Very Scary Monday
ReFrederator kicks off a week of creepy classics with “The Cuckoo Murder Case” wherein Flip the Frog and his independently minded shadow play detective, investigating a haunted house. SPOILER! The jolly frolics take a decidedly dark turn when the murderer turns out to be no less than the Angel of Death himself, who, at this point in his career, was making relatively few cartoon appearances.
There are probably still a few people left on the planet who realize the title of this 1930 Ub Iwerks release is a vague-ish parody of the then ridiculously popular Philo Vance books/movies (they all had names like “The BLANK Murder Case” except BLANK was always a different six lettered word). Of course, today, the bigger mystery is “who the hell is Philo Vance?”
Very Scary Week gets even weirder — just wait!
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On November 1st, 2006 at 12:00 am
There’s an interesting line in the title card which occurs in some of the very early cartoons: “Cartoon Process Liscenced under Bray-Hurd Patents” (complete with a misspelling).
On November 2nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
So does this imply that the cuckoo bird merely died of old age, and the gun shot was just a metaphor? Or am I thinking too hard?
On November 2nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
Natural causes? Hmmmm… mebbe. I kinda think the grim reaper is just getting impatient with the whole process and decides to take things into his own boney hands. What the hell — he’s gonna get everybody eventually, why not remove the middleman?