ReFrederator Blog

Guilty pleasure… spot gag cartoons! I suppose a lot of fans groan when these things pop up instead of a film with an established leading character, but I always got a kick out of the really, really contrived one shot cartoons. Somebody would pick a suitably generic topic (sports, zoo animals, the Mississippi River, whatever), dream up a dozen really thin jokes, and bingo! Instant cartoon! Warners did a lot of these in the late thirties, early forties and Lord knows Paramount-Famous spit ‘em out like watermelon seeds well into the mid fifties. And, okay, much of the entertainment value in these things is unintentional. The writing gets almost hilariously lazy a lot of the time, and everybody else in the studio strains so hard to pick up the slack. Case in point: the scene above is one of the big laughs from “Sports Champions” (WB, 1941). It’s almost as if the director and writer (Freleng and Maltese, I think) marched over to the background painters and said “Okay, why don’t you guys try to be funny for a while!”

Dave Kirwan