Blitz Wolf (1942) - Not very funny. Seems like just an excuse for the animators to insult Hitler. Definately not enough to hold a cartoon for several mintues.
Scrap Happy Daffy (1943) - Some great gags. Daffy inadvertantly insulting himself. Glasses on the butt. Daffy lamenting what he could do with some spinach.
Herr Meets Hare (1945) - Not bad, typical Bugs Bunny stuff. I’m not sure I get the final joke though. Nice little precursor to What’s Opera Doc?
Russian Rhapsody (1944) - Now 5 minutes is gross exaggeration. It was 70 seconds. And done before in other great comedies by no less the Charlie Chaplin. The majority of the toon deals with the Gremlins singing songs and destroying the plane which is pretty funny and enjoyable.
Now what they don’t show is any toons with any major stereotypes. Just Hitler, Guerig and Himmler. So no
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944) which is a very funny cartoon, with great gags and would definately be one of everyone’s favorite bits weren’t it not for the outrageous stereotypes, especially at the Ice Cream truck, sheesh. Most of it is in the same vein as Wackiki Wabbit (1943) which is my favorite Bugs Bunny toon. I love his thinking cap. I need one of those.
What’s scary is that this I don’t find these shorts so shocking since I see them still in our entertainment, only rather then Japanese and Germans we got Arabs and a few others. It’s not nerely so blatant but they’re still there.
“Does your tobacco taste different lately?” which I believe was a slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes.
Russian Rhapsody also had a Hitler-scared-of-Stalin joke in it. And I personally thought the Hitler-speak in that cartoon was humorous for a short gag. “…with the Fritz Freleng and the what’s cooking doc…”
I’ll agree the Daffy Duck one wasn’t very good. I thought the animation quality for it was awful the gags weren’t entertaining.
On the other hand I really enjoyed at least the beginning of Blitz Wolf. Especially the pigs having signed a Neville Chamberlain-esque treaty with the wolf. But I was expecting the wolf to roll over the third pig’s Maginot Line like house as well from the way the cartoon was starting.
Well I watched the last two because my bro was watching- “Russian Rhaposdy” and “Herr Meets Hare.” Well, okay, they were…bizarre, to say the least. Did people really get sucked into this sort of thing, or was it more tongue in cheek, like that Afghanistan episode of “South Park”?
Anyway I don’t know if I was entirely entranced (those Gremlins were scary as hell!!), but maybe it’s because I was raised on a diet of Simpsons and Futurama and Family Guy. I mean, the quality of animation has changed a lot in the past sixty years.
Fifty years from now Simpsons and South Park are going to look really strange to that generation.
Taken in the context of the times, the stereotyping doesn’t bother me; it’s pretty typical for countries during a war to dehumanize their enemies.
I’m not defending racism, mind you, I’m just saying that the perspective of the years should eliminate a knee-jerk response. For instance, I grew up in very rural Pennsylvania; I’m sure there wasn’t a black family within 50 miles. Yet I had a large collection of rag dolls made by a very talented local lady, and almost everyone of them was black. Were my family racist? Nope; in fact in the late 50s while travelling, my parents stood up to a diner owner who wanted to refuse service to a group of black travelers. My father told him, “If you’re open for us, you’re open for them. These people want to eat just like we do.”
To clarify: The sign had read “No Dogs Allowed.” The Pig had crossed out “Dogs” and written “Japs.” That “Japs” was what Cartoon Network (or someone) had blurred out.
I was a bit disappointed overall with the cartoons they showed—but for me, nothing can ever beat the pre-Code Betty Boops. It made me wonder if Japanese and German theaters were showing anti-U.S. cartoons with wild FDR caricatures.
One or two moments gave me the willies: Bugs Bunny piloting a plane into a skyscraper (it wasn’t in one of the full-length cartoons, just a quick clip during the narration segment), and the Statue of Liberty pulling out a machine gun and blasting away at incoming enemy planes. I DID jump up and applaud at THAT moment . . .
a) Bugs didn’t pilot the plane into a skyscraper, he piloted it between two skyscrapers, doing a quarter barrel-roll in order to keep the damn thing airborne. It was a clip from the same cartoon where the gremlin and Bugs discussed gas ration cards at the end.
b) You, of all people, should know the difference between a Flit gun and a machine gun.
I watched it with the Tzeroling and had to explain a lot to her 'cos she didn’t know much about the war. I think she got most of it.
I am glad they handled the Japanese caricatures the way they did; stuff like that needs to be put in context and really shouldn’t be broadcast completely without comment.
Exapno Mapcase, ask the generation of your family that grew up during the war (if they’re still around) about going to see the movies at that time. It wasn’t just the one film “in and out” kind of thing we do today; an afternoon at the movies literally was a whole afternoon, with a newsreel and a cartoon, and probably a short feature film before the main feature. I daresay a date at the movies could easily have been four to five hours.
According to Jerry Beck, animation historian and producer of this special, the only print Turner had of Blitz Wolf was this one, which had the word “Japs” removed from the sign, and also removed another gag regarding the Japanese. The very long gun one of the pigs has bombs Japan, leaving only a sign reading “Doolittle dood it!”
Olentzero, I’m no Eve, but I’m pretty knowledgeable about entertainment history. If you look at other public entertainment of the time, radio, movies, books, you’ll see a huge amount of propaganda throughout the war years, but only the poorest-done bits of it were as petty and heavy-handed as was shown in these cartoons. (Admittedly, comic books came pretty close. Maybe there’s something about the medium.) Today we’re more used to cartoons placing their jokes in backgrounds and insinuating their messages into the main entertainment, and that seems to be an extremely effective mode of conveying their intent.
The crudeness of the content of these propaganda cartoons is even in contrast to the non-propaganda cartoons of the era. I was surprised and disappointed. I expected better.
Ah, I misunderstood the thrust of your argument. I thought you were complaining about the length, rather than the content. Don’t know how I got that impression.
In any case, I think the answer lies in the fact that deadlines were just as much a part of the cartoon studios’ existence back then as they are now for today’s animators. I’m not sure how many new releases were expected to have new cartoons accompanying them, but it seems likely that the rate of WB’s output necessitated a lot of hard and fast work over at Termite Terrace. My guess is that the order of the day was “Make Hitler look like a total shmuck” and the boys went with whatever ideas they could come up with in the time allotted.