ReFrederator Blog

Could you be more iconographic than Mutt and Jeff? I mean, they’re part of the language, right? (Mutt and Jeff: tall guy and a short guy.) And yet how many people born after the Truman administration actually remember reading their adventures regularly in the funny paper, much less seeing them animated?

For the record, these guys were created in comic strip pre-history by Bud Fisher 99 years ago (real number.) Then, for much of the movies’ silent era, audiences enthusiastically greeted the boys’ theatrical cartoons, of which there seems to have been a jillion (fake, exaggerated number.)

Today we’re looking at “Westward Whoa”, a film that was originally produced by the Associated Animators Studio in 1926, but was one of a handful of M&J shorts painstakingly redrawn in color and retrofitted with a primitive soundtrack sometime during the early thirties. It’s probably a bit of overstatement to call this version a talkie, since, truth be told, nobody speaks — some of you more critical types might suggest calling it a comedy is a bit of an overstatement too! In any event, Mutt and Jeff’s movie career pretty much evaporated with the coming of sound.

Gone, but not forgotten, the guys are part of our “Singular Duos Week” here at ReFrederator. Stop in tomorrow for the exciting concluding chapter!

Dave Kirwan