I Like Mountain Music (Lip Service, or Three Sides to Every Story)

 

Director: Rudolf Ising

Summary: In a follow-up to “Three’s a Crowd,” characters from books and magazines of the early 1930s come to life in a drugstore at midnight. It’s not the first to have this (since “Three’s a Crowd” also had book characters coming to life and other shorts, like “Red-Headed Baby” and “It’s Got Me Again” were also cartoons where animals, inanimate objects, and fictional characters also partied once the clock struck midnight), but it is the first to establish this formula, which would last until the directors decided to make cartoons with actual plots and characters, culminating to Bob Clampett creating the ultimate “book characters partying after midnight” short, “Book Revue.” (I know an episode of the 1990s Animaniacs did something like this in a video store, but, like “Book Revue,” that was a spoof of a bygone subgenre).

The Channel: Cartoon Network (on an episode of Late Night Black and White and on the “Midnight at the Bookstore” episode of ToonHeads); Radio & Television Managers redrawn version.

Part(s) Edited:

• A short scene of African natives (standing in front of a magazine called Asia magazine, which makes me wonder if they’re actually African natives or are supposed to be South Asian [as in “from India”]) flapping their oversized lips to the music as Sonja Henie (a well-known figure skater back in the 1930s) skates on a mirror with baby powder to simulate snow was cut when Cartoon Network aired the short on Late Night Black and White. It was also cut when it was shown as a redrawn-colorized version on the ToonHeads episode, “Midnight in the Bookstore,” which, coincidentally, wasn’t part of the original episode. The original “Midnight in the Bookstore” episode (first aired on December 18, 1998) had the cartoons “Speaking of the Weather,” “You’re An Education,” and “Book Revue.” Apparently, “You’re An Education” was so filled with outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes that it was pulled and replaced with “I Like Mountain Music” (which also had outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes, but was easier to have those scenes removed) in reruns.
• The Radio & Television Managers redrawn version (retitled “Magazine Rack”) left in the African/South Indian natives and their oversized lips, but altered the magazine publishing dates to 1970 rather than some time in the early 1930s and cut the performance of “Sweet Adeline” because it had racially insensitive caricatures of Pacific Islanders (which are really just the hula girl and the native guitar players from “Pagan Moon”)

How It Plays Edited/Video Comparison: Since I recently stumbled upon a video that shows a three-way comparison between the original uncut black and white version versus the Radio & Television Managers redrawn version versus the Turner Entertainment version, I’m just going to show that instead of tell you (the reader) for the billionth time that the edits didn’t affect the story because this is one of those musical cartoons that doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Yeah, there’s a sequence where the other book characters try to stop criminals from a crime thriller pulp magazine, but those are a dime a dozen in shorts like this. If, for any reason, this gets pulled from YouTube for copyright reasons, I’ll edit the post to reflect the change:

Availability Uncut: Despite both the uncut and edited redrawn versions being available on YouTube, it is under copyright (though something tells me it’ll be in the public domain in a few short years). It has been officially released on the fifth volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Age laserdisc set (it’s on side one, which is dedicated to black and white cartoons), the final volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set (on the third disc dedicated to the early black and white cartoons. It’s on the bonus cartoon list, alongside “I Love a Parade,” “Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence,” and “How Do I Know It’s Sunday?” It’s not remastered, if you care about that sort of thing, but it is uncut and censored), and is a bonus feature on the Public Enemies: The Golden Age of Gangster Films DVD (released in 2010), on the Blu-ray version of the film Ladies They Talk About starring Barbara Stanwyck, and on the Blu-ray version of the 1933 adaptation of Little Women starring Katharine Hepburn. Both Blu-ray movies have the cartoon uncut, uncensored, restored, and remastered for high-definition. It was available on HBO Max (now called “Max”) when the streaming service was first released in 2020, but it was removed as quickly as it premiered due to (say it with me now): scenes of outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes.