A Peck o' Trouble

A Peck o' Trouble is not a personal favourite and Robert McKimson has done better, it's still a good cartoon but not great. The ending is the least funny scene of the cartoon and feels abrupt, the kitten is not an appealing character who's more annoying and underwritten than he is funny and the pace can be a little on the slow side at times. A Peck o' Trouble is still a beautifully drawn and brightly coloured cartoon though, and the music is full of character and energy with lovely orchestration and seamless action synchronisation. The writing has been sharper before with McKimson but it is funny and has evidence of freshness and wit, while the gags and slapstick while routine still raises laughs. The story lacks the vibrant pace of most Looney Tunes cartoons but is nonetheless fun and charming. Dodsworth is not a bad leading character at all, in fact he is very charismatic and much wittier than he looks, and didn't get enough of a chance, Sheldon Leonard voices him wonderfully and gives what he has been given a good amount of energy. Mel Blanc deserved much more though, he still does his best as he always did but he has been much funnier and much better used, that the character of the kitten is one of his weakest ever characters doesn't help. In conclusion, quite good but could've been much better. 7/10 Bethany Cox

A strong script and excellent voice work by Sheldon Leonard make this a cartoon worth seeing. Part of the short-lived "Dodsworth" series -- I've only seen two of them -- about a fat, lazy cat that keeps suckering a mewing kitten into doing his work for him, Dodsworth somehow turns into a dead ringer for Rodney Dangerfield twenty years before anyone had heard about him!

I guess that Robert McKimson only cast Dodsworth and the anonymous kitten in two cartoons, but the two cats do some great stuff in both turns. In "A Peck o' Trouble", lazy Dodsworth wants to eat a woodpecker for breakfast, but the woodpecker lives in a tall tree, which Dodsworth refuses to climb (after all, no member of his family has ever stooped to physical labor). So, as in "Kiddin' the Kitten", Dodsworth pretends to teach a class on catching the animal, and teaches a kitten how to do it (in the first cartoon, the kitten was white; here he's yellow). But sure enough, things don't go quite as Dodsworth planned.

At first glance, this is a neat look at turning a dishonest situation upside down. But also, it shows that - contrary to what some people have written in other reviews - Robert McKimson directed many good shorts. When Warner Bros. had to close one of its animation units in the late 1940s, it's a good thing that they kept open McKimson's unit; without it, we wouldn't have Foghorn Leghorn, Hippety Hopper and the Tasmanian Devil.* Anyway, I just get a kick out of what happens to the languid Dodsworth. He's like a feline version of Foghorn Leghorn. Worth seeing.

PS: Sheldon Leonard, who provided Dodsworth's voice, produced "The Danny Thomas Show", "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show".

*In all fairness to Arthur Davis (whose unit they discontinued), he had a pretty interesting record, namely "Bowery Bugs".

Robert McKimson's 'A Peck O' Trouble' is a second attempt to break in the character of Dodsworth, a fat, lazy cat who debuted in McKimson's frankly dreadful 'Kiddin' the Kitten' (a cartoon every bit as terrible as its title). Dodsworth is clearly not fit for stardom, his comedy being based on an uneasy mix of slow-paced verbal gags and slapstick with the emphasis on the former. To make matters worse, McKimson resurrects the boss-eyed kitten from the previous cartoon as well. This pale, freakish little character has no appealing characteristics whatsoever. Perhaps the assumption that something could be made of Dodsworth is understandable (given the right script, which he never got, Dodsworth might have been a very effective character) but the return of this utterly repulsive sidekick is totally mystifying. 'A Peck O' Trouble' proves to be no more effective than 'Kiddin' the Kitten' and is ultimately perhaps a little worse. Thank god Dodsworth was abandoned at this stage, allowing McKimson to concentrate on the similar but vastly superior Foghorn Leghorn series.

My favorite scene in this cartoon is the part where Dodsworth uses a huge pole to propel the kitten up to the tree. The woodpecker puts a bottle of nitroglycerin onto the pole and drills 1/2 of the pole, resulting in the bottle falling down. Dodsworth puts a blindfold on and lights a cigarette.

Then the nitroglycerin blows up on Dodsworth which results in Dodsworth being on fire (the scene shows Dodsworth frantically trying to extinguish the flames a la Sylvester in "Ain't She Tweet")

This cartoon was in heavy rotation when Nickelodeon aired The Looney Tunes cartoons during 1988-97?