Old Smokey

The Captain gleefully retires the horse Old Smokey and the horse-drawn fire engine with the arrival of a shiny new fire engine vehicle. On his first call, the Captain gets into all kinds of trouble. Old Smokey is at the entrance of the horse retirement home when he smells the smoke. He rushes to the fire and rescues everyone. This is an early MGM animated series called The Captain and the Kids. There is plenty of talent behind the work. It shows. It's a well made screwball animated comedy. The Captain doesn't have the right charisma and he never caught on. That probably spelled doom for the series.

The problems with taking a known source material from one medium and attempting to translate it to another are manifold. Aside from a built-in fan base for the original work ready to pounce with sometimes malicious glee on the adaptation and tear it to shreds with flensing knives, there is the definite prospect that the adaptation doesn't work well between the differing media. From static media to active media (i.e., print to film) the transition requirements are challenging, to say the least. As far as animation goes, Betty Boop and Popeye made the leap successfully and Der Captain and the Kids did not, in part for the same reasons: the Fleischer Studio seemed to understand the source material better than MGM did Der Captain and the Kids, for one thing. But more importantly, Betty Boop and Popeye are more dynamic personalities with greater room to grow in the new medium, while Der Captain and the Kids had characters that were less dynamic and more stereotypical and thus gave the animators and writers less to work with. Ironically, the best proof of this comes from the pre-Code and post-Code changes in Betty Boop. As Betty's personality and trademarks were slowly erased to make her tamer and come in line with the Code, the shorts became more mediocre. Der Captain and the Kids, without that much to work with to begin with (ethnic characters tend to become one-note quickly unless the writers and directors have an excellent feel for the material), forced the studio to resort to other means and materials to make shorts work, as the main characters were limited. The fatal error was focusing all too much on Der Captain, the character who works least well on screen, being more one-dimensional to start with. The horse, Smokey, is a more fully developed character than anyone else in the short and far more interesting than Der Captain, who is more caricature than character and gets what little character he has from Billy Bletcher's voice work. Good, but far from great, short with a few moments. Worth watching, but nothing special.

This short mainly concerns the Captain switching the old horse-drawn fire engine with the new gas-powered one. Then Mama calls and says her house is on fire. The Captain rushes over in the new vehicle but gets stuck hanging on his coat at the top of the ladder. The horse who was just on his way to the retirement field hears the call and rushes to rescue them...Some amusing touches but mostly uneven with the Captain a really useless character here. And where are Hans and Franz? Loved the horse and his reactions of sadness when getting fired and excitement when rehired. And the humorous way he and another human character tried to rescue the Captain. So for him I'm giving this at least a 4.

Old Smokey is through as a fire horse. He's being retired to the Old Horse's home, when volunteer fire man Der Captain, gets trapped on a high ladder while trying to fight a fire Mama started in the kitchen.

Der Captain is voiced by Billy Bletcher, of course, but what's most notable about this rather dull cartoon from "The Captain and the Kids" series, is that it's the fourth cartoon directed by Bill Hanna. Hanna is, of course, remembered from his partnership with Joe Barbera; together they won a slew of Oscars for Best Animated Shorts for the interminable Tom & Jerry series, then produced a slew of cartoons for TV. There's no sign of Barbera here, although that may be because his contract called for newspaper cartoonist Rudolf Dirks to receive sole writing credit on the series.

At it's best, the "Captain and the Kids" series at MGM had a strong sense of comic structure while maintaining some of the essence of the Dirks strip ("Buried Treasure", "Mama's New Hat", "The Winning Ticket"). At it's worst you end up with "Old Smokey". Given the fertile theme of childhood mischief and a funny cast of characters that looked animated even in newsprint, it's baffling why director Bill Hanna (uncredited) would opt for a lame, limping, sentimental horsey story. This is the fourth "C&K" entry in which the Kids are nowhere to be found. Perhaps Mama would someday find their pictures on a milk carton.