El Coleccionista de Huevos

Up until Looney Tunes really hit its stride in the mid-1940s, the output of the studio was often iffy. This is because through the 1930s they too often relied on cute characters....and the best of Looney Tunes in later years was never cute! Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Pepe le Pew and others were funny...not cute.

"The Egg Collector" is one of 12 cartoons which represent the end of the old at Looney Tunes. While their Sniffles cartoons are uniformly well animated, Sniffles himself was a terrible recurring character. In his early appearances (like this one), he was ultra-cutesy and sweet...almost nauseatingly so. Later, he became worse...an annoying chatterbox. As a result, these cartoons lacked the humor and weirdness you'd later come to expect from the studio. And, as a kid, I winced when these Sniffles cartoons were aired on TV!

In this cartoon, Sniffles the mouse and his friend, Bookworm, are out doing something very stupid...they are trying to steal an egg from the owl's nest. Considering mice are owls' favorite food...it's actually AMAZINGLY stupid. Can Sniffles and Bookwork survive this stunt? I sure hope not!

It's fortunate that this Sniffles cartoon isn't as over the top cutesy as some of his other shorts. It still could have used more laughs, but at least there's no singing and there are a few gags that work. Not bad....though this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the film. It is, on the other hand, one of Sniffles' best shorts.