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.

One of the best gags of the toon, IMHO, is the stray fleck on the film. We've all seen them in old films, but nobody would ever expect what happens with this one!

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.

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.

As long as we understand that "Magical Maestro" contains some politically incorrect scenes, we can enjoy it for the purely crazy, as a sadistic magician plays all sorts of tricks on a snobbish opera singer by changing the guy's persona every couple of seconds. I think that my favorite one was the little kid.

I believe that it was the Klingons on "Star Trek" who declared "Revenge is a dish best served cold." Maybe the magician doesn't go quite that far, but he sure has some funny things up his sleeve! It just goes to show that while Tex Avery may not have been as clever as the people behind the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons, he certainly had some great ideas. Worth seeing.