When Magoo Flew

I recall watching the UPA cartoons featuring "The Nearsighted Mister Magoo" – as his full credit appears here – on Italian TV as a kid; for the record, the "Leslie Halliwell Film Guide" rates his 1952 'vehicle' BAREFACED FLATFOOT a highly respectable ***! Recently, too, I did catch his inevitable 1962 rendition – via a half-hour special – of "A Christmas Carol"; however, I did not bother with the live-action Leslie Nielsen incarnation (or, should I say, abomination) when it emerged in the late 1990s. Anyway, this delightful effort emerged the winner of the Best Animated Short Oscar: typically voiced by Jim Backus, Magoo goes out to experience a 3-D movie but he invariably takes a detour and winds up a passenger on a plane; he takes the flight to be the realism of the movie and, when the man next to him disappears but leaves his bag behind (he proves to be a spy being chased by cops), Magoo goes to look for him all over the place – literally, even walking on the wings of the plane, through clouds (which he mistakes for the smoking area of the theatre!) and even sliding across the cockpit windscreen to demand the flabbergasted pilots if they have seen the man in question! Incidentally, among the film's competitors at the Oscars were Tex Avery's CRAZY MIXED-UP PUP and the "Tom & Jerry" swashbuckler TOUCHE', PUSSYCAT!