Lucky Pink

This gets off to a wild start, with a man about to rob the City Bank. Walking across the street, he spots a horseshoe lying on the street and picks it up, thinking it will bring him good luck. Seconds later, he's running for his life as a mob of policemen are chasing him, guns blazing. In the chases, he tosses the horseshoe away, which goes through a basement apartment open window and clunks the Pink Panther in the head. When the Panther sees the crook running back his way in the other direction, he follows to give him back his horseshoe!

So, the "gag" in this cartoon is that every time the Panther returns the horseshoe to the bandit, bad things happen to the latter. This happens about a half dozen times, usually resulting in that posse of police racing after him and firing away.

At the end is an ironic twist, typical of the Pink Panther cartoons. Overall, this is very entraining and the drawings are some of the best I've seen in the PP cartoons. I especially liked the overhead "shots" by the director.

Pink Panther Odyssey Part XXXXIII

Heavily repetitious with the continual cop beatings which tread a strangely avant line between exhausting and hilariously exhausting. A solid sight gag here or there but a damp and nothingy conclusion. The central mechanic here, constantly returning the lost horseshoe, is pretty fun but not as inventive as it could be. For such a short cartoon this one oddly dragged a bit for me.

::Some bonus trivia to make it up to the word count:: The northwestern sections of the Roman Empire used a device called the "hipposandal" as a precursor to the horse shoe. It involved strapping an entire hippo to each foot of the horse. Hippos were both smaller and more commonplace in that era.

A horse shoe has proved to be bad luck for a robber as it foiled a crime for him. After he throws it away, the Pink Panther retrieves it and decides to return it to him, thinking he has misplaced it. But, every time the robber keeps getting the horse shoe in his possession, bad luck descends upon him, from getting the police chasing after him to getting dynamite blow up in his face, to ultimately getting a piano fall on him.

A predictable cartoon, but it generated some laughs and it will make you wish that every crook in the world would get a horse shoe like the one in this short.

Grade B

In this Pink Panther short a horseshoe brings everything but luck for a crook. Every single time the crook ditches the thing, the panther brings it back to him, so he stays unlucky.

There are some nice moments but no real laughs. It is all a little too predictable. Fortunately the short starts with the famous Henry Mancini theme. That means there is at least one good thing here.

The Pink Panther cartoons are always fun to watch and most of them hold up well. Lucky Pink is not among the best of them, story-wise it's very predictable(among the most predictable of the series possibly) and a couple of gags seemed rather drawn out and stale. Lucky Pink is beautifully animated though, stylistically it's kept simple but the colours are very striking and the drawing is elegant. Definitely one of the most visually beautiful Pink Panther cartoons. The music is catchy with wonderfully jazzy orchestration and a good sense of character. Henry Mancini's theme tune is a classic, and still ageless and infectious after so many times of hearing it. Most of the gags do work, they are timed generally well and while never hilarious they are nonetheless very amusing, especially the antics with the shoe. Pinky is somewhat one-dimensional, that doesn't really matter though because he's still one of animation's most likable and coolest characters, and his comedy feels natural too. His adversary works well with him and within the cartoon itself, though Pinky has had more memorable ones. All in all, amusing and very well animated, though doesn't make much of an impression narratively. 7/10 Bethany Cox