Title: Taking the Blame
Studio: Fleischer
Date: 02/15/35
Credits:
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Animated by
Myron Waldman
and
Hicks Lokey
Series: Betty Boop
Running time (of viewed version): 6:16
Commercial DVD Availability: 600d4 or here
Synopsis: Betty brings evil cat into the house.
Comments: The cat kinda looks like one of those Felix the Cat clocks. Similar in story to My Friend the Monkey from 1939. Second cartoon in a row with a beating in the first third. I hate this kind of "authority keeps thinking the innocent party is guilty" story. Weird short "aw shut up". Unsatisfying domestic Betty Boop but really Pudgy short. It's much easier to view this 600 Cartoons disc once it's been copied to a harddrive. People's heads going through paintings show up as gags periodically in multiple eras; was there an earlier time when it was extremely common?
Extremely common... you mean in real life? Maybe before the invention of nails. :facepalm:
ReplyDeleteGreatest example of the gag in a cartoon has to be in Flip the Frog's ROOM RUNNERS at 2:20—
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNi-ybtYiRw
I actually don't know what I meant exactly; one of the dangers of these entries having been written more than a year ago. I think I did mean in real life. People may have had what amounted to glassless framed posters they ended up accidentally putting a fist or a face through back in the day...
ReplyDeleteAnd that Flip gag is nippletastic.
Moving on, it's interesting to read your thoughts about Betty's unsatisfying nature; in 1935, you happen to have chosen a year in which multiple studios got serious about reducing their once-colorful lead characters to boring, gentrified straight-shooters: Mickey, Betty, Oswald, Krazy.
ReplyDeleteSome have blamed the Hays Code, but I wouldn't; if being well-behaved was a requirement, Donald Duck and Popeye would be DOA.
I'd love to recommend that after 1935, you look at 1932. The difference is striking for just a few years apart, and the impact will be much stronger than if you were, say, to do 1949 or something in between them.
I should be taking at least a year off from chrono blogs after '35 (unless I do a cheater year with very few releases; can anyone provide me with DVDs of the last few years of Lantz theatricals?); I'd like to assemble a BoxOffice-based release date dataset. And I'm not sure I have the stength to go back to the early '30s for the follow up to '35; I found '43 much more comforting to blog about than '35; my expectation is that '47 wil be even more comforting than '31; not that I wouldn't do '31, just that I might not be ready to do it right after '35. ('71 is likely to be far far less comforting than '31 of course, but it would be very short.)
ReplyDeleteWhenever you do it, I'd suggest '32, not '31. There's a distinct difference—in '31, we're still closer to the onset of sound, so a greater number of cartoons stop dead in their tracks to deliver repetitive musical numbers.
ReplyDeleteIn '32, more studios had gotten over that (relatively speaking), so the films are far more varied in style.
It may be a "Malum consilium quod mutari non potest" situation. I have the "every fourth year" thing in my head...
ReplyDelete