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A little girl dreams she is in a toy castle where the figures sing about Beauty and Beast, often refraining to a random low "buu-daa-buu-bup-bup". The character designs are nothing more than evenly proportioned circular shapes, but they do some crazy things like the wooden birds who grow wheels out of the blue. The most clever gag is the sentient canon who yelps in pain when the toy soldier lights his fuse! The way the beast comes in would sound predictable if I revealed it here but in the cartoon it's actually unexpected.
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Rating: 4/7
Famous for being the first Porky cartoon, but there are other things to enjoy in here. Apparently they were going to make a series out of all the characters introduced at the beginning (It's great when Beans "nyahs" the camera) but only Porky had any staying power. His own sequence is the best when he does an imitation of a horse and cues his fellow classmates to drop lightbulbs and stuff for sound effects. His stutter sounds like real stuttering as opposed to the theasaurus-reliant stuttering of his later incarnations, yet it's not offensive because he's more a funny pig who happens to stutter than a stuttering pig who happens to be funny, if you get the idea. The other children are entertaining in their own way.
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Rating: 5/7
It's not far removed from the b&w Harman and Ising cartoons, but at least it moves on to the next scene before the current one can wear out its welcome. You know the drill: Tons of incidental gags, a musical number, and some singing and dancing lady getting kidnapped. This one shows a bunch of ants directing traffic with stop signs spun around on egg-beaters and sailing across a sink like it were Venice. I love the musical number for this one, BTW. The vocal melody sounds slick but it's also quite eerie for a generic song about lusting and doesn't sound "Barber-shop quartet-y" (which often annoys me in these musical cartoons). I've told you all you need to know.
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Rating: 4/7
A suave Bing-Crosby knockoff bags someone else's girlfriend, then dumps her for a French singer. Bing's voice showing up in unlikely places are the best gags. If you want a corny romance film crammed in 7 minutes, you could do worse.
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No matter how much I try I can’t get excited over this film of celebrity caricatures, although I enjoy some scenes immensely. These gags take already wacky celebrities and place them in outrageous scenarios, such as Harpo Marx chasing a female with stop and go signs popping out of his top hat. I also look forward to the guy with his head forever in profile and Laurel and Hardy exchanging figures by drinking out of the same coconut bowl.
The setting is pretty bizarre (a radiobroadcast at a night club set up in the woods) and it’s taken advantage of with celebrities stationed in bizarre places, such as whoever portrayed Tarzan and his wife sitting in a palm tree. The characters are rendered in these overtly-geometrical shapes (check out the huge lips on the guy who eats the banana). And heck, the entire cast is a mix of human and animal caricatures.
Not every scene is thrilling but I don’t hate the cartoon, I just think it’s a little pointless. Still, it’s fun to watch how they ridiculed celebrities back in the day.
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