Saturday, March 15, 2008

Now I ask you very confidentally: "Aint She Sweet?" (1933)



If you've only seen the screenshot titles on Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research Paramount page, now's your chance.
This was a 1933 Fleischer Screen Song directed by my favorite sing-along director, Seymour Knetiel and credibly directed by Dave Fleischer. This print has all of the gags without any splices or edits, plus a live action performing sing-along of Lillian Roth's "Ain't She Sweet", a notable
1920's song. Thad K's idea that nobody gets the end gag. I get the gag: the title of the song is a metaphor to sweets and pastries. Suckers (the candy) is a "sweet".
Another Screen Song of the Fleischer era: "Popular Melodies", has a longer end gag.

Imagine if a Famous Studios Screen Song (or a forerunner such as "The Mild West" and "Old MacDonald"), would be THIS long of a short, or at least the timing and humor value.

Don't forget to obey this famous phrase: "Follow the Bouncing Ball!" so you can sing-along!

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Off-Topic but important: The truth about my passion of Paramount cartoons and "Two Kitties" to explain it...

I have a confession to make.

When I was a kid, I didn't like the Paramount cartoons as much as you think, "Old MacDonald" was only interesting because I realized home video divisions of movie studios weren't the only ones to make Bouncing Ball sing-alongs, and without the recognizably discovery of the Paramount logo on the original titles, I would have thought the same thing Viacom does with their cartoon library. I was tired of listening to the "Short'nin' Bread" song from the cartoon of the same name. The tape broke and I watched a lot of Looney Tunes (or WB because many were also released as "Merrie Melodies"), on Cartoon Network. No DVNR. No color-saturation. Just a bunch of cartoon violence in the Golden Age.


There was a reason, and is a reason a wee bit similar to Lionsgate's unintrest in relasing the Paramount cartoons on video. They were too old and too obscure. The NTA logo was too creepy. I thought "Short'nin Bread" was advertising desserts or even cheese (which I thought the same when I first saw "Jasper and the Haunted House" with the racial slur billboard in the end I mistaken as a plug for a real brand of pie.).


This is the thing I felt when I returned a rental of "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters", a documentary on the world record of the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong.(not to be confused with the "King Kong" films), but more of a feeling that I felt when I saw the Jam Handy Rudolph short on a Republic tape. Only time will tell if I like it more.


I didn't recognize that Capser found a friend, or that Popeye beats up Bluto with a can of spinach in nearly every episode. I once didn't like Popeye because he ate spinach. Now I know that he means more than selling spinach, because Paramount only was advertising their movie studio in nearly all of their films.


I only found more appreciation of the Paramount cartoons when I got a PD tape from the library, years after my "Old MacDonald" tape broke.


I saw a PD tape print "A Tale of Two Kitties", with the "Merrily We Roll Along" theme silenced out, before seeing Paramount cartoons on PD tapes. That was my first WB cartoon.

In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that I sort of didn't like the Paramount cartoons at one point, but found it's fun to watch obscure stuff a lot. I will still post Paramount cartoons. I did not "cheat" on Paramount cartoons, I just didn't like 'em as much as I do now. But I also do like other studios' cartoons as well. I had a variety of cartoons when I was littler, but I like other cartoons today too.


Here's a restored print from Volume 5 of the Looney Tunes set of Clampett's A Tale of Two Kitties, which as I said before was my first WB cartoon, and is a parody of Abbot and Castello.