Countdown to Halloween: Spooky Swabs (1957)

Spooky Swabs (Paramount/Famous Studios, 1957)
Dir.: Isadore "Izzy" Sparber
Animators: Frank Endres and Thomas Johnson
Story: Larz Bourne
Backgrounds: John Zago
Music: Winston Sharples
Cel Bloc Rating: 5/9

If you are one of those who did not like Disney's film version of Pirates of the Caribbean, you have to admit to one thing: at the very least, when they promised pirate ghosts, they gave you pirate ghosts.

And even Scooby-Doo got it mostly right when he and the rest of his Mystery Machine gang ran into pirate ghost problems. Even though the pirate ghost they battle in the original series – Captain Redbeard – turns out to be a normal creep in a disguise, he sure plays up the part to the hilt. There is not a second within the cartoon where you doubt that Redbeard is not just a full-blooded pirate, but a scary one to boot. Why, even the same can be said for South Park when Korn came in as guest stars to solve their own Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery, itself a spoof on the Scooby-Doo style. Pirate ghosts through and through, without a doubt as to their abilities as buccaneers of the first order.

Even knowing that, in the world of the cartoon, all of the monsters and ghosts on Scooby-Doo are really regular people simply wearing masks and disguises doesn't dispel the fact that the characters running away from them think all of these ghosts and spooks are for real (though, by a certain point, the Mystery Machine gang really should have picked up on the pattern). Not so in the final Popeye cartoon produced for theatres by Famous Studios, released in 1957 before the famous sailor man moved to television for a long run. In Spooky Swabs, apparently in the studio's great desperation to cut costs, Famous doesn't even dress their pirate ghosts in traditional pirate garb. Instead, they give us a couple handfuls of ghosts who talk (briefly) like pirates, but by their drab, normal ghostly appearance, they could easily have been inserted using recycled animation from practically any Famous Studios' Casper cartoon. (Perhaps someone out there knows whether this is true or not.)

For whatever reason, Popeye and Olive are adrift at sea on a raft. Luckily, they are equipped with the one thing that a couple cast to the waves needs on such a journey: a checkerboard. A series of large waves toss the raft aloft and then the raft drops back down from underneath Popeye, Olive and the checkerboard. Then, in order of weight, Popeye drops back to the raft, close followed by Olive, then the checkerboard, and then finally the individuals click back down on the board. Without sparing any action outside of the game of checkers, Popeye mechanically points to an offscreen occurrence, and informs the neatly dressed and ladylike Olive that there is a ship in the water nearby.

The camera cuts to a shabby-looking sailed vessel which sits completely still in the water, which is amazing since the raft was just leaping up and down not mere seconds before on the same ocean. Olive is overjoyed, because now she "can go home and watch television!" Because there is no way he could possibly ever "motorboat" his beloved Olive, Popeye uses his corncob pipe as a propeller to turn the raft into a speedboat, and they zip hard through the water in exactly the way that Popeye should have done in the first place when they ended up adrift at sea. (He is Popeye, after all -- he can get out of any fix.) They smack into the side of the weird ship and are vaulted up and over the side, seemingly to safety. But then the camera pans to the right and down to the bow of the ship, where the name "Sea Witch" and the date 1678 clue us in to the true ghostly nature of the vessel.

Popeye and Olive call about for any "swabs" aboard the ship, and inside the ship's cabin, a motley group of ghosts wake up from their naps. "Blimey, mateys!", swears the bland ghost, sounded a bit like a Charles Laughton knockoff and trying his best to be all “pirate-y,” "We've been boarded!" While Popeye hoists the mizzen, he promises to take the craft back to "civili-skation". The ghosts are shocked by this turn, wanting nothing to do with civilization - with an extra "k" inserted or otherwise – and decide to take desperate measures to win back their ship. As Olive rests in a nest of rope attached to the anchor, two ghosts throw the massive object overboard, and when the rope unravels and follows the anchor, Olive is sent spinning into Popeye, legs akimbo, and she kicks his head and neck through the hole in the ship's wheel. Olive does her best to unwedge Popeye from the wheel, but when he pops out free, she crashes into the cabin and comes out with the wheel around her midsection.

A bit later, having gotten out of her near ship-wear, Olive fixes the wheel so that they can steer again while Popeye attempts to pull the anchor back up, but the ghosts have a different idea. One ghost paints the anchor rope with grease, and another knots a section of the rope around Popeye's ankle. When his hands hit the grease, the rope slips and burns his hands, so he lets go and the knot carries him down into the water after the anchor. Olive tries to pull him back in, but a disembodied handkerchief carried by an invisible ghost blinds Olive from behind. Popeye grabs a passing sawfish and cuts himself free, but when he returns to the ship, one of the ghosts is finally doing a real pirate thing by forcing Olive to walk the plank at the point of a cutlass. The drawback? The ghost is completely invisible, so we don't get to see him acting like a pirate.

Popeye grabs the plank and swings it back into the ship, but he does this in the style of a 3-D film, so that it becomes a perspective shot with Olive moving first out towards and then back to the ship. She lands facedown in a bucket of water, and when Popeye dredges her out, her eyes are full of water, but as she spits the water out, her eyes drain until we can see her pupils. She is then picked up from the deck by invisible hands, and the ghosts materialize as they drag her. The shocked Olive escapes their grasp and in her panic, she tries to run off the end of the ship. Popeye grabs her and swings her back in the nick of time.

Obviously one step ahead of the sailor man, one ghost flies to the top of the mainsail and cuts the fabric with a cutlass. When Popeye protests to Olive that ghosts do not exist, the mainsail ghost drops the cloth on top of Popeye, and Olive freaks out! Thinking that he is a ghost, she conks Popeye with a baling peg, and when he finally pulls off the cloth and reveals himself, there are several large bumps atop his noggin. Not giving the couple a chance to rest, the ghosts take up arms and attack the couple, yelling semi-piratey things and sea dog slogans, but Popeye, seemingly without a can of reserve spinach of his own, runs into the cabin to check out the supplies. He finds a jar marked "Ye King's Spinach", and if you ever wondered what 279-year old spinach can do to the human body, well -- it pretty much does to Popeye what all spinach does to Popeye. It makes him unstoppable, though with a different result than normal. Perhaps it is actually "ghost spinach", for once it hits the bottom of his feet, it turns him into a completely invisible whirlwind.

After spinning himself unseeable, Popeye easily cuts a swath through the crowd of swabby phantasms, and he punches each of them into the side of the ship's cabin, where they turn into nothing more than flat, empty fabric. Olive sews the lot of them into an enormous sail. With Popeye at the wheel, Olive sings: "The ghosts you did finish, 'cause you ate your spinach!" Then Popeye joins her for his concluding line, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!", as we see the ship sail into the sunset with the entire cadre of not-so-piratey ghosts catching a breeze to send the couple back to "civili-skation."

Not to be too blunt about it, this is the sort of cartoon that makes me want to rid myself of "civili-skation". It is the downfall of humanity to settle for the merely humdrum, and while humanity was spared any more of these latter-day Popeyes after this point, the fact that the series remained so popular for so long in such disparity serves as a sad reminder of how easy it is for people to merely settle. Why push buttons, why court logic, why dare show originality? Instead, take a once daring series and tie its legs together like a rodeo calf. Take away its edge, wilt away its wit, and drain away every trace of what once made the series great. The glory of the Fleischer days was long, long gone, but did anyone notice by that point in time? Did anyone care?

I know there are apologists for each and every film made in the history of the cinema, and there are plenty of people out there who would say that I am being far too harsh. Many of these same people also settle for the television Popeye series, often stating, and I'm collectively paraphrasing here, that "maybe they aren't quite as good as the early ones, but they are still OK." This is usually attributed to the fact that anything that stars their hero Popeye can't be all bad. Well, people, send me your favorite Popeye doll, and I will take a healthy dump on it and send it back to you. Then, without cleaning it up at all, you write me back and tell me that you still love your Popeye doll just as much as you did before. That is exactly how I feel about the last few years of the Famous Popeyes, and that is how I have felt since I was a kid about the sub-sub-sub-standard television Popeye pablum, and that is how I feel about any attempt to modernize the Popeye mythos.

As for the pirate ghosts (or are they ghost pirates, as the members of Korn argued amongst themselves in the South Park episode?), it is the most telling aspect of this cartoon that the filmmakers couldn't even commit to paying more than lip service to the pirate concept in the film. No hats, peg legs, hooks, or striped shirts amongst the lock, just normal, sheet-wearing ghosts; at least they had some cutlasses with which to attack their invaders. But even with the ghosts armed, when push comes to shove, it takes only one punch to each ghost for Popeye to subdue them. Punch? I'm sorry, but aren't they ghosts? Intangible spectres? Even with whatever properties Popeye took on from the ancient spinach, it should have taken far more than that to take them out. Maybe it was ghost-strength spinach after all.

As it turns out, these are apparently some real pirate ghosts that even Scooby-Doo could have captured... and even without a wayward jackhammer...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it (not that you need to...)

[This post was originally published on 5/26/2006, but was given a rewrite and edit, and updated with new images, on September 29, 2017.]

A Shark Film Office Special Edition: Plane Dumb (1932)

Plane Dumb (1932, Van Beuren Studios) 

Dir.: John Foster and George Rufle

TC4P Rating: 4/9

So, I spent some time years back on this site heaping light praise upon a much-neglected series like Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry shorts, and then I ran into the film Plane Dumb. The title Plane Dumb could very nearly describe the actions of the animators as they contrived this wannabe Amos N' Andy homage. Apparently, donning blackface not only helped disguise the very white Tom and Jerry as they roamed about Africa in 1932, but it also seems to have lowered the team's respective IQs to the negative, changed their speech patterns automatically, and somehow also made their disarrayed and lighter-colored hair to instantly turn short, dark and curly. Ah, the magical properties of a common, everyday makeup kit!

I read a couple of reviews for this cartoon short years ago where each of the writers complained that Tom and Jerry were traveling to Africa "for no good reason". Let me state this from the outset: Tom's plan is to fly non-stop across the ocean to Africa so as to bring fame and fortune to the pair. As simple and understandable as that. Non-stop flight... cross the ocean... fame and fortune. If this seems like "no good reason" to the reviewers, well, then they are probably not clued into the fact that when this film was made, the world was only five years removed from Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Europe. And although Lindbergh had done it already, there were plenty of daring aviators in those days. The feat was, given the limits of technology at the time, still quite a challenge to accomplish, and many more people besides Lindbergh continued to attempt it well after he achieved the goal. Just because you are first up the mountain doesn't mean that the next 10,000 mountaineers are just going to give up trying. It's the impulse of exploration that exists to this day, and it seems like enough of a "good reason" to me. (Not that I am going to try it myself... I have cartoons to watch.)

Now that I am done with the philosophical portion of this review, let's jump back to the film, which still has "no good reason" behind its creative impulses. How else to accept the continued harassment and degradation of other races by the mass media controlled by the white establishment of the day? As said, Tom wants to fly across the ocean to Africa so that they can become heroes, but Jerry couldn't care less. He sits bored and listless in the passenger seat, but expresses worry that they might not be safe in Africa. Then Tom hits Jerry with his 'brilliant" idea to put on blackface makeup to disguise themselves on the "Dark Continent," which they do. Soon, the pair are transformed completely (as described in the first paragraph). They shake hands at the completion of their task, and as their voices switch to Amos 'n' Andy mode, they both shake hands and say at the same time, "Well, I'm sho' glad to see you again!"

Apparently, though, the disguise also whisks away Tom's abilities to fly the plane, and he loses control and dives the craft down into the ocean. The biplane's wings rise to the surface, and the now-darkened (the makeup does not wash off) pair climb onto the wings of the plan and dangle their feet in the water. "Well," starts Jerry, "I wonder how far it is to there!" Tom's answer: "'bout twenty knots!" Jerry scratches his head at this, and asks, "How come they got knots in the ocean?" Tom shrugs his shoulders, and answers, "Tropical wave gets heavy, it gets tangled, it makes knots!" To prove his remark, he points out several waves which meet with other wave crests and knot up three times in succession, following comedy's Universal Rule of Threes.

An octopus suddenly climbs up and with a huge smile, happily puts an arm over each of the lad's shoulders. Both men shriek, but Jerry is even more alarmed, and cries, "I tol' you I didn't wanna go to Africa!" "Wait a minute!" interrupts Tom, "Is we in Africa?" "No we ain't in Africa!" is Jerry's reply. Tom asks, "Does it look like we is gonna get to Africa?" "It shoooooooo' don't...," fears Jerry. "Then what has you gotta kick about?" The octopus, probably alone in his opinion, finds this hilarious, and laughs uproariously. It kisses Tom full on the cheek, but Tom takes this as an attack and punches it in the nose. (Yeah, I know that octopuses don't have recognizable noses, but this one does... a big, black button nose.) The punch from Tom ires the octopod, who briefly spanks the gangly man on the bottom, and then the huge mollusc spins his arms and wallops the pair (Tom on the rear and Jerry in the head) over and over again in bicycle fashion. The octopod then dives back into the water.

Just after that attack, a crowd of sharks are shown swirling about the pair's feet. Tom and Jerry take turns both accusing each other good-naturedly of tickling the other one's feet, but then their mood changes when shark after shark starts breaches from the water and leap over their heads. "Dinner station's in the front," jokes Tom as he ducks his noggin down against the wing. "Look here, man! These is shawks!" Jerry continues, "Will they eat ya?" to which Tom, still ducking his head, replies, "If they don't, they'll sho' mess you up plenty!" 

From below, a large sawfish skewers the plane's wings right through their center and starts to saw through, so the lads are forced to springboard off the end of the wings and then run along the top of an long rainbow of breaching sharks. "We running, ain't we?" asks Jerry, and Tom finishes with, "But we ain't gettin' anyplace!" The last shark goes past, and the pair drop into the briny drink. They struggle to stay afloat, but because we don't see Tom and Jerry swim before this in the cartoon, it is hard to tell if their inability to swim is because they are now black (which would play off the once commonly held stereotype that blacks are bad at swimming) or if they just can't swim period. (I am banking on the stereotype, given when it was made.)

A large ominous-seeming black whale zooms through the waves and then the film cuts back to the boys struggling in the water. Suddenly, they are standing upright with their feet still just below the water, and Jerry proclaims, "Hey, sista! We been saved by a submarine!" The whale pops up with the pair on his back well above the water, and Tom says, "No! This is a whale!" Jerry wonders where it is going, and Tom says, "Ask him. I don't speak whale-ish!" The whale continues to cut through the water at a high rate of speed towards the shore. They decide to try to stop the whale by sitting "on his nose to smother him". When they do, the whale spouts them high up into the air, and eventually aims them towards the shore by adjusting its spout. The boys are deposited with a rough tumble or two onto a patch of ground, where just moments before, a crowd of assorted jungle animals were watching their approach. (The lion, for future reference, ran into a nearby cave...)

After they are charged by a pair of strange-looking imaginary animals, Tom and Jerry run into the cave, which is cloaked entirely in complete darkness, so that only their eyes, enormous lips, and single-toothed mouths can be seen. Their heads swell up to fill the screen as they carry on with their "What was dat?" "Where iz we?"-style routine. At one point, Tom's eyes get all weird and googly for the briefest of moments, merely for sake of adding more weirdness to the scene. Soon enough, when the lights come back on, they get assaulted by a huge bat and then the lights go out again, leaving us once more with their lips and eyes only. A deep growl is heard in the darkness, and we assume it is the lion we saw walking into the cave earlier. "Jerry," says Tom, "turn loose my leg!" "I ain't holdin' yo' leg!" When Tom reaches the point of begging his diminutive friend with "Jerry! Jerry! Please say 'Yes, you iz holdin' me!'," then the lights come back on and the boys face off with a quartet of black skeletons. The skeletons sing in gospel fashion, naturally in four-part harmony...

"Good lord, I'm ready

Indeed, I'm ready

Oh, good lord, I'll be ready when the great day comes!"

Sitting all the way to left, the fourth skeleton takes a brief, bass solo...

"Good glory hallelujah!"

They repeat the refrain, and at the end, the bass skeleton finishes solo with "the great day comes" again. (Note: This animation and song is recycled from an earlier Tom and Jerry short called Wot a Night from 1931.) The four black skeletons then burst into pieces and lie all about the floor in front of the boys. Tom and Jerry shriek and run out of the cave in fear and end up being surrounded, from behind every object imaginable, by an entire tribe of headhunters. The lads run for their lives as spear after spear is thrown past them. For some reason, with the spears flying all about the pair, Tom and Jerry both wipe the blackface from their faces, but it helps them not at all in escaping from their predicament. They end the film in a cliffhanger, in danger for their lives with no chance of escape dangling before them. The film irises out, and not a moment too soon.

Like most of the film, the ending seems to not matter, for the only purpose seems to have been to get Tom and Jerry into blackface so they could carry off what must have been some already pretty standard and tired vaudeville routines involving the supposed behavior of blacks in the 1930s. (There are probably even more subtle digs piled in here that meant more in the time period, but I am unaware of them.) That a cartoon series that could actually be so fun would resort to gags like this for a joke here and there would be more bearable, but to need the use of such a gimmick for an entire film is unforgivable. On top of this, never once is a real laugh approached within its far too long seven-minute running time. (They don't even reach the shores of Africa until 5 minutes into the thing.)

If anything saves this film from being a total waste of time, it is a few, brief scenes, most of them involving the ocean creatures Tom and Jerry encounter. There are those marvelous shots of the mass of sharks swirling about beneath the floating wings and the tickled feet of the boys. I also like the scene with Tom and Jerry running along the backs of the voracious, leaping sharks, and the scene where the whale is seen cutting through the water, where he rather humorously filters a bunch of fish out through his gapped teeth. I also like the scene where the plane is flying above Africa, and the Dark Continent is shown with what must be about a half-mile of jungle spread out across its obviously not-in-scale relief map. It's the one part of the film that actually strikes me as being wittily designed.

I'll admit it openly. I do have a certain fascination with Hollywood films that use blackface, not just as a gimmick, but sometimes as the impetus for the plot. I'm embarrassed when I see Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, or Fred Astaire (all of whom I adore otherwise) or Al Jolson (whom I don't) don the makeup, and with it the stereotyped garb, mannerisms and characteristics that come with the disguise. But I can't turn away. It's a fascination like that with a trainwreck. You want to think better of the people involved, especially when they are entertainers you appreciate normally, but then you realize they were just as complicit in even the casual racism of the day as everyone else, including their audiences.

If you make it deep into Al Jolson's Wonder Bar, which is a horrid exercise in how not to make a musical comedy for the first 3/4 of the film (though there are several tidbits of pre-Code verbal naughtiness worth hearing), you end up viewing Busby Berkeley's production of Goin' to Heaven on a Mule, with its "Here you is in Hebbenly'Land!" lyrics and its giant dancing watermelons... and your jaw just drops. I will admit that I found some of this pretty funny when I was a teenager and young adult, but then I made a solid attempt to raise my game and tried to put all the lazy stereotyping that I learned growing up in the '70s in Alaska behind me. Along the same lines, you watch some scenes like this in older films, and wonder how some of these white stars could perform like this, especially given that they were often surrounded by real blacks with real talent, and one wonders how they were able to shut off that part of their brain that said, "This is the wrong thing to do." Or were they just too trapped in the studio system and the overreaching norms of the time to be able to do anything about it at the time?

Now, the Van Beuren Studios were not Hollywood: they were New York-based, and right across the street from the Fleischers Studio. (According to Maltin, Fleischer artists would sometimes moonlight at Van Beuren due to their proximity, which is not a surprise.) Many of the early Fleischer films, too, dealt with such stereotypes, though often (but not always) in a much subtler fashion, sometimes incorporating characteristics into their plots and drawings, but not always in the then-commonly accepted "blackface" mode.

I thought at first that perhaps the voices used by Tom and Jerry while in blackface were white performers such as on Amos 'n' Andy, but according to IMDb, the parts of the duo in this cartoon are played by seminal African-American songwriters and performers of the day, Aubrey Lyles and F.E. Miller, known by the comedy team name of Miller and Lyles. (This cartoon was completed in the year before Lyles died relatively young from tuberculosis.) This surprised me, though I have yet to find another source to back this information up, except that the film was also (according to IMDb and the Big Cartoon Database) apparently released under the alternate title of Miller and Lyles All Wet. 

No matter who provides the voice or fills the role, outrageous and incorrect racial stereotypes are just that. Van Beuren stoops pretty low with Plane Dumb, bringing us that common mode and sending it straight into the commode. The film has a few cute moments, but stinks otherwise, and a definite step down from other films in the Tom and Jerry series (but not that many steps down). They did the wrong thing in this picture, especially given that it is not only a slap in the face of another race of humans, but it is a badly done slap in the face.

But you can't look away... especially to Dixieland.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This review was originally written and published on May 2, 2006. It has been updated with a rewrite, a video link, and new photos and republished on September 21, 2017. Further revisions were done on October 13, 2017.]

Neptune Nonsense (1936)

Neptune Nonsense (A Van Beuren Studios Rainbow Parade cartoon, 1936) 

Directors: Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer

TC4P Rating: 5/9

Fish, outside of halibut, have nothing to fear from me. I've gone through my "keeping fish as a pet" phase, having inherited, through some means of indistinct origin, an unbelievably huge fish tank in the mid-1980s, and mainly through my own lack of interest, except in my strangely personable plecostomus, Quint, it soon became quite apparent that fish were not for me. I am solidly a cat-and-dog guy, which I also owned, and once poor foot-long Quint died (though certainly not from malnutrition, as he made quite a run through my goldfish and various other species) after a few years, I quickly shed myself of the tank and all of its trappings.

As for the devouring of fishy flesh, it is also not for me (outside of halibut). Fish sticks are too bland and weird; salmon disgusts me (I have spent much of my life avoiding it in two households devoted to it, though smoked salmon has its charms); and while breaded catfish is okay, there are too many other things at Cajun restaurants that I am interested in to ever consider the ordering of such an item. I am fairly devoted in my lack of seafood interest (outside of halibut), and if there is a section on the menu with fish dishes in it, I am almost 100% unlikely to even cast it the slightest glance. So, whether for companionship or dinner, fish can stay in their original water for all I care. (Except sharks. I love sharks.) 

But such is not the case with Felix the Cat in the second cartoon of his Van Beuren "comeback" attempt from 1936, Neptune Nonsense. Felix has a lonely pet goldfish, and Felix goes to extreme lengths to bring his sweet little baby some piscine happiness. However, the Van Beuren staff rather fails to bring any real life to Felix, and after the trio of films (which also included The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and Bold King Cole, both reviewed on this site), it would be a couple decades before the magical cat was allowed another shot at success, only the next time, it would be on television.

In a room encased by near-total darkness, we hear a buoyant whistling rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel, as a shadowy figure, which one must surmise can only be sunny little Felix, moves across the room and springs up a window shade. Brilliant light fills the room of Felix's home, and he wastes not a second in removing the cover from his birdcage. "Good morning!" he chimes to his pair of lovebirds, and after feeding them, he skips, still whistling, across the room to a pair of terriers asleep on a rug (in the way that terriers actually don't sleep in the morning -- believe me). "Good morning!" he shouts cheerfully to the yawning pups, but they have not one bit of compulsion to arise from their mat. Felix's famous exclamation-point tail flashes briefly while he considers the situation, and snapping his fingers, he arrives at a solution. He pulls a dog biscuit out of a box, and saying "Good morning!" again, he waves the tempting object before their eyes. The dogs, much like mine would, immediately jump up and wrestle over ownership of the biscuit. With each dog tugging on an end, Felix fixes the problem by cutting the biscuit in half with some scissors.

In the next room, Felix awakens his goldfish Annabelle with the same greeting. He shakes her breakfast into her bowl, but she is listless and droopy-eyed. He asks, "What's the matter, Annabelle? Don't you feel well?" and she shakes her head sadly, "No." "Aren't you happy?" he follows up, and her answer is a clone of her first reply. Felix paces and thinks, in that clenched-behind-the-back, furrowed-brow way for which he was famous at one time, and arrives finally at the reason. He tells her that she is lonesome, and that he will go out and find her "a little playmate,” a statement which has Annabelle jumping high out of her bowl with joy and anticipation. Felix carries his pet fish outside, but as he walks merrily with her bowl, he trips on a rock, and the bowl, water and fish all go flying up out of his grasp. He scurries and catches first the bowl, then he runs forward to retrieve the falling mass of water, and then runs further still to allow Annabelle to plop back in her bowl. Her rescue is accomplished at the very spot to which Felix was bringing her: a cliff beside the ocean, where Felix conveniently has already placed a fishing pole and apples for bait.

Felix baits his hook and throws his line into the ocean, and almost immediately, with the impatiently wriggling Annabelle looking on from her bowl, he pulls a fish out of the ocean and swings him straight into the bowl. The problem? The slightly larger fish chases and then swallows Annabelle whole, and Felix has to squeeze his little pet out of its throat as if he were handling a tube of toothpaste. Rest assured, the fish is thrown back, and Felix gives it another try. The second apple attracts the attention of a small goldfish much like Annabelle, but the fish is wary of the bobbing prize. A sawfish, however, bigger and armed with a schnoz-equipped weapon, can afford a little more curiosity. It peels the apple with a few deft strokes, and then puts its mouth about the tempting fruit. Felix tugs on the line, the sawfish tugs back, and after a brief war, Felix is pulled into the ocean and down to the bottom. He loses his pole as the sawfish swims away, but he soon spies an entire school of goldfish. He grabs one, but it is too slippery and small to hang onto, and it flees swiftly away.

An octopus policeman with glowing eyes turns them red and whistles fish traffic to a stop, then turns about, his eyes now glowing green, and whistles the school of goldfish through his intersection. One of the fish gets caught in his hand, smiles at him, and zips after his fellows. Felix arrives to ask him if he has seen any goldfish "come this way." The octo-cop mimics Felix's questions in a mocking fashion, and then tells him, in a much higher pitch of voice, that he has seen "some go this way (points right), and that way (points left), and this way!!" He then tickles a delighted Felix, though the octo-cop goes back to being a stern officer of the law once Felix departs the scene. Meanwhile, the goldfish school has run smack into the open mouth of a large sleeping grouper, and when the enormous fish breathes out again, each fish returns encased in their own individual bubbles, which pop as the fish continue to swim. Felix's arrival causes the grouper to awaken, and after Felix asks his question about the goldfish, the grouper spits out a huge bubble which floats casually over to Felix. It pops in a huge burst, and a very waterlogged "No!" is spat at the cat, knocking him down.

Felix spies the goldfish ahead, and just as he is about to grab his quarry, another slightly larger fish zips in and eats the goldfish. Then another fish slightly larger than the previous one swallows that fish, and then yet another slightly larger one follows suit, and then another, and finally, a huge blue-backed fish completes the food chain, and swims contentedly away from Felix. As the sawfish swims past, Felix grabs him by the tail, and when the sawfish grabs a nearby piece of coral with his fins, Felix propels the fish as if he were an arrow in a crossbow. The sawfish flies sharply into the keister of the blue-backed fish, and then each fish is spat up by each succeeding fish in the chain. The fish all turn around to swim away from the tiny little goldfish who started the chain, but he opens up his maw larger and larger as he swims to each fish and swallows them all whole. Bloated like Eric Cartman on a Snacky Cake bender, the now-titanic goldfish floats up to Felix and burps loudly. Later, after an electric eel finishes tormenting a lobster and a starfish, sending them reeling and spinning with jolts from his charge, Felix wanders into the area, and the eel wastes no time in shocking the feline. Felix's insides light up, and in the process, light up the whole ocean floor, before Felix runs off to resume his search elsewhere.

The goldfish, playing child-like with a bubble, is finally discovered by Felix. When the cat grabs him, the fish cries for "Help! Help!" and the entire ocean community rushes to his aid. The citizenry of the sea all begin chanting, "Help! Police! Kidnap!" and "Murder!" and other additional crimes. A beat cop manages to get on the shell-o-phone and reaches his dispatcher, who sends out the call to the squadron. "Calling all carps! Calling all carps!" (Many fish cartoons seem to love this gag, up to and including television’s Fish Police.) The call is repeated inside what comprises a fish paddy wagon: a frightening deep-sea monstrosity with enormous needle-sharp fangs, with a carp riding along on its side while listening through a back-mounted horn. Everyone gives chase after poor Felix, and he is finally tracked down and dog-piled by the carps. They throw him in the paddy wagon and wheel him away towards the forbidding gates of King Neptune's castle.

Neptune is busy charming a small beautiful mermaid (with prominent and clearly naked breasts, which she jiggles as she dances, but they are sans the nipples that would apparently make her "nude" -- nowadays, they would place little off-flesh-colored dots over the nipples, like they do on the mainstream newsstand men's magazines, as if to say "Hey, sorry, boys! No nipples here! Just little dots - shaped exactly like nipples."). King Neptune plays Aloha Oe (Farewell To Thee) on the tines of his trident, and the mermaid giggles and dances, spins and swims in circles, and kisses Neptune on the cheek over and over. (One wonders why he ever bothers with looking at the fish.)

But, all good things must eventually end, and Neptune has a court over which to preside. After banging his gavel harshly on a table, the King of the Oceans hears the charges from the goldfish regarding Felix the Cat. "He tried to kidnap me! And cook me! And eat me!" the fish lies (except for the obvious first part). Neptune is outraged, and Felix, clearly the victim of species profiling, is not allowed to plead his defense. "How would you like to be put in a hot frying pan, and cooked until you were nice and brown--?" Neptune asks the cat, "-- On both sides! How would you like to be somebody's dinner? How would you like to be MY dinner!" 

When Felix states that he doesn't eat fish, the King laughs with disbelief. Felix tells the King that he was only trying to give the little guy a nice home, but the victimized goldfish protests that he already has one. However, the little nipper has an idea, which he whispers into the King's ear. Neptune picks Felix up and carries him to a fish orphanage, where Neptune picks out a cute little goldie for Felix and Annabelle. After the remaining orphans give them a sendoff, Neptune brings them back to the shore, where he places the orphan into the bowl with Annabelle. "Bless you, my children!" the cheerful ruler declares, "Good luck and goodbye!" He approximates an awkward dive back into the water, and Felix is left with his two charges. "Now are you happy, Annabelle?" Felix asks the ladyfish, as she smooches her new boyfriend intently. She emits two bubbles from her mouth, which rise to the surface of the water, and pop: "And how!" The fish kiss again, and the film irises out.

Here is the problem with the Van Beuren Felix shorts: Felix is not allowed to be Felix. In each film, he is surrounded by other, bigger characters, and each time, the directors allow Felix to get swallowed up by the events surrounding him. Felix is not allowed, except in brief instances in each film, to do what he does best: think his way out of situations. It's thrilling in the early part of this film to see Felix's tail turn into an exclamation point, as it did nearly every cartoon in the silent days, but then he never uses it for anything, especially to get himself out of jams or try to catch the fish. Felix is too passive in this film in particular. Once he hits the water, he is mainly at the mercy of whatever gag situation he wanders into, and the Felix of old would have found a way out of Neptune's court. This Felix allows all of the other characters to determine his fate, something silent Felix rarely did. Not enough thinking and pacing makes Felix a very dull kitty. Not that the animation of the cat isn't swell, but he really doesn't do very much in this series to warrant such grand design.

Last night, as I was watching this cartoon in preparation for this post, I was at the moment of Neptune's trident rendition of the Hawaiian Aloha Oe song, when I received a call from Jen, just off work, who told me that a friend of ours from Hawaii, Ali, was in town for the night, and wanted to catch up with us at Disneyland. Coincidence? I think not, especially where cartoons are concerned. Once we finally got there, we grabbed a table at the Uva Bar in Downtown Disney, and ordered some tapas while we awaited Ali's arrival. For several days, I had been craving, for some weird probably-Food Network-related reason, fish n' chips (something I rarely do), and I took the opportunity at seeing it on the Uva menu to order a plate. To my horror, though the chips were great, the fish was bland, slimy and highly unpalatable, and I had to douse it in malt vinegar and tartar sauce (which I wanted to save for my chips, for I am all about condiment variety as far as chips are concerned) to get the stuff down.

It was then that I realized that what I had been craving all along was halibut n' chips, which is a commonality in my Alaskan home, but rare indeed in Southern California. Compared to my delicious halibut, the ocean-dweller I had been devouring with my Ali-reunion meal might as well have crawled out of a cesspool. It didn't put a damper on a fun evening, but I came to realize just how picky I am when it comes to my associations with the creatures of the sea, even when its choice seems to be called for by hint of coincidence regarding the playing of a Hawaiian ballad, the viewing of an ocean-visiting cartoon, and the receiving of a phone call from a dear friend.

I wouldn't mind scoring that hot mermaid, though... nipple dots or no nipple dots.

RTJ

[This piece was edited and revised with new photos on September 15, 2016.]