PriceSCAN Blog

The first two volumes feature cartoons by Ub Iwerks, who worked with Disney on the very first Mickey Mouse cartoons. He went on to produce a series of cartoons for MGM, mostly featuring a very un-frog-like character, Flip the Frog. There is also a "Comicolor" series which takes off on familiar nursery rhymes and fairy tales usually to comic effect. Detractors may point to the lack of coherent plot lines in some of these shorts. But it is the constant inventiveness of the transformations and the barrage of sight gags that make these cartoons so remarkable. Not to mention the sheer technical genius with which Iwerks brings it all off. Not that his gags are all brilliant, and many are just plain crude, but the way they just keep coming at you assures that sooner or later one will hit you. (They can't all be gems, as Groucho used to say.)

An added delight is the musical scores written by the young Carl Stalling, who went on to greater brilliance in the later Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series at Warner Brother. He doesn't have the Warner Brother catalog on hand here, but he makes good with mostly public domain songs. Certainly the best of the Flip cartoons are the ones that foreground music most emphatically. "Ragtime Romeo" is my favorite of these in which Flip comes to serenade his girlfriend (a cat?) on his piano, which he handily totes over in his tiny car. Soon all the tenants of the apartment building are swinging, except for a music-hating cow who calls the cops on the lot of them. This cartoon really rocks.

The fairy tales can be cloying at times, but they also have their surprising turns. In "Humpty Dumpty Jr." the emperilled heroine, a female egg, falls in a pot of boiling water. When she emerges, she has become "hard-boiled" and does a mean Mae West impersonation. Mary's little lamb sneaks on stage during a school talent show and stops the show with a riotous sheep shimmy dance. In "Balloonland" a civilization of balloons is menaced by an animated pin cushion. I'm not making any of this up.

The restorations are much better than you would expect, given that all of the cartoons are over 70 years old and that the color ones use an early two-strip color process. And the sources must be very rare - I don't think I had ever seen a single one of these cartoons before this. All in all quite an education and quite a package.