Everybody Knows That
Most of us buy into a whole culture of common cartoon knowledge; stuff that has no basis in reality, but we all accept at face value because, I suppose, we’ve seen it thousands of times right there on the screen. You know, well known facts like billy goats eat tin cans or elephants are always afraid of mice. How about that thing where if a cartoon character eats another character, he assumes the vocal inflections and physical likeness of whoever it is he just ate? Okay, that last one’s more than a little disturbing, but, still, it’s one of those agreed upon animated rules of thumb.
I was thinking of such things the other night, while watching an oldie, “Betty Boop and Little Jimmy” with an audience of about 70. Here’s the cartoon that posits the novel notion people who laugh a lot get fat, so when the title characters launch into conniptions at the end of the short, they both instantly blimp up like a couple of beach balls. The crowd I was with laughed pretty hard at this point too, but more with a “What’s up with that?” reaction. Obviously, whatever the Fleischer Brothers were pitching back in 1936 didn’t exactly take root in the public conscience, at least as far as I could see.
Which brings me to my point (I think!) I’ve been trying to think of other films with similar cartoon cliché wannabes that never really caught on (or are just too damn obscure for a modern audience). Any suggestions?
Dave Kirwan
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On March 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
What cartoons have that physical likeness absorption thing? Was it just some bizarre extension of “you are what you eat?”
On March 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I’m thinking of cartoons like “Catch as Cats Can” (Warners -1947) where Sylvester eats a parrot (off camera) who has been parading around like a Bing Crosby caricature… of course, Sylvester pops up in the end of the cartoon sporting a Crosby shirt, hat and pipe talking like Bing Crosby! There are a lot of Warners films like “Foney Fables” where some carnivore shows up mimicking the character he just consumed. Some of the other studios would occasionally do the same schtick… check out the 1944 Terrytoon “Gandy Goose in Ghost Town”
On March 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many people wearing white gloves these days. Some of that Fleischer “cartoon logic” always seemed (to me) to be intentional wierdness, which I love about them. In their later cartoons they adhered more to realism, and those just aren’t that much fun.
On March 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
You once gave me a pretty satisfactory explanation of what alum is and why it posseses head-shrinking properties, but why is it again that you’d want to salt the tail-feathers of an elusive bird you wanted to catch? Oh, and eating crackers has never prevented me from being able to whistle, but then again I’m not a canary.
On March 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
You know Laurel and Hardy used that alum gag in one of their last shorts (that would be 1935 or so) — I mean it didn’t actually shrink their heads, as I recall, but had the effect of making everybody’s mouth very sphincter-like. The cracker thing reminds me of Jerry the mouse sucking a lemon while Tom was trying to sing high opera. The power of suggestion was always more potent in cartoons…
Oh yeah, sometimes there are “gopher bombs” in old cartoons… I’ve never researched wether hardware stores actually stocked explosives for extermination purposes.
On March 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am
That’s how people get fat? Note to self: Spend more time thinking about Lassie getting lost in the woods…