233. Gold Rush Daze (1939)

Release Date: February 25th, 1939

Series: Merrie Melodies 

Director: Ben Hardaway, Cal Dalton

Story: Tubby Millar

Animation: Gil Turner

Musical Direction: Carl Stalling

Starring: Joe Twerp (Prospector, Tourist, Scandinavian), Mel Blanc (Cop, Seabiscuit, Bar Patrons, Doctor) 

The perfect vessel for the type of hayseed, Podunk, cornball humor that Ben Hardaway revered so much, Gold Rush Daze is full of Hardawayisms, whether that be both strengths or weaknesses--more often the latter.

Joe Twerp is no stranger to Warner Bros, in terms of both their cartoons and their radio programs. He previously starred as the iceman in Tex Avery's 1937 short I Only Have Eyes for You, voicing a stuttering, meek, tongue-tied bird. Twerp was known for his spoonerisms, which he repeats in this cartoon. As it turns out, Twerp worked alongside radio spoonerist Lou Fulton on a Warner radio show entitled The Last Nighter. Working with Fulton likely gave him the idea--Fulton also lent his voice to a Warner Bros cartoon, voicing the stuttering bird in I Love to Singa.

Twerp voices both a stuttering tourist and a gold prospector in this Hardaway and Dalton story centered on the gold rush. A gas attendant fills his attendee in on his days as a prospector during the rush, talking about how gold isn't always where you find it.

Accompanied by a hurried music score of “Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride”, the cartoon opens to an establishing shot of a car weaving in and out of perspective as it tears along a dirt path. While the movement is a little clunky, both the speed and pursuit of interesting perspective are admirable for a Hardaway and Dalton cartoon; that the sequence isn’t longer or flatter is a miracle in itself.

The speedster squeals to a halt in front of a rickety gas station, sluggish H/D pacing more apparent when he skids a few feet too far, backs up for a little too long, and comes to a clanking stop.

“Fill ‘er up, pop!” Right out of the gate, Joe Twerp wastes no time launching into his spoonerisms. It likely goes without saying, but the vocal direction in this cartoon suffers more than his vocal direction in I Only Have Eyes for You, being a little too fast and a little too much. “Er, full ‘er up, pip! Er, pill er fu—aww, put some gas in it!”

A wad of spit lobbed by the gas attendant immediately establishes his country bumpkin status. 

When asked what the hurry is, the tourist answers that he’s going to gig for dold—dold for gig—dig for gold. A rather uncomfortably long pause follows as the attendant places the gas nozzle back in its rightful place and wiping his face before giving his lines.

“Don’t make me laugh!” The cornball precedes his speech with another lob of spit. “Why, there ain’t no more gold in them hills than there is in a hound dog’s tooth!”

Excessive spitting continues as he prattles on, claiming that he himself tried to dig for gold “in every corner a’ the world”. With that, we segue to the ol’ reliable flashback as he talks about his days in the gold rush of 1849… despite not at all looking as though he’s over a hundred years old.

Melting away to the streets of 1849 San Francisco, Hardaway and Dalton are eager to jump into their purposeful anachronisms and hayseed humor. Here, a street cop makes note of the horses parked in the parking lot, only to confront a horse in a no parking zone.

“What’s ya name?” As fun as Joe Twerp is to listen to, a minute into the cartoon and Mel Blanc’s gravelly Brooklyn accent is already a relief to hear over the bad cornpone accent from Twerp’s character. 

“Seabiscuit!” Horse is also voiced by Blanc in a nasally whinny, the name a reference to possibly the most famous racehorse in history, crowned as American Horse of the Year in 1938. “What’s yours?”

And that’s the punchline, Seabiscuit’s whinny an evident cue for the audience to laugh. Blatant unfunny antics aside, Seabiscuit’s brief appearance does somewhat serve some significance for Hardaway and Dalton; they would lampoon the famed racehorse in Porky and Teabiscuit only a few months later in 1939.

When reviewing Hardaway and Dalton cartoons, their flaws are very apparent and easy to pick out. Audiences were much easier to please back then, and hindsight bias certainly makes it easier to wonder why their shorts aren’t as good as the cartoons released in the coming years, but their quality does suffer against the work of their peers at the same time.

With all of that said, these cartoons do have moments of significance, whether purely birthed by themselves or as a result of birthing a gag and having said gag or concept be polished and refined by much more competent filmmakers (ie. Bugs Bunny.) Here, one of those birthing moments is seen as Twerp’s character, looking the exact same as he did pre-flashback, wandering the streets. A nearby bar owner spots him…

…and visualizes a literal metaphor for the poor sucker. While I can’t attest to outside studios, this is the first appearance of quite the famous gag in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Chuck Jones was particularly fond of it, and would polish the execution to greater and funnier lengths in cartoons such as Tom Turk and Daffy and Little Orphan Airedale.

Before the prospector can head into the nearby café, a man grabs the sucker by the suspenders and yanks him inside.

Flow between scenes is jumbled by the lack of a proper hook-up pose; the man is already perched at a seat, non moving, as the sucker is sent whirling into place right at the seat. Having the man already waiting for Twerp is a funny idea, but it’s not executed quickly enough to warrant the snappiness demanded by such a gag, making his seating appear more accidental and “lazy” (for lack of a much, much, much better word.)

Regardless, one bit of nonsense segues to the next as the man (a poker player) engages in an impromptu round of gambling. The timing of the animation suffers quite a bit; the gambler shuffling his cards reads as stiff, mechanical, and cold, especially when the cards begin to shuffle on their own—a mediocre idea that could be made politely amusing with snappier timing and better spacing, but instead falls flat. Carl Stalling’s honky-tonk piano accompaniment is the most exciting part of the entire sequence.

A blank, vacant, unmoving reaction from the prospector furthers the stagnation of the scene. While the gambler is supposed to appear stoic and bored, that boredom accidentally transcends his character and leaks into the execution of the scene as a whole.

The payoff? 5 aces from the gambler. 

And that’s exactly that, nothing more. When another prospector slides into the bar and alerts the fellas that gold’s been discovered, the gambling sequence ends just as abruptly and flatly as it began.

Even the prospector’s “excited” reaction feels flat and boring, with a few mechanical blinks at the camera and an all too sluggish exit off-screen. No yelling or exclamation or even just the standard repetition of “Gold?” That a Tex Avery cartoon from 1935—his first ever—with a similar premise manages to be much more energetic and funnier in comparison to this 1939 cartoon isn’t exactly reassuring of Hardaway and Dalton’s directing capabilities. 

Nevertheless, our hero darts outside, where the silhouettes of miners adorn the mountain peaks in plain sight. 

Armed with a claim sign, the prospector rushes to find a spot before it’s too late. Once more, his running through the mountains lingers more than it should—the establishing shot of the tourist tearing along the road in his car has been the most thrilling portion of the cartoon yet.

Such could be said for the sequence of the prospector actually trying to find a claim. Just as he’s about to stake the claim, another miner swoops in with a braggadocios declaration of “I SAW IT FIRST!”, prompting a sluggish reaction take on the prospector and a sluggish pompous pose on the fellow miner.

The charade continues a few more times, the fastest portion being when an sign of “KEEP OFF!” is hurled and stuck into the ground from off-screen. Much of this philosophy could apply to many H/D cartoons, not just this one, but the sequence would fare better had it just echoed the urgency it demands. Stalling’s music score is the most exciting part of the chase. 

Though it’s a bit unfair to compare to a better gag from a better cartoon by a better director from a better year of cartoons, Chuck Jones, who was still only then learning to shed his similarly molasses pacing at the time, performs a similar gag with much more speed and many more laughs in 1942’s My Favorite Duck, despite the stakes (no pun intended) being much lower in the latter.

Even then, the prospector does manage to stake a claim through accidental means. With an “Awww, shucks!” of resignation, he tosses the sign away, which lands conveniently in an open spot nearby. When nobody swarms to steal the claim, the lucky miner grins at his good fortune.

Commence gold digging sequence, which, as revealed by a wide shot of the claimed spot, is much more dangerous than initially thought. The inevitable occurs as the prospector chips the cliff away, the claim chipping off and plummeting to the ground.

With Porky’s Tire Trouble debuting one of the first examples of a character walking on air in a Warner Bros cartoon, it’s only fitting for Gold Rush Daze to debut one of the first examples of a character sitting on air. 

Despite reusing the same exact voice line of “Awww, shucks!”, the gag almost manages to save itself as he crawls to his feet and walks along the air. Though the story does have to be ushered along in some way, having the prospector walk along the air and go back to the cliff safely would likely have been funnier than his inevitable demise, which is, again, executed with much more haste and less urgency than demanded by the scene. Even the dissolve of him falling to his doom and into his stay at a hospital drags on.

Nevertheless, cue the pathos as a doctor listens to the bruised up prospector’s heartbeat—which, instead of a thudding sound, emanates the shrill hum of a flatline.

Lousy thing. The doctor adjusts a dial on his stethoscope, radio frequencies squealing and humming. When the right setting is reached, Morse code beeps are heard from the heartbeat instead. Such a gag is actually relatively funny, but is lost in slow pacing and unconfident, unclear direction.

One of this cartoon’s most prominent issues is that the flow is very stilted and cut-up, with it very clear that one event happens after another rather than a momentous flow of occurrences. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples is the doctor’s declaration of “They found gold in Virginia City!” with no prior introduction. Even a “Guess what I heard?” could have eased the momentum, if only slightly.

In any case, the prospector gets the message loud and clear. With the irony of the scene exuding the most urgency taking place in a hospital duly noted, the miner echoes a line from Gold Diggers of ‘49 that, luckily, did not turn out to be Porky Pig’s catchphrase as they set it up to be: “WHOOPEE!”

He scrambles out of bed and takes off, much to the frozen, mildly shocked reaction of the doctor, another victim of terminal Hardaway-Dalton stiffness. 

One slightly too long pause later, the miner rushes back in to grab his hat before heading back out again.

We then dissolve to a ravine as the hopeful prospector attempts to pan for gold using a coffee grinder. A scowl and dumping of stray pebbles indicate that no such luck is found. 

Camera panning left, we segue to a gag of a panhandler shaking the pan with his back to the screen. Cue a samba orchestration of “Oh, Susanna” with some rather stilted animation of the prospector shaking his butt to the rhythm; Carl Stalling’s music is the true highlight of the sequence, especially when the payoff is revealed to be that the panhandler found a goldfish as his prize.

Seeing as music is on the mind, the tone shifts to that of a musical number, this time a cornpone rendition of “The Old Apple Tree”. Typical Hardawayisms ensue, with one of the singers pausing to spit out his tobacco, moving his beard to the aside, having two prospectors share the head of pickaxe as they dig back and forth, overall slow execution, and so on.

Gold Rush Daze borrows a number of beats from Gold Diggers of ‘49, including unnecessarily racist Chinese caricatures and stereotypes. For whatever reason, an egregiously caricatured chef slurps down some gold bouillon (labeled clearly by the stew pot), showing off his shiny gold to the audience with disarming eye contact. The animation is ugly for both obvious and more subtle reasons—mean spiritedness aside, the motion of the animation is stilted and choppy, and his head appears to shrink when he faces the camera. Technological folly is likely the last thing worth noting, but it does stand to reason that there are many more flaws than just the design.

In any case, the music is relatively catchy, sadly interrupted by an incredibly unnecessary aside from the guitarist, folding his beard up to speak in a nonsensical accent: “By Jiminy, they sure sound gewd!”

Both the entrance and exit of the miners in the mine cart singing the chorus is more thrilling and snappy than any of the actual prospecting action in the cartoon.

Back to our star, still struggling with the coffee grinder with some reused animation footage from the prior scene. The new addition of animation is to highlight the angry throwing of the grinder on the ground as we wipe to yet another unrelated sequence.

“Gimme a shot a’ nugget nectar!” Carl Stalling’s violin accompaniment of “How Dry I Am” makes for cozy accompaniment as a non-gambling barkeep pours his patron a drink.

Cue another gag that would be polished to snappier and funnier heights, this time in Art Davis’ Mexican Joyride. Here, the miner takes a swig of his nectar, and the effects are immediate; in a slightly excessive but, surprisingly fun sequence, the prospector literally turns stiff from the alcohol, his body spinning around in a whirlwind from the ferocity of the liquor. The animation of his hat spinning around in particular harbors some nice smears and elasticity to it, something all too absent in the H/D cartoons.

The “transformation”, so to speak, takes too long to maintain its full impact, but is still a comparatively fun scene. Art Davis’ aforementioned sequence takes the novelty of the idea and streamlines it, with the barkeep haphazardly throwing a stiff Daffy onto a pile of fellow petrified bar patrons in seconds flat. Of course, to compare the quality of a 1939 H/D effort to a 1947 Art Davis effort is futile, but interesting to observe the evolution.

On the subject of comparing cartoons, memories of Gold Diggers of ‘49 are beckoned in a direct parallel as a prospector darts into the bar and alerts the patrons to more found gold.

Cue close-up after close-up of the patrons incredulously repeating “Gold!?” Even our down and out prospector pops back to life with a hat take and “Gold!?“ of his own. 

Tapping into Gold Diggers some more, he repeats Porky’s short-lived catchphrase of “WHOOPEE!” as he scrambles to his feet. Gold Diggers, in spite of its longer sequence and longer splices, remains more spirited and urgent, but Carl Stalling’s ascending music chords and comparatively quick cuts between the bar patrons adds an excited, hopeful atmosphere lacking in the rest of the cartoon. 

Along heads our hero on horseback as he travels over hill and dale to reach the gold. Surprisingly, the montage fares comparatively well—the random cuts between each scene and each setting make as much sense as they can, eased by cross dissolves, and aren’t filled with unnecessary dialogue or needless japes. 

In an attempt to be artsy, Hardaway and Dalton have the prospector literally rushing from all corners of the globe, with “GOLD!” in big letters springing up into the screen wherever X marks the spot, somewhat similar to Gold Diggers’ own employment of typography. The scene is a little too sluggish and loses the steam from the montage, but the creativity is appreciated and certainly ties together the prospector’s earlier claims of traveling every corner of the globe to find gold.

Back to present day at the gas station, the miraculously ageless prospector telling the tourist that he’s wasting his time. 

Another spit o’ humbleness and hayseed declaration.

“Why, I wouldn’t go on one of them wild goose chases for all the gold in the world! No siree Bob.”

Perfect timing for a prospector to approach the two on horseback and alert them to a gold sighting.

“Gold!?”

The prospector’s conniving grin is unnecessary, but admittedly amusing as he throws the poor tourist out of his car and hops into it with a victorious “WHOOPEE!”, honoring the legacy of his stuttering porcine ancestors.

Typical take off and then come back gag ensues. “You can have the station!”

“YIPEE!”

The shrug of the tourist as we iris out correctly summarizes the last 7 minutes spent.

I personally am more sympathetic to Hardaway's cornpone sense of humor than most, as I do like to gravitate towards the novelty of the hayseed atmosphere; there's a lot of potential for gags, whether it be through anachronisms, syntax and dialogue, setting, or just certain transformations of props (such as the ma in Tex Avery's much funnier A Feud There Was purposefully inciting rifles to shoot at her coffee pot, using the bullet holes to pour multiple cups of java at once.)  Atmospheres such as this one have a lot of free reign, and perhaps the biggest flaw of this cartoon is the potential it squandered.

For a cartoon about the Gold Rush (emphasis on "rush"), the short is much too muddled by the glacial, in-your-face timing of the H/D efforts, lessening any thrill that should be present. Chuck Jones' cartoons were, at this time, also glacial, syrupy, slow, but had the benefit of beautiful, rich character acting and strong character designs. This short is the direct antithesis to beautiful and strong.

A number of gags that could be funny are lost due to sluggish pacing or unconfident execution. That the most unimportant aspects of the cartoon--the tourist racing his car in the beginning, the miners in their mine cart zipping in and out of frame--are the ones with the most urgency is not lost. 

Though it's nice to see Joe Twerp make another appearance, he was directed much more adequately in I Only Have Eyes for You, which is also a much funnier cartoon. Carl Stalling's musical accompaniment is the biggest source of redemption for this cartoon, which can be said for a large number of these shorts.

Not all of Hardaway and Dalton's output are duds, and that this cartoon has a lot of missing potential is much better than having no potential at all, but Gold Rush Daze is a very weak cartoon, whose animation and appearance is just as weak as the gags themselves, with the two of those weaknesses sometimes converging (ie totally unnecessary racist stereotypes--which are never "necessary" to begin with, but here feels even more unprecedented.) Hardaway and Dalton have their select share of better cartoons and moments, but this certainly is not one of them.

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