Wanted: No Master

One of the unjustly forgotten comic strips, Milt Gross's "Count Screwloose of Tooloose" used to house it's nutty hero in a sanitarium. The Count later escaped and settled in suburbia and that is where we find him and J.R. the Wonder Dog in this pull-the-stops-out animated adaptation from MGM. Originally an unreleased flicker, it now pops up intermittently on Cartoon Network's "Late Night Black and White" and is worth hunting down. A hoot from start to finish involving J.R.'s plot to marry off his obnoxious master to an aging spinster. Wacky enough to make you wonder what sanitarium Gross broke out of.

This cartoon is so full of fast-paced "anything goes" humor that some things that would normally be now offensive, like putting something looking like blackface on a white character and having him talk in stereotypical "black talk" of the time, actually adds to some of the hilarity of a dog (J.R. the Wonder Dog) trying to get rid of his master (Count Screwloose), because of how he keeps hogging the food at home, by getting him married to a rich frequent widow with loads of children. Despite the fact that the widow is homely, the dog fools his master initially when he pastes a classic beauty picture from another page over that of the widow's without him knowing. Milt Gross was probably an acquired taste at the time so one can't blame MGM for only letting him make two cartoons for them. Too bad, he'd probably be a cult figure today...