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Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: January 1961
Stars: Inspector Willoughby
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Rough and Tumbleweed’ introduces Inspector Willoughby, an incarnation of the little guard from ‘Salmon Yeggs‘ (1958).
Inspector Willoughby is a very, very Droopy-like character: he is small, undisturbed and persistent and even sounds like Bill Thompson, the voice of Droopy. The animators added a funny jumpy walk to the character.
In his first film Willoughby tries to arrest fierce bandit Boy McCoy. This leads to several gags in the best Tex Avery tradition. Particularly inspired is the scene in which Boy McCoy tries to get a train to run over a safe full of dynamite, which is attached to his leg. Unfortunately, there are two train tracks, and a multitude of trains pass by without McCoy succeeding in his plan. It’s nice to watch such inspired comedy in a cartoon made as late as 1961, when the golden age arguably was already over.
Watch ‘Rough and Tumbleweed’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Rough and Tumbleweed’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2″ as part of the ‘Woody Woodpecker Show’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: November 3, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Dooley
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘Jittery Jester’ takes place in a medieval castle where Dooley is court jester to a bored king.
Then the King hears Woody Woodpecker singing his own variation on ‘The Woodchuck Song’ from 1904. The king finds our hero infinitely more funny than Dooley, and he orders Dooley to catch the bird. During the obligate chase scene the king is too often the unwilling victim of Dooley’s attempts to catch Woody. In the end Woody is the new jester, using Dooley in his pranks.
Like many other Woody Woodpecker cartoons from 1958 ‘Jittery Jester’ is a rather run-of-the-mill chase cartoon, which features some anachronisms like a speedboat and dynamite. The draw bridge scene is the most inspired, even if it’s as predictable as the other gags in the cartoon.
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 88
To the previous Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Tree’s a Crowd
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Tom Cat Combat
‘Jittery Jester’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: September 8, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Woody rides a bus through Colonel Fleabush’s 60,000 acre estate full of trees.
Woodpeckers are not welcome there, and when the colonel discovers Woody, he orders his big yellow cat Filbur to catch the bird. What follows is a typical chase cartoon in which all the trees are destroyed.
Filbur is distinguished by a typical laugh (provided by Daws Butler), and sounds a little like Muttley from the later Hanna-Barbera television series ‘Wacky Races’ (1968-1969). The chase sequence is very formulaic and has little to offer, especially as Smith’s timing is a little too relaxed to make the gags work. The short also features three puns on trees, while the Latin tree names the colonel utters are all nonsensical.
Watch ‘Tree’s a Crowd’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 87
To the previous Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Everglade Raid
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Jittery Jester
‘Tree’s a Crowd’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: August 11, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Gabby Gator
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘Everglade Raid’ opens with Woody Woodpecker reading a newspaper add telling tourists to come to the Everglades to make a fortune on alligator bags.
So Woody goes to Florida, where he encounters a hungry alligator, voiced by Daws Butler as a variation on the Southern wolf from the Droopy cartoon ‘The Three Little Pups‘ (1953). What follows is a chase cartoon with blackout gags, in which the alligator tries to catch Woody, and vice versa. In the end the alligator succeeds, yet it is Woody who has the last laugh.
‘Everglade Raid’ suffers from slow timing and a surplus of dialogue, but some of the animation is very fine, especially the alligator’s walk cycle. Later, the alligator was christened Gabby Gator, and he would return in ‘Southern Fried Hospitality’ (1960). The character lasted until 1963.
Watch ‘Everglade Raid’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 86
To Woody Woodpecker’s debut film: His Better Elf
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Tree’s a Crowd
‘Everglade Raid’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: July 14, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘His Better Elf’ starts with Woody Woodpecker being poor, full of debts and living near a city dump.
Suddenly a four-leaf clove grows through the floor, which turns into a leprechaun woodpecker (a miniature green Woody) called O’Toole, who speaks in rhyme. First O’Toole demonstrates his powers, and then he grants Woody three wishes.
Woody’s first wish is, as expected, to become filthy rich. But O’Toole grants him the wish by placing him inside the National Bank, and soon a cop tries to arrest Woody for bank robbing. The rest of the cartoon is essentially a chase cartoon with the cop trying to catch Woody, and O’Toole sabotaging these attempts, using a lot of dynamite. In the end Woody uses his third wish to sent the little pest to hell.
‘His Better Elf’ is a genuine gag cartoon, but it’s a pity the wish concept isn’t used more, but instead taken over by a routine cartoon chase. There’s a shot featuring a moving background when Woody is caught by two policemen, a rare feat since the early 1930s.
Watch an excerpt from ‘His Better Elf’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 85
To Woody Woodpecker’s debut film: Half Empty Saddles
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Everglade Raid
‘His Better Elf’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: April 21, 1958
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Dooley
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Half Empty Saddles’ opens with Woody Woodpecker looking for an old treasure in a Western ghost town.
Strangely Dooley already is there, hiding in a barrel, and he soon tries to steal Woody’s treasure (which is something (we don’t know what) hidden in a wooden box).
The complete cartoon is filled with Dooley’s attempts in a blackout gag cartoon. The one-dimensional story is saved by two excellent strings of gags, one in which Dooley’s foot gets hurt repeatedly, and another which he rides a wooden horse. Composer Clarence Wheeler accompanies the wooden horse with a particularly silly sounding version of Franz von Suppés ‘Light Cavalry’ overture. The cartoon ends with Dooley exploding in the distance, forming a mushroom cloud (!) in a rare cartoon reference to the atomic bomb.
Watch ‘Half Empty Saddles’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 84
To Woody Woodpecker’s debut film: Watch the Birdie
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: His Better Elf
‘Half Empty Saddles’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
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:
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: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: November 4, 1957
Stars: Woody Woodpecker, Windy & Breezy
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
In Yellowstone Park a father bear shows his son how to get free food from the park visitors.
Father bear gets cake from an old couple, looking particularly miserably, and food from some youngsters playing ‘rock-‘n-roll’ (the tune the bear plays is more rock ‘n roll in name than in sound). The next customer is Woody Woodpecker, who for once isn’t short of food himself.
After making the bear perform some tricks, Woody gives the bear a sandwich and a bottle of ketchup, but when the greedy bear wants more, a gag routine starts, with Woody placing some food on ‘Old Faithful’ (a geyser), and the bear falling for it, no less than five times. This sequence is surprisingly fast-paced, making the comedy, which are essentially variations on one theme, work.
The little bear’s function in the plot is only to address the audience once in a while with an admiring ‘that’s my pop’, no matter what calamity befalls his father. In this respect he resembles Sylvester jr, who had made his debut eight years earlier in ‘Pop ‘Im Pop!’ (1950).
The bear pair was later christened ‘Windy & Breezy’ and starred four cartoons of their own, starting with ‘Salmon Yeggs‘ (1958).
Watch ‘Fodder and Son’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 81
To the previous Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Dopey Dick and the Pink Whale
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Misguided Missile
‘Fodder and Son’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: February 15, 1954
Stars: Sugarfoot
Rating: ★
Review:
In their search for new characters the Lantz Studio introduced yet another character after launching Maw and Paw in 1953. Their new star, Sugarfoot the horse, was even less successful than the barnyard couple.
In his debut cartoon Sugarfoot is expelled from his farm for wrecking his replacement, a tractor. He soon finds a job at the movies as a double for a star horse, earning enough money for his boss to buy a new tractor.
Sugarfoot was an interesting character for the 1950s, because he did not speak. Nevertheless, he was so remarkably unfunny, he lasted only two cartoons, the other one being ‘Hay Rube’ from the same year. It remains an almost unbelievable fact that this terribly unfunny cartoon was penned by the great Michael Maltese.
Watch ‘A Horse’s Tale’ yourself and tell me what you think:
http://www.trilulilu.ro/video-animatie/sugarfoot-a-horses-tale
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: August 10, 1953
Stars: Maw and Paw
Rating: ★
Review:
In the early 1950s Lantz seemed to be in search of new characters for his cartoons.
This cartoon introduces Maw and Paw, two poor, phlegmatic farmers with hundreds of kids and one pig, who’s introduced as being the most intelligent of the lot. In an almost plotless story the pig wins a sports car. This leads to a lot of gags, without getting any funny. The cartoon even seem to look back all the way to the early 1930s with its barnyard setting and its abundance of repetitive animation.
Maw and Paw were no strong characters, and their series stopped two years later after only four films.
Director: Paul J. Smith
Release Date: October 22, 1956
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
In this cartoon Woody Woodpecker wants to ride the Niagara falls in a barrel.
However, there’s a park ranger who tries to stop him, and it’s this ranger who repeatedly ends in a barrel on the falls.
It’s amazing to discover a gem like this between the badly designed, badly animated and badly timed Walter Lantz shorts of the late 1950s. Although this cartoon, too, features ugly animation, the story and the gags (penned by Disney-veterans Dick Kinney and Milt Schaffer) are very good. The result is by all means one of the best Woody Woodpeckers of the fifties.
Watch ‘Niagara Fools’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Woody Woodpecker cartoon No. 71
To the previous Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Calling All Cuckoos
To the next Woody Woodpecker cartoon: Arts and Flowers
‘Niagara Fools’ is available on the DVD-set ‘The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Volume 2’
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