Believe It, or Else (Berth Defects)

 

Director(s): Tex Avery (credited as “Fred Avery”)

Summary: A spoof of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, where viewers get to see strange and unexplained phenomena from around the world, from a man who speaks in moos after drinking nothing but milk to a wishing well in Arabia that’s not exactly helpful to a matchstick optical illusion that gets complicated. All the while, Egghead (which, according to the Looney Tunes Fandom wiki is a prototype version of Elmer Fudd) makes his skepticism known by carrying a sign that says, “I Don’t Believe It!” (despite that he’s able to ride in Buck Dodgers’ spaceship camper trailer and somehow survives getting sawed in half).

Fun Facts: 

• This is the last cartoon where the Egghead incarnation of Elmer Fudd was voiced by Danny Webb (“Elmer’s Candid Camera” would have Arthur Q. Bryan voice Elmer until Bryan died in the late 1950s).

• Buck Rogers is an actual pulp space adventure series and character. In the days before Star Wars and Star Trek, this was the space adventure series that was everywhere, whether people liked it or not. There’s even a Looney Tunes parody of it. You probably know it: “Duck Dodgers in the 24th-1/2 Century” (Buck Rogers was the 25th century) from 1953. Here, Buck Rogers is called Buck Dodgers (eh, close enough...)

Sorry, no “Letterboxd Says the Darndest Things” this time. The reviews weren’t funny or interesting enough for me to cut in...

The Channel(s): Cartoon Network, Boomerang, MeTV, and Tubi

Part(s) Edited: The entire scene of “the berth of a baby” (as in “a crying baby in a train car”) was cut because the two people who pull back the curtains just happen to be stereotypically black train porters.

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): This simultaneously doesn’t grind my gears and does. It doesn’t grind my gears because this is one of those spot-gag cartoons that are just a flimsy excuse to show as many cheesy visual jokes and scenes that feel like a Family Guy-style cutaway joke with no set-up (in the days before Seth MacFarlane was even conceived) as possible, and cutting a scene like that isn’t going to ruin the flow of the cartoon. 

So what does grind my gears about this edit? That the censors chose to simply cut the scene. That’s not how you make memorably bad censorship cuts on TV. If it were me, I’d replace the scene of the black porters parting the curtains with a black screen (or freeze-framed the green curtains, then dissolved onto the crying baby). In fact, I did the former hypothetical edit just because I could (and because my first plan to crop the shot to get rid of the black porters didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I also was considering digitally removing the porters with AI editing, but the last time I used AI-based digital removal, it made the Toilet Duck scene from Father Ted look stranger than usual. I’m still learning all this AI stuff because it’s better than ignoring or protesting against it):

The blackout edit would make people think their television blew out or that there are technical difficulties on the station’s end. I’d much rather have that, since that can easily be turned into a meme or discussed as a collective childhood memory for 1990s kids online.

Video Comparison: 

Availability Uncut: Outlook not so good. As of this writing, the only way you can see this uncut legally is on the Golden Age of Looney Tunes laser disc from 1992 (volume three, side eight: “The Evolution of Egghead”).

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: Good news: It’s currently on Tubi. Bad news: They somehow managed to upload the edited version instead of the uncut version, or better yet, just omit it, since Tubi doesn’t show a lot of the WB cartoons that have been phased out due to outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes. Worse news: It’s not available anywhere beyond that.

 

‘Til next time: Stay Looney and Be Merrie!

Drawn and Quartered's Belated Christmas Spectacular -- Episode #4: Toyland Broadcast (It's a Jungle Out There)

Director(s): Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising (as if the title card didn't make it apparent).

Summary: Cut from the same cloth as “Red-Headed Baby,” “The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives,” “Those Beautiful Dames,” and other “midnight party in a closed store” musical cartoons (particularly the one where toys come to life, not so much the ones where it’s mice or product mascots and food in a grocery store), Harmon and Ising do an MGM version of these shorts (sometimes using the same scenes and gags) where a nutcracker who, ironically, sounds like a higher-pitched version of Buddy is the emcee in a variety show of performances, featuring a Bing Crosby jack-in-the-box (still better than the Hitler one from “Nutty News” — stay tuned for that one), a white roly-poly conductor (modeled after Paul Whiteman) winds up a sambo jazz band toy; a pair of French dolls (one a pimp from Montmartre; the other, his whore girlfriend [literally a whore. That wasn’t meant to be a misogynist insult]) acting out an apache bit that actually has a happy ending; and an ending that pretty much shows why this short was edited to pieces on the rare times it aired on television (Ironically, that’s been my favorite part since I was a kid, despite the outdated racial caricatures that I should be offended over in this day and age. I’m only slightly offended, but do realize that it’s a product of its time).

Fun Facts: 

• The Apache dance, depicted in this film (and used in other live-action films and cartoons), was originated by street toughs in the Parisian slums around the turn of the century. The dance itself re-enacts a pimp’s domination of a prostitute, with the man picking her up and throwing her around would render her a “limp noodle.” In some instances, as seen here, the woman could fight back, showing that not everything from the past was misogynist. There was some misandry thrown in there, too. It still wasn’t as equal as it should be, but it was there. About the only times that the apache dance is subverted/spoofed is here (with the prostitute dominating her abusive pimp by strangling him and tossing him into a spittoon) and in the Pepe Le Pew cartoon “Scent-imental Romeo” from 1951, where it’s treated more as a romantic tango (this is Pepe Le Pew we’re talking about. He may be stalkerish, pushy, crass, and manipulative in his approach to the fair sex — or what he assumes to be the fair sex, as seen in his premiere short “Odor-able Kitty” or that time he accidentally made out with a human man in the Tunnel of Love ride, also from “Scent-imental Romeo” — but he’s not violent towards them. In fact, if the female is violent towards him, as seen on “Scent-imental Over You” and “Wild Over You,” it just arouses him more. That’s why I consider the Pepe series a sexual horror comedy, because there are horror movies out there — particularly the serial killer/slasher horror flicks almost everyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s knows and loves — where fighting back against the slasher killer through violent means is not going to easily defeat him and, worse: might arouse him) and the only violence is the striped cat he’s been harassing dancing him into a box of wooden clubs so she can grab one and beat him without mercy (not “merci”). Forgive the detour to the Pepe Le Pew cartoons. That’s my Valentine’s Day special preview.
• Celebrities caricatured here: Bing Crosby (the crooning jack-in-the-box); Kate Smith (the girl doll blowing a balloon and turning into a plus-sized woman with a beautiful singing voice), Paul Whiteman (the roly-poly doll that winds up the sambo jazz band), David Rubinoff (the violin playing toy), Rudy Vallee (the dog on the strange, fire-powered saxophone), and The Mills Brothers (the blackfaced quartet harmonizing during “Jungle Fever”).
• Speaking of The Mills Brothers, their harmonizing here is not really them. It was done by The Four Blackbirds, who also did Mills Brothers-style harmonizing on the Censored Eleven short, “Clean Pastures.” I...don’t know if they did the matchsticks on “Wholly Smoke,” but it sounds like it could be them.
• The ABC radio station seen here predates both the American version that’s now owned by Disney and the Australian version that (I’m assuming) is its own station.
• The song here (“Jungle Fever”) is real. It was composed by Howard Dietz and Walter Donaldson and used in the 1934 film Operator 13, starring Gary Cooper and Marion Davies. 

Letterboxd Says The Darndest Things: Told you I would bring this back. I wasn’t going to because the “Fun Facts” was running long, but I figure that I can squeeze some time for this segment.

Tim Brayton darkens our door again with another two-and-a-half star review (though here, it’s justified, since the early musical cartoons can be grating on those who are used to animation with a plot), stating:

My current dive into the Happy Harmonies series is demonstrating, if nothing else, that Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were not at all interested in pigeonholing themselves, to a degree that makes their years with the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies look outright sedate. The basic description of this one sounds pretty straightforward: toys come to life and put on a show, first by parodying pop culture figures, then by indulging in racial cariature. That’s not new per se. But there’s a kind of mad randomness to this, with the visual style and music changing with every new toy, practically, so we get everything from unendurably cloying cutesiness in the beginning to some rather alarming, even menacing jazziness in the end, accompanied by some very out-there lighting effects that look almost hellish in the two-tone color being used. It’s a lot of things, but never lazy, and God bless them for that; at the same time, it’s deeply unfunny and something about the way it keeps switching to a brand-new caricature every 20 seconds or so makes it feel much longer than it is.

Things I Agree With Tim On: As I mentioned before, it can be grating for those who are used to animation having a plot and jokes, so him not finding it funny (but an interesting watch due to the insanity of how it was made) is justified.

Things I Disagree With (or Challenge) Tim On:

• If Harmon and Ising “...weren’t interested in pigeonholing themselves,” then why does this short feel like the ones they’ve done before when they worked for Leon Schlesinger at Termite Terrace? Feels like they were trying to trot out what they were known for to another studio, which does explain why they brought along Bosko and Honey.

• The short is only deeply unfunny by today’s standards, due to modern audiences not knowing about the celebrity caricatures and finding some of the bits offensive (mostly the racial caricatures, but also the apache dance could be considered demeaning and violent to women, never mind that her pimp does get his in the end). It was probably very chuckleworthy and entertaining in its day, and I will not hear another bad word about it (you can tell I did like this as a kid thanks to repeat VHS viewing).

Joe (no last name given) was a bit nicer to this one with three-and-a-half stars, but the review...yeah:

I didn’t intend this musical cartoon to fall within my Shocktober viewing parameters but between the two-strip Technicolor and a jack-in-the-box caricature of Bing Crosby that brings to mind Bing cast as demented evil clown Horrabin in some horrible nightmare version of Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, this is just unsettling enough to cut it.

Not going to do an agree/disagree/meet halfway entry for this one, because I’ve never seen The Anubis Gates and him thinking that “Toyland Broadcast” is a horror short film despite being the 1934 version of Toy Story is no sillier than me thinking the Pepe Le Pew cartoons are a sexual horror comedy (or, more realistically, a romantic dark comedy with sexual undertones) or that the 1963 Daffy Duck cartoon “Aqua Duck” is a psychological dramedy about Daffy either holding onto a gold nugget (symbolizing his "golden years" as the Daffy Duck that was wacky or a comic loser/idiot hero who starred in genre spoofs) and becoming increasingly insane from the desert heat or giving into his greedy jerk ways and trading the gold nugget to a pack rat for some water. We all have our own weird ways of viewing the world and the media we consume.

Finally, we have Jay Diaz, who gave this two-and-a-half stars and asks the burning question:

is it bad if I think that the blackface quartet have the best song

My answer: Only if you personally think so, just like watching The Censored Eleven. As for me, the song has lived rent-free in my head since I was a kid and I didn’t mind the racially insensitive caricatures because I wasn’t told until later that they were a symbol of less tolerant times. Oh, to be young and ignorant again...

Okay, that’s enough of the salad course. Let’s get to the meat:

The Channel(s): Cartoon Network, Boomerang, and DVD

Part(s) Edited: You would think this wouldn't see a TV or home media release, but it did. When it was on television, it aired around Christmastime (though a Fandom Wiki dedicated to showing what episodes and animated shorts aired on Cartoon Network by day, month, and year has “Toyland Broadcast” airing in February, May, and November in the early-to-mid 2000s. In contrast, Boomerang strictly aired this around Christmastime). The version Cartoon Network and Boomerang aired (and its DVD release version), naturally, cut all the scenes featuring outdated African/black stereotypes...and I do mean all of them, so say goodbye to the sambo jazz band scenes, the African cannibal dolls, the four white dolls turning blackface from chocolate, and a Southern mammy doll that looks like what I think Mammy Two Shoes (the black housemaid from the Tom and Jerry cartoons) looks like, who, in turn, reminds me of my dear, departed grandmother.

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): This is a ramped-up version of how “September in the Rain” was cut, only here, the cartoon makes less sense and is more choppy without the offending scenes.

Video Comparison: Instead of embedding the video on the blog, I've provided a link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ATB6BMdS7S-0PUJ6SKzwjuUgxsEneC86/view. And there's no comparison this time around; it's a re-enactment of how Cartoon Network showed it edited. Here's the uncut version from YouTube. I will change the link in case the video gets taken down.

Availability Uncut: Its physical media history...oof! It’s kinda bad. If you want to see it in all its uncut glory, then it’s available on 1991’s Tom & Jerry’s The Night Before Christmas and the MGM Cartoon Classics: Happy Harmonies laser disc (side 4, “Swingin’ Cats and Critters”). If you want to see it edited to pieces and missed out on when Cartoon Network and/or Boomerang ran classic cartoons, then I recommend the 2008 DVD release, The Joan Crawford Collection: Sadie McKee.

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: No, no, and hell no! However, some video sites do have this, despite it not being in the public domain yet, but those are unofficial releases.

‘Til next time: Stay Looney and Be Merrie!