody reads to Dooley which calamities the insurance covers, which promptly make these happen to the bearded fellow. In a matter of seconds Dooley gets hit by a safe, hit by a streetcar, falls into a printing press, is hit into the ground by a pile-driver, etc.
This remarkable selling strategy succeeds, and Dooley signs. But Dooley double-crosses Woody, thinking he now is insured against everything. He is, except for guided missiles. So Woody launches the slowest guided missile thinkable on Dooley. The rest of the cartoon consists of the guided missile slowly following an agonized Dooley. This is by all means a remarkable sequence, greatly enhanced by the tick-tock sound effects and Clarence Wheeler’s inspired music accompanying the missile.
Curiously, eleven days later, the slow missile would return in the earlier produced Droopy cartoon ‘Sheep Wrecked‘. Indeed, both cartoons were penned by the same writer: Homer Brightman.
Watch ‘Misguided Missile’ yourself and tell me what you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOQH5f1JUPo
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 82
To Woody Woodpecker’s debut film: Fodder and Son
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Watch the Birdie
‘Misguided Missile’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: March 12, 1943
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Donald Duck is looking for a plane at ‘Ben Buzzard’s (crashed) used planes’.
Ben Buzzard sells a ramshackle plane to Donald and makes him signing a swindling contract in which an insurance company will pay the swindler $10,000,- in case of an accident. The buzzard then tries to make Donald crash.
Unfortunately, the comedy doesn’t quite work. First, because it’s hard to believe that the anthropomorphized buzzard can fly on his own, while the equally anthropomorphized Donald cannot. Second, Ben Buzzard’s attacks become more open and open, but at no point it’s made clear whether Donald realizes why he’s being attacked.
‘Flying Jalopy ‘was the last cartoon Dick Lundy directed at Disney. In October 1943 he left Disney to become an animator and director at Walter Lantz, where he directed several Woody Woodpecker shorts, including ‘Wet Blanket Policy‘, which uses the same idea, but with way better results, resulting in a far more hilarious cartoon. It even uses the same buzzard character, but Lantz’s Buzz Buzzard would become way more famous than Ben Buzzard ever was.
Watch ‘Flying Jalopy’ yourself and tell me what you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbF-BEBM0i8
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 40
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Tire Trouble
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Fall out – Fall in
Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: August 27, 1948
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Buzz Buzzard
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Wet Blanket Policy’ uses exactly the same idea as Dick Lundy’s last Donald Duck short, ‘Flying Jalopy‘ (1943).
The cartoon even uses the same adversary in Buzz Buzzard, a swindler who makes Woody sign an insurance contract that will give Buzz a $10,000 when Woody dies (in the original Donald Duck cartoon the character was called Ben Buzzard).This leads to a fast and very murderous chase sequence full of nonsense.
Penned by Warner Bros. alumnus Ben Hardaway and Heck Allen, who had collaborated with Tex Avery at MGM, ‘Wet Blanket Policy’ is one of Woody’s wildest cartoons. Unfortunately, it’s also the first in which Woody’s proportions start to waver. At one point he’s particularly tiny. This unsteady sizing of Woody would become a particular problem of the cartoons of the 1950s. Buzz Buzzard, however, proved to be a strong adversary for Woody, and became Woody’s antagonist in many of the following Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
Watch ‘Wet Blanket Policy’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 29
To the previous Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Wacky-Bye Baby
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Wild and Woody
‘Wet Blanket Policy’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection’
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