Release date: September 18th, 1937
Series: Merrie Melodies
Director: Friz Freleng
Starring: Mel Blanc (Police Dog, Spitz), Billy Bletcher (St. Bernard), Berneice Hansell (Puppy), The Sportsmen Quartet (Chorus)
Around this time, Friz Freleng left Warner Bros. to reconnect with his former co-workers and friends, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, over at MGM. He’d serve a relatively short stint as director there, coming back to WB as soon as April 1939. The backlog of Friz cartoons would trickle out until early 1938, where he would then be replaced by Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton.
Friz has seniority at the studio, going as far back as animating for the 1929 pilot Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid. While this isn’t his last cartoon, it remains an intriguing talking point! He’d make his biggest splash upon his return, directing a number of great black and white Porky cartoons and making other little-known characters such as Yosemite Sam and Sylvester, to name a select few.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, now: here, we’re treated to a number of spot-gags involving dogs—including a drunken St. Bernard.
Patrons stream into a theater advertising the local dog show. It’s not a ‘30′s cartoon without a celebrity caricature of some sort–a lumbering caricature of humorist/author Irvin S. Cobb moseys along down the street with his identical looking bulldog.
He’s followed by William Powell and his pooch Asta, both featured relatively prominently in Speaking of the Weather just 2 shorts ago. And, furthering the connection to the aforementioned cartoon, we get another gag implying that the dog took a leak on a nearby pole: Powell marches past a spare pole, when suddenly his leash is yanked from behind, leaving the audience to read between the lines.
Another gag that is more reminiscent of the early days of animation: your stereotypical “fat lady” gag, underscored by a rather sardonic rendition of “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”. The woman, in an attempt to fit into the seats, ends up shoving the entire row out of the way. Not much to add here: not many laughs nowadays.
Cue the dog puns as we get a look at the line-up for the dog show. A bird dog (as in, dogs who hunt birds) is taken to its literal meaning, perched in a cage and whistling like a bird. The next pen over is an Irish setter (sitter, get it?) perched on top of a nest. Mama crawls out of the nest to reveal a line of eggs. One by one, they all hatch to reveal a trio of energetic, yappy puppies. Points for surrealism.
Next up, a disembodied voice cries “RAIN BLOW THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN!”, curtains withdrawing to reveal a police dog donning a mountie uniform, howling (its howls, of course, provided by Mel Blanc). This is a reference to the ever popular Renfrew of the Mounted, a ‘30′s book and radio series about a singing mountie–Frank Tashlin’s Porky in the North Woods even served as an ode to it.
After that features a spitz hound, chewing on a glob of tobacco and lobbing it at a spitoon. Amusing at first, this gag quickly wears its welcome as its featured in a number of other cartoons. Spitting gags themselves were more along the lines of the earlier ‘30′s cartoons, right at home in the cruder days of the early Harman and Ising films. Of course, this won’t be the last time we see a gag of this nature.
A St. Bernard booze hound is next to be revealed, drunkenly singing a wordless rendition of “How Dry I Am”. Billy Bletcher’s deep bellow is a perfect match for such a big dog. The dog, rather Pluto-esque as we’ll come to recognize, will return throughout the picture. The animation of it is rather nice–the physics on the floppy jowls are great. After a fit of hiccups, the dog giggles bashfully.
So, to counteract that high of the dog, our next pooch?
Oh, sweet hilarity!
Time to make room for more puns, this time plastered on the curtain. The curtain advertises groaners such as “Come see our itchings – canine art galleries”, “Are you in the dog house? Get a new leash on Life Supply Co.”, and so forth. The spotlight takes its sweet time to roam around each pun, allowing it to really sink in. Complete with close-ups! I’m watching the newly restored version on HBOMax (which looks gorgeous, by the way), and so I don’t know if it’s the fault of the restoration or if the original print had this issue, but the close-ups are a bit blurry, as if they were having some problems with the double-exposure effects.
With eye-rolling puns out of the way (and I say this as a shameless pun lover), the audience is treated to a variety of K-9 vaudeville acts, starting with a pair of Scottie dogs, who perform the highland fling. The spacing of the animation isn’t well distributed here–the movement feels too mechanical.
The Scotties are replaced by a pair of Russian wolf hounds, who look like sticks when viewed from the front–a common place gag. Animation of the hounds doing the Hopak fares better than the Scotties, and the barks at the end of the musical phrases are at least passably amusing. As the performance wraps up, the ushankas worn by the hounds turn out to be little black dogs curled up in a ball–once more, a tried and true gag that calls back to the days of the Harman and Ising era.
Just when we think we’ve had enough groaners: the next act, titled “dog eat dog” features a… wait for it! A dog eating a hotdog. At least the ironic commentary by the sarcastic, pitchy, violin rendition of “Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone” alerts us to some self-awareness regarding how lame the gag is.
Thankfully, the next gag at least got a polite chuckle out of me: the act titled “Little man you’ve had a busy day” (in reference to the popular song of the same name) showcases a dog panting and flashing a guilty smile, a line of poles in the backgrounds. Two piss jokes in one short! That must be a record!
What could be considered the song portion of the short follows next, a group of prairie dogs singing “My Little Buckaroo” with alternate, dog-inclusive lyrics (mentioning pedigrees and the like).
The drunken St. Bernard from before cringes at the act, howling and carrying on. A hand off-screen shoves a muzzle on him to shut him up, prompting the dog to force it free.
Instead, the dog accidentally ricochets himself into an open trunk (labeled Johnson Skating Act, a reference to background artist Johnny Johnson, most commonly associated with Tex Avery). And, as to be expected, the dog emerges from the trunk slipping and sliding on a pair of roller skates. The animation of the dog on the roller skates is certainly the high point of the short–even the dog’s emergence just slides like butter. Definitely worthy of a frame-by-frame watch.
The prairie dogs finish up the remainder of their song (once more bitten by the double-exposure bug, still wondering if that’s the restoration or the original print?), just in time to allow a shanghaied skating pup to slide across the stage. More great animation of the dog struggling on his skates as he slides into the other wing, his struggle animated on ones (you’ll also note the sign in the background advertising a gross of anvils).
He eventually topples over, the barrel on his chest keeping him going until he crashes into a wall. The few smear frames leads me to believe that this is Ken Harris at work, though I’m far from confident on that claim.
Even more great animation as the dog, Pluto-esque in his struggle and frustration, struggles to get back onto his feet, his drunken hiccups sending him falling each time. I love when he resorts to grabbing his ass by his teeth to lift himself up, giving a self-satisfied grin at the camera before falling right back down again. Frustrated, the dog grovels in his humility, a welcome burst of comedic timing as he shoves the lower half of his body down in frustration, free to mope and ponder in peace.
Next up serves as a rather deliberate callback to one of Friz’s most monumental pictures (in notoriety, not quite in quality)–his 1935 entry I Haven’t Got a Hat, that most famously marks the debut of everyone’s favorite porcine. A shy little puppy timidly pokes her head out from a cardboard standee, clearly in no rush to get out on stage. Ken Harris’ animation of her resisting the push of the disembodied arm is full of character. I just adore that mortified expression.
Finally, she’s thrown out on stage… facing the wrong way. A whistle summons her to turn around, where she recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, her squeaky vocals provided by none other than Berneice Hansell.
She starts off… and, in an Avery-esque break of character, growls to stage left “Awww… this is SILLY!” A book is thrown at her in response.
In the midst of the puppy’s recital (which is cleverly underscored by “Puppchen”), the drunken dog from before still engages in his battle to get up. Once more, the animation is more than a treat to look at: the dog, fueled with fury, scrambles to his feet with a running start. The animation glides as effortlessly as the dog, but something off-screen catches his attention: a trunk containing a flea circus.
As you can surely guess, dog crashes, and the fleas miraculously fly (suspension of disbelief!) out of the trunk, ready to cause trouble. In another ode to I Haven’t Got a Hat, where Porky was the one mixing up two poems in a recital, the reciting puppy mixes up her nursery rhymes (”Mary had a little lamb, the mouse ran up the clock. And anywhere the lamb would go, hickory dickory dock!”) while watching a flea buzz dangerously close to her vicinity, eyes rotating 360 degrees and all.
Inevitably, the flea strikes, and the puppy gives a strained remainder of her recital, itching all the way. The main ode to I Haven’t Got a Hat stems here–the puppy’s voice grows exceedingly higher in pitch, the animation of her pacing from side-to-side and eventually off stage directly reused from the short.
It should be noted that, in the original scene, another Hansell-voiced animal (Little Kitty) was giving the same recital of Mary Had a Little Lamb. This scene has the benefit of better animation and a little bit more humor, but it’s an interesting callback to such an important cartoon.
Fade out and back in to the remainder of the fleas, who are having a hell of a time sopping up the spilled alcohol from the St. Bernard’s barrel. One flea fishes in the liquor, another swimming, one more even licking it up straight from the source. The short comes to an end on a quartet of drunken fleas, singing a shrill, obnoxious, hiccup-ridden rendition of “How Dry I Am”. Iris out.
I will admit that, as I reviewed this, the cartoon slowly warmed up to me. I wasn’t at all charmed by the first half: the puns are rather lame, the timing is bloated and slow, and it lacks direction, even for a spot-gag cartoon. It feels overwhelmingly half-hearted: when a director or its crew lacks enthusiasm, that absence is certainly felt.
Yet, the second half of the short definitely thawed my otherwise cold review. The animation of the St. Bernard on roller skates is some absolutely gorgeous stuff. It’s very smooth, very funny, and very tactile. Moreover, the puppy’s recital of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was very fun and amusing–Berneice Hansell never fails to win me over with her vocals.
With that said, however, I wouldn’t really recommend this cartoon: there are too many other good Friz cartoons to check out. It lacks enthusiasm and conviction, and feels more like a relic of the past, from the prevalence of Billy Bletcher and Berneice Hansell (who dominated the pre-Blanc cartoons) to the Harman and Ising-esque gags to the deliberate callbacks to I Haven’t Got a Hat.
Mainly, I would persuade you to check out the second half for the animation of the roller-skating dog, and maybe add the recital sequence as an extra incentive. But, for now, this is a largely unremarkable cartoon that you can skip without feeling too slighted.
Yet, with that said, link!
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