68. Buddy's Beer Garden (1933)

Release date: November 11th, 1933

Series: Looney Tunes

Director: Earl Duvall

Starring: Bernard Brown (Buddy), Jeane Cowan (Mae West), The Singing Guardsmen (Chorus)

Tom Palmer’s been kicked to the curb, and now we have Earl Duvall, Buddy’s creator, directing Buddy's Beer Garden. Exciting to note, this is Frank Tashlin’s first animation credit (as Tish Tash)! He’d get fired from the studio in 1934 because he wouldn’t give Leon Schlesinger a piece of his revenues from the comic strip he ran at the time, Van Boring, a take on his former boss Van Beuren. He’d rejoin Warner Bros. in 1936 and make cartoons until his departure for Disney in 1938, and then ONCE MORE come back in 1942 until a solid departure in 1946.

Back to the cartoon: prohibition was on its way out the door, officially ending less than a month after the cartoon was made—beer had been legalized in march of that year. Beer gardens were popping up everywhere, and Buddy’s own beer garden is no exception. We follow the antics of Buddy, Cookie, and his dog (who looks different than Happy) in a beer garden.

Buddy’s gotten a total redesign, which would stay permanent until another redesign later in his career. As poor as Tom Palmer’s cartoon was, I wish they kept his design from Buddy’s Day Out. He looks a lot more unlikeable, but that’s just my opinion. Buddy is strolling around, swinging some beer on his platter and singing “Auf Wiederseh’n”. A wiener dog trots along behind him, pretzels stacked up on its tail.

He places the beer down on a table (beer flying out of the glasses in pure cartoon fashion) and whips out the table cloth from beneath the mugs with no problem, snapping it and placing it back under with ease. The sound effects are an improvement from Buddy’s Day Out, but still feel rather present instead of integrated into the cartoon. The animation is a lot better, too. Maybe a little less so than the Bosko cartoons.

Any beer garden has a live German band, right? There are an array of spot gags involving the band, including a clarinet player popping his head out of a tuba and playing a very catchy melody. There’s another scene where the bartender pours beer into the mugs in synchronization with the music, and a trombone player sliding the glasses down the counter with each slide (accompanied by the music). This actually made me realize that there was no musical timing in Buddy’s Day Out—well, all of the timing there was wrong and discombobulated, but it’s strange to think about when, at this era, music was always a priority.

Cookie makes an appearance, making pretzels by knitting the dough. Buddy’s dog salts the pretzels with a salt shaker in his tail. Another standard gag, but creative and amusing. At this point, I’m always glad to see creativity and some imagination. I won’t take it for granted any time soon.

Another gag I love, tongue sandwiches with actual tongues singing and licking up mustard.

Elsewhere, there’s a man who looks like he’s an escaped convict, booming “Where’s my beer!?” A tiny little waiter dashes over to him with a beer. Not waiting for any further invitation, the brute picks up the waiter and tosses back the beer into his mouth. The music they used is really jarring: when he drinks the beer, it sounds like a murder mystery cue?? Like the dramatic chipmunk video. It feels out of place and hinders a potentially funny gag.

Meanwhile, more musical antics ensue as a gang of drunks sing “It’s Time to Sing ‘Sweet Adeline’ Again”. A man gets beer foam thrown on top of his bald head, which he uses a comb to comb out, another man plays spaghetti like a harp, and Buddy plays beer steins like chimes. Also a good gag of the beer mugs kissing (above) when they clink together.

Cookie has gone from dough-knitter to cigarette/cigar seller. The ex-jailbird from before flirts with her, tossing a coin into her box and snagging a cigar, cutting the tip with his stein. The animation is nice and fluid, almost jarringly so, like there’s no weight. Nevertheless, I’ll take it over the jankiness of Palmer’s cartoons. An amusing gag ensues as the brute uses a flamethrower to light his cigar.

Back to the German band, the man popping out of the tuba sporting maracas this time instead of a clarinet. Seemingly out of nowhere, cookie saunters out into the middle of the garden and does a “sexy” dance (not really sexy at all). The setup would be amusing, just randomly popping out of nowhere and doing some sort of a flamenco dance after German oompah music has been blaring in your ears, but it comes off as too slow and careful, too deliberate. Nevertheless, the power of her dance intrigues her patrons. A goat on a poster blows its horns, the dog bounces the pretzels on its tail, a very cartoony piano comes to life and imitates Cookie’s dance, as well as the brute from before. Buddy is also tossing the beer in the mugs he’s holding, whereas the brute now chews up some olives and spits the pits into a nearby spittoon.

Once more to Buddy. His surroundings get more screentime than he does! Suffering from Bosko syndrome, I suppose. He slices up bread and cheese, shuffling the two piles together like a deck of cards. Elsewhere, the man inside the tuba now comes out with a piano. The gag is funny, but relied on too heavily.

Buddy slides the tray of food off his back and tosses sandwiches onto a table, the man paying him back accordingly. Buddy places the tray on his head (I guess another one of those “He can do anything!” indicators) and the beer steins slide and clink together as he walks. One of the steins comes to life and protests “Hey, you mug!”, prompting the other to growl “Don’t call me a mug, you mug!” I actually enjoyed that, a little bit of cleverness for a change.

This is great gag with great visuals. Two men are literally playing their pipes, the smoke anthropomorphized as dancers who sway along to the jaunty rhythm.

Suddenly, Buddy squeezes himself into the spotlight and says “Hold it, folks! A big surprise! This will open up your eyes! Introducing someone grand—give the gal a great big hand!” his voice sounds drastically different from Buddy’s Day Out, almost exactly like Johnny Murray’s Bosko. Still trying to fill mickey mouse’s shoes, I guess? The animation is jarring, too. Melty and blobby, no weight, no spacing, just constantly moving and changing.

Beats me how Buddy somehow got a caricature of Mae West to perform at his beer garden, but nevertheless she struts out and belts her stuff. There’s a shot of a conductor whose lapels roll up and down, but it mainly disrupts the flow of the song, especially with the slide whistle sound effects.

The jailbird finds her to be hot stuff and flirts with her, asking “Hello, baby! Give me one big kiss!” The brute is perched under a table, his butt sticking out the other end. The goat on the poster from before headbutts him, causing him to barrel straight into Mae. She flies into a tree, whereas the brute flies into a mirror (complete with an OW sound effect with no lip movement). Mae falls back to the ground.

The reason Buddy got Mae West to perform is because HE was her all along. Our first drag joke, I think? Well, it did one thing effectively: it caught me by surprise. The surprise was slightly ruined, though: when Buddy was in the tree (still as Mae) you could see him adjusting himself, the wig slipping off slightly. I think it would’ve been better to just wait until he fell back down and crashed, THEN revealing the surprise. The parrot in the cage he used as a makeshift butt turns into a Jimmy Durante caricature and scoffs “Am I mortified!”, iris out.

This was a much better effort than Buddy’s Day Out and I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song for sure. The animation was an improvement, gags were an improvement, sound effects were an improvement, and so on. It still felt rather bland and unmemorable, though. Not terrible! But once again, we know little about Buddy and are assumed to just know everything about him. It wouldn’t hurt to skip this one, but it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, either.

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