Those Beautiful Dames (A Shamn Dame)

 

Director: Friz Freleng (credited as “Isadore Freleng”)
Summary: This is more-or-less "The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives," only it's about an orphan girl who wishes to have toys, but is too poor to buy one. Instead of Santa coming to give her toys, the toys come to her run-down shack to cheer her up by giving her a home makeover (a modest one for the 1930s) and throwing her a party with cake and ice cream. Cute kids' fantasy stuff.
The Channel: unnamed syndication, Cartoon Network, and streaming (HBO Max [a.k.a Max])
Part(s) Edited/Video Evidence: Today, we have a two-fer (or three-fer, rather, but I only have evidence of two channels editing this short). Rather than explain it by writing it down (and because I recently installed DaVinci Resolve and gotten the hang of editing on non-linear video software, which is easier than what I used to do back when I was in film school), you can click here to see the video (if anything happens to the video, I will re-edit this blog).

How It Plays Edited: The Cartoon Network version where the Jazz Bow band scene was replaced with the scene of the toys gathered around the girl and the girl looking amazed that the toys she had seen in the store window are here and made over her broken-down shack has the most obvious "replace problematic scene with more benign footage" edit I've seen...so far (I'm not at the later cartoons yet). The edit done to the scene of the pickaninny girls next to the chocolate cake is similar (and looks and sounds obvious that something's missing) on both the Cartoon Network and (HBO) Max/streaming version, with the only notable differences being that the streaming version has more vibrant colors, the sound is clearer (the better to pick up on audio jumps, my dear), and there's no station identification bug at the bottom right of the screen.

Availability Uncut: Until a restored, remastered version that's uncut and uncensored resurfaces, your best bets to seeing this uncut are on the Golden Age of Looney Tunes laserdisc (volume 5, side 6) or as a special feature on the 2006 DVD release of the film Dames, starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell.

Hold Anything (Head of Mouse-hold)

Director: Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising

Summary: Bosko is a construction worker who impresses Honey by making music from everything in sight, including a decapitated mouse, a typewriter, and a goat filled with hot air. I don't know how best to describe it. The early Warner Bros. shorts were weird in their lack of a coherent plot and characterization.

Part(s) Edited: Nickelodeon strikes again with their edits. This time, they cut Bosko decapitating the Mickey Mouse-looking mouse (and the mouse trying to get its head back) as Bosko tosses the mouse back and forth on the saw. It's not as gruesome as it sounds (mostly because it's played for laughs and musicality), but I do kind of understand why Nickelodeon would consider it inappropriate for kids/family TV, especially back in the late 1980s, early 1990s when censorship was a bit more strict on the violence/dangerous behavior front. Thanks to OpenShot Video Editor, I did a recreation of how I think the edit played out on Nickelodeon. 

Please note: I was too young to remember when Nickelodeon aired Bosko cartoons on Nick at Nite (but I do remember when they aired Daffy/Speedy cartoons on their daytime version of Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon), so this isn't 100% actual evidence.

How It Plays With the Edit: Besides a mild jump in the audio (and the fact that the early Warner Bros. cartoons didn't have much in the way of a story or plot), the edit doesn't make or break the cartoon. Get used to this type of evaluation. It will be semi-frequent.

Availability Uncut: Bad news: it's not on any official Warner Bros. DVD or Blu-ray release as of this writing, nor is it on any streaming service, such as HBO Max (or Max, as it's now known), Warner Media RIDE, or even Boomerang (whose streaming service has more classic cartoons than the actual channel). The good news: this short is public domain, so YouTube and other video sites should have it uncut and uncensored (and maybe, just maybe, you can find the edited-on-Nickelodeon version since there are people out there who want to upload the stuff they recorded on their VCRs back when that was common). Here's the full short on  YouTube (the quality isn't the best, but it is uncut and uncensored).