Two robins move into a new home and raise three youngsters from eggs, despite the presence of a hungry black cat in the last Terrytoon issued in 1939.
It's a good subject for a Technicolor Effort, but it makes the same error that a lot of Terrytoons do; the staff assumed that because the audience would have Technicolor to look at, it wouldn't mind recycled gags. This was not an entirely unwarranted assumption. Paul Terry aimed his cartoons at small children and their doting parents, whose precious scions would never do the awful things that Leon Schlesinger's characters would. Besides, this gag hadn't been used in a year and so no one would ever notice.
Except that's not how we watch cartoons nowadays. We watch them in batches, and in the batch I've been looking at for three weeks now, productions as early as 1930, I've seen the gag of the predator punishing himself for failure with a particular mechanical device at least four times; it was done best the second time. By now it's a meaningless stock device.
Philip Scheib makes extensive use of "Listen to the Mockingbird" for his musical cues. It would not be the last time.
It's a good subject for a Technicolor Effort, but it makes the same error that a lot of Terrytoons do; the staff assumed that because the audience would have Technicolor to look at, it wouldn't mind recycled gags. This was not an entirely unwarranted assumption. Paul Terry aimed his cartoons at small children and their doting parents, whose precious scions would never do the awful things that Leon Schlesinger's characters would. Besides, this gag hadn't been used in a year and so no one would ever notice.
Except that's not how we watch cartoons nowadays. We watch them in batches, and in the batch I've been looking at for three weeks now, productions as early as 1930, I've seen the gag of the predator punishing himself for failure with a particular mechanical device at least four times; it was done best the second time. By now it's a meaningless stock device.
Philip Scheib makes extensive use of "Listen to the Mockingbird" for his musical cues. It would not be the last time.
