ReFrederator Blog

We say goodbye to Celebrity Imitation Week with a dandy from 1947, “A Bout with a Trout.” This is one of those great Little Lulu epics wherein our heroine: A. falls asleep, B. has a Technicolor dream of an imaginary place with fantastic denizens, followed by C. a big musical production number. Man, this happened to Lulu all the time!

The subject at hand is playing hooky and the song deemed appropriate is “Swinging on a Star.” Since this was a Bing Crosby hit, someone thought it would be cute to anthropomorphize said stars with the faces of Crosby, Bob Hope… and Jerry Colonna! Oddly enough, there are no drawn caricatures, but instead animated photographs are used for kind of a Monty Python/Conan O’Brien effect. Weird.

I. Sparber directed this lively little item, and I, for one, think it’s a pretty darn good cartoon. You can accuse Paramount Famous Studios of medicine coating the candy, always cramming a moral into Lulu’s deliriums, but the closing gag in these films usually reassures us that the kid has no intention of ‘learning her lesson.’

Monday ReFrederator, the world’s first daily classic cartoon podcast, launches Underwater Week. Hold your breath!

Dave Kirwan