Last night was one of those nights where for no reason, I woke a number of times from a series of bizarre dreams. I don’t remember a single one of those, so rest safely assured you’re free of a tedious recounting of my brain sending its garbage to the dump.
In one of the waking intervals though, something prompted me to remember a cartoon I saw a few times as a kid. Google and YouTube are failing me as I try to find more details.
The era: old, possibly black and white. I would have seen this on a local channel that had a show dedicated to older, probably cheaper cartoons outside the ‘regular’ Bugs Bunny/Popeye/Huckleberry Hound axis. I recall a lot of the cartoons on this show were old-timey sing-alongs, the kind where you follow the bouncing dot as it lands on the current lyric.
What I recall: There was some sort of invasion. Aliens? Enemy aircraft? Dunno. The aircraft were literal teacups and saucers, with the cups upside down on the saucers to make a domed UFO-looking thing. Anti-aircraft fire was provided by salt and pepper shakers. There was a pitched battle. It was weird.
Maybe related?: I think it was the same cartoon but possibly this is just a co-located memory. There was a love interest, and she was injured in the fighting. Someone, a doctor maybe, opened her chest to repair what was a clockwork mechanism of some time. As a kid, I thought her heart was represented by a pretzel, but now I suspect I just didn’t know what a watch balance wheel looked like.
That’s a surprisingly good find, but I don’t think that’s it. I recall the cartoon being a little more sophisticated in graphic style, with more shading and perspective. I also don’t recall a human figuring so prominently.
As a bonus though, here’s a Koko cartoon I have always loved, especially how it incorporates movie footage into the story.
The one with the flying saucers could also be a Harveytoon, but I don’t know which one. I suggest you surf the rest of the archive. If it does indeed have flying saucers, it’s probably dated later than 1947, the year that phrase was coined.
Brilliant, thank you! It’s not exactly how I was remembering it, but after watching, it’s indisputably what I saw. Years of brain rot merged a few things together, including the bit from some other cartoon where one of the characters had a clockwork heart.
And you were right in your suspicion. The balance wheel shaped like a heart (or like a pretzel to snack-driven young me) is right there at 17:40. Thanks!
I remember seeing it when I was seven or eight, and kids could still go home for lunch and watch cartoons on TV. I think I’d seen every Harveytoon ever produced by the time I was ten.
There was a Milton The Monster episode where a Flying Saucer Monster and a Flying Cup Monster from Outer Space landed on Earth and tried to invade, could that be it?
