Magical Maestro

For my money, Avery's finest cartoon...for years Avery tried to answer PORKY IN WACKYLAND, with out full manic success...this surpasses all previous Avery efforts with wit, sophistication and of course with dropped anvils. Plus, the satire is razor-sharp.

Avoid the butchered "politically correct" edits on Cartoon Network---seek out the slightly offensive but imposingly hilarious original.

This is a wonderful Tex Avery cartoon. It's very funny and fresh as well as very fast-paced. A singer insults a magician and in turn the magician dresses as the musical director and then uses his magic wand to make lots of crazy and impossible things happen to the singer during the performance. It's completely Tex Avery due to the pacing and humor. There are two problems that keep it from being rated any higher. First, as the 50s arrived, production values on the MGM cartoons (particularly the animation and backgrounds) began to suffer. While this isn't as bad as the later Avery efforts in this regard, the art just isn't up to the standards as earlier Avery classics. Second, it is quite possible that some people could feel offended by the short clip where the singer becomes a black singer (sounding a lot like one of the Mills Brothers). While this isn't the most obvious of racial insults (there were many worse ones during the era), some might not enjoy this or the Chinese characterizations. Don't skip the film, though--that would make you a reactionary idiot.

Tex Avery did for writing cartoons what Mel Blanc did for voicing them. Magical Maestro is yet another of his brilliant concepts. As in almost all of his cartoons, the jokes are non-stop and damn funny, the re-occuring theme of one person making anothers miserable is in full bloom here. Lets hope that an Avery collection is released soon on DVD.

Down and out variety magician gets his own back on haughty opera singer, by changing everything the tenor can sing, technically this is really brilliant, with a soundtrack that must really stretched the MGM orchestra. Unfortunatly the cutbacks in the cartoon department at MGM at the time really show in the lack of backgrounds in this late Avery 'toon, but the quickfire sight gags fall thick and fast to make up for this. As a projectionist working in the cinema, the can containing the print of the film carried a warning that the scene where the hair gets stuck in the gate was an integeral part of the film and should be ignored. Enjoy this great 'toon, and watch out for the rabbits!!!!

This has been one of my favorites since I was a kid. The machinations that Mysto the Magician goes through to upstage Poochini are hilarious. Notice the hair on the film gag? My favorite change is the one near the end where Poochini's a Polynesian (?) dancer and the two rabbits are beside him! One word of warning though - On Cartoon Network, they have cut three of the changes (Chinese, both Blackface) so it's not as good as the uncut version.