Col. Heeza Liar, Detective

A rooster goes missing and Col. Heeza Liar is on the case. The Cartoonist greets his friend who boasts that he bought a champion rooster for $10k. They get a call from the friend's wife. The rooster is gone. The Cartoonist mails Heeza Liar to the location with a cap, a badge, and a gun.

This is a cartoon in a live-action world in that Out of the Inkwell way. Putting back together the chicken is rather grotesque. It's obvious that the film is run backwards and one can see the chicken being dismembered. At first, I thought the bum trying to reassemble the cooked chicken is a really funny gag. My idea would be to reassemble the chicken off screen. The final egg idea is funny as a concept. They do need to show the egg more clearly. I've never heard of this character, but he has some fun potential.

Vernon Stalling does the Out-of-the-Inkwell plot with the Colonel in this amusing mix of live action and animation. Vernon starts out drawing Heeza Liar (who needs a second to put on some clothes). In comes a friend who has bought a rooster for $10,000 and had it stolen. So the Colonel puts on a deerstalker, pulls out a magnifying glass, and goes to investigate.

While the Fleischers split their work about 60-40 between Ko-ko's cartoon world and live action, this one runs considerably in the other direction. Although the Bray Studios had cut the costs of animation enough to make them economically viable, the live sequences were still considerably cheaper to shoot.

There was an earlier entry in the Heeza Liar series with the same title. It seems to be missing.