Title: Meatless Tuesday
Studio: Lantz
Date: 10/25/43 (12/20 in BoxOffice)
Credits:
Direction
James Culhane
Story
Ben Hardaway - Milt Schaffer
Music
Darrell Calker
Animation
Paul Smith - Pat Matthews
Series: (Andy Panda)
Running time (of viewed version): 6:54; 7:54 with Woody Woodpecker Show intro
Commercial DVD Availability: WWCE6 (Woody Woodpecker Columbia House v6)
Synopsis: Andy Panda can't eat meat due to rationing, so he decides to eat a rooster.
Comments: Walter Lantz's blue eyes match his blue suit in the show opening. Shamus Culhane cartoon. Opens on a text based mailbox stuffed full of additional text. Andy looks a bit like Lionel Barrymore, grumpy and rumpled in the opening looking at his meatless cookbook. Meatless Tuesdays (along with other Wheatless Mondays and other less official things similarly named days) were implemented in World War I. Presumably it was part of WWII rationing, but a quick Google search comes up with better attestations to the WWI practice. Flipping through the book is a real world prop (and again I don't know if it is flipped in real time or as stop motion animation). Incidentally, "meat" in this context id not include fish or chicken. Fast timing on some chase gags; not perfected like the contemporary Tex Avery's, but not too bad. I wonder what makes tiptoeing funny. The rooster is somewhat evil. Gooey Andy. Murderous Andy. Rooster also looks a bit Barrymore at times. Axe neck. Andy is actually willing to kill the rooster when it comes down to it. Perhaps he does after the end title. Strangely unadorned opening title; retitle? It looks stylistically correct for the period tho, just really boring. The Lantz Encyclopedia has this title, and says it was retitled "Chicken Chaser" for tv (and that this was the last appearance of Charlie Chicken, which I didn't even know was a thing; I guess Andy did eat him). Andy has a mostly terrible look in this. Interestign shot of Charlie running into close up followed by axe spinning into closeup.
The last Lantz cartoon for the year, and the last for 5 months if the usually accepted date is correct. But as mentioned above, BoxOffice puts this cartoon as being released On December 20th (See, for example, BoxOffice 1/1/44 page Showmandiser 11
http://www.boxofficemagazine.com/the_vault/issue_page?issue_id=1944-1-1&page_no=145#page_start
or November 11, 1943
http://www.boxofficemagazine.com/the_vault/issue_page?issue_id=1943-11-13&page_no=205#page_start
Blogger was being a real bear about upoading photos when I was putting this up.
Like the earlier "Swing Symphony" cartoon by Culhane, the designs on this one look like they were started by someone else (Lovy?) and finished by Shamus when he arrived at the studio, in the same way Art Davis finished Bob Clampett's final few cartoons he started at Warners. Once we get to Culhane's 1944 cartoons, the designs start looking a lot more polished (and in some ways, close to what the Jones unit was doing when Culhane was at Warners).
ReplyDelete