Disclaimer: another one of those cartoons where racist caricatures and stereotypes are predominant. I don’t at all endorse them, they’re wrong and they’re gross, but they can’t be swept under the rug, either. This review is going to contain racist content and imagery--thank you for your understanding.
Release date: January 13th, 1934
Series: Looney Tunes
Director: Friz Freleng
Starring: Bernard Brown (Buddy), Charlie Lung (Chinese Caricature)
It’s finally 1934, and Friz Freleng’s first independent director’s credit! Buddy the Gob (not to be confused with Porky the Gob) entails our hero Buddy arriving in China and saving a girl from being sacrificed to a dragon.
Open to a rather impressive shot of a fleet of ships. Fun visuals galore as the ships slide on the waves: nothing new or exciting, but mildly entertaining. Freleng’s love of musical timing is evident with various cannons firing and whistles blowing to the beat of the music.
Elsewhere, our faithful sailor Buddy is dutifully scrubbing away at a pair of pajamas. The pajamas shake the water off like a dog, gratefully accepting a towel handed by Buddy to (redundantly) dry itself. Buddy, the master of thrilling dialogue, peers out the window and cries “Oh, boy! China!”
Eagerly does our young gob dash up the stairs and jump off the side of the boat, landing safely in a rowboat. Treacherous waves are no problem for the ever optimistic buddy. We fade out and fade in on a bustling Chinese village, stocked with stereotypes as always. Thankfully, the stereotypes aren’t as nasty, mean spirited, or abundant as they are in One Step Ahead of My Shadow, which this is practically a remake of, but they’re still cringeworthy and uncomfortable. A mother carries her children with a carrying pole, the children dangling by their hair from the pole instead of buckets. Meanwhile, a man reads the script on a flyer, getting taller as he reads up and compressing as he reads back down.
Buddy encounters the poster and scratches his head, unable to translate it. Nevertheless, the magic of cartoons rages on as the script translates into English, reading “GRAND CELEBRATION TODAY, the 150th birthday anniversary of the SACRED DRAGON.” Friz tries some fancy work with the camera angle, zooming in on the lower half of the poster that reads “A beautiful girl will be sacrificed to the dragon. COME ONE, COME ALL!” Buddy rushes to a growing crowd, trying to get a good look. He climbs a matryoshka of a family like stairs to dive into the crowd.
The crowd isn’t witnessing a brutal execution, but a stereotype filled parade. A man twirls his baton and bounces his beer belly up and down, two men carry a drum, mice jumping on it to create a drum cadence (reused from It’s Got Me Again!), a line of trumpeters, a man playing piano, another man using children and their rice hats as cymbals.
There are some masked dancers who parade the streets, including a caricature of Jimmy Durante. They loved their Durante gags! Many more are to come. Behind the slightly terrifying durance is the girl about to be sacrificed, crying as she’s carried away in a cage by two men.
Loyal Buddy hears her cries for help and promises to save her. He runs after her, up a stairway and to a doorway that slams in his face. One of the guards lifts him up with his spear and tosses him to a wall, the spear sticking and buddy falling to the ground as his pants tear.
This is pretty clever: after a few failed attempts at using the spear as a pole vault, he rips a gate off its hinges and fires several of the bars like arrows. One by one, the arrows stack up in the building, providing Buddy a safe way to crawl into the building via window and save the girl.
Inside, a man is chaining the poor girl to the wall, swallowing the key to the lock. Buddy bursts in once the man has left, but not before we get a shot of the fire breathing dragon behind bars. Buddy tries all he can to free the girl, trying to rip the chain from the wall, yet fails.
With some quick thinking, he knocks on the door where the man presumably entered. As the man walks out, Buddy smashes a barrel over his head, parts of the wood binding him together. Our cute boy scout turned violent displays more aggression as he kicks the man in the ass, the key spitting back up onto the ground.
Buddy unlocks the lock, and the girl is free. Unfortunately, so is the dragon. The girl uses a lantern to jump out of the window and landing in a cart (an appropriate accordion sound effect to accompany the panther unfolding). Buddy prepares to join her—he joins her sooner than expected when the dragon literally sets a fire under his butt.
A man pulls the cart, the cart flipping opposite ways as they hit rocks. The townsfolk aren’t happy at their celebration being ruined, and an angry mob follows Buddy and his girl. The man trips over a rock once more, and the cart is lost in sight. Again with the dehumanizing horse gag as the man runs on all fours, carrying Buddy and his captive while neighing. Ugh. You’re better than this, Friz!
Buddy and his girl run to a bridge, where buddy snaps the ropes connected to the pegs in the ground. There are some nice visuals as the two run across the bridge, the bridge folding beneath them and plummeting to an endless chasm.
Once they make it to the side safe and sound, the two mock the townsfolk, who shake their fists and their spears. One man throws a spear at Buddy, and it misses. The spear becomes anthropomorphized, and seeing that it missed its target, turns back around and jabs Buddy in the butt. Iris out.
I have conflicted feelings on this one. For one thing, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. The racism is still very much there and shouldn’t be shrugged off, but it isn’t as blatantly nasty as One Step Ahead of My Shadow. Another thing, although it was very uncomfortable, it was a relatively good buddy cartoon. More interesting than the rest. The music was great as always, and the sound effects are becoming more and more tolerable. As always, though, the stereotypes and caricatures prevent me from enjoying the cartoon’s full potential. Friz certainly has much, much better entries as we’ll get to see and enjoy, but this was also his first independent directorial job. So, if anything, this cartoon carries historical significance with Friz’s first directorial credit, but that’s about as much significance as it will get. I wouldn’t really recommend it, but if you do watch it, view at your own discretion (link).
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