Here's a Walter Lantz cartoon starring Oswald The Lucky Rabbit. In this one, our little guy has to cheer up Old King Cole, who gots da blues!
Get ready for the old bait and switcheroonie. Oswald is at the dentist office but the tooth to be pulled is giving the dentist a tough time.
The dentist has a solution to the problem? It's anesthesia time!
Oswald wakes up after being knocked and hears on the radio that Old King Cole has the blues. Being a rabbit of action, Oswald sounds the alarm to his Hollywood celebrity friends!
You can carry more stars with a fire truck, ya silly!
At the king's palace , the court jester tries to get the king to laugh at his silly antics to no avail, look at that long face!
Then Oswald shows up with all his pals, time to turn that frown upside down!
Oswald opens the Mother Goose Song Book, that should do the trick!
The cow tried to jump over the Moon but didn't quite make it, nice bloomers!
This Little Bo Peep gag leaves me speechless.
Even Mae West gets into the act... Oswald stares at Mae's spectacular backside the whole time she sings the Humpty Dumpty song!
But, Old King Cole doesn't break out of his shell until Laurel and Hardy start giving a pie-in-the-face demonstration...
And things get a little out of hand...
And the flying pie race is on!!
Unlike his brothers, you can see that Groucho ducked when a pie was tossed at him, but as he's having a laugh about his cleverness, yeah, he gets a pie in the face.
The court jester gets some advise from his dark side, like, HEY, THESE GUYS ARE TRYING TO TAKE YER JOB!
So, the jester pulls Oswald down into the cellar.
There, he chokes our little pal with a noose! (Jeez!)
Like I was saying, Oswald's actually still knocked out as the dentist pulls with all his might, and the damn tooth finally lets go.
No wonder it was so hard to remove, the tooth was connected to his shoes!! This cartoon is no where as crazy as the real world is nowadays.
Got a surprise a few days ago, when a teenager asked me what I thought of the early black and white cartoons (Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, and 'Steamboat Willie' Mickey). My reply was that I tend to prefer the pre-fifties cartoons, even the black and white ones. He told me that he has been wanting to create B&W animations of his own, and he has the tools to do it. I told him to GO FOR IT! This young fellow knew I had been a maker of several short films since the early 1970s, and he seemed quite pleased/surprised by my positive response. I even mentioned that he should look up 'Oswald the Rabbit' too.
ReplyDeleteI gave him some words of encouragement, then he realized that he was 'on the clock' as he saw his boss approaching, I said I'd talking to him again sometime, and as I headed to the parking lot and my car, I turned and saw him *running* across the lot, skipping, and jumping up in the air!
God knows, I hope I encouraged him to pursue his 'animation dreams' just a little, on that day.