Ground Hog Play

The late-40s to the early/mid-50s Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons had a higher budget and overall the overall quality was much better. Onwards, the quality did diminish quite significantly though the overall cartoons varied, some decent, many mediocre.

Famous Studios' cartoons are not for all tastes, but my opinion is that their early stuff and some of the early 50s output are good. While they were very formulaic they were always well animated and voiced with some funny parts, some poignancy and decent characters and their regular composer Winston Sharples could always be relied on to write a great and often outstanding score.

Admittedly though, by the mid-50s through to the late-60s Famous Studios' cartoons did get repetitive. While Sharples' music still shone and the voice actors did their best the animation suffered due to lower budgets and tighter deadlines, the humour became more tired and slow in timing than sharp and funny, the stories became increasingly predictable and rehashed and some characters started losing their initial spark, this is particularly true of most of the later Herman and Katnip cartoons.

While not among the best Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons, 'Ground Hog Play' is still one of the better later cartoons and the best perhaps since 'Boo Moon'.

The dialogue is forgettable and rather twee in places, while Mae Questel's high-pitched voice for Casper does take some getting used to. The animation has been much better before. The odd lovely bits of colour aside, other parts are flat and the backgrounds and drawings have lost their meticulousness and instead look hastily drawn and scrappy.

Best thing however about 'Ground Hog Play' is the music score. Winston Sharples' music score here is typically merry and whimsical, it's beautifully orchestrated, energetic and adds so much to the mood, his music has always been one of the best assets of the Famous Studios cartoons and it's not an exception here. In fact how it's composed and how it meshes so well with everything going on in the animation, story and action contributes to it being the best thing about the cartoon.

While he is a character that won't click with everybody, Casper does win me over with his friendly nature and kindness, while the ground hog and their chemistry are adorable. The comic book concept does give the story some freshness, and apart from some typical Casper components that does make it predictable and repetitive in places, while the climax does have a sense of urgency.

All in all, one of the better later Casper cartoons and the best since 'Boo Moon'. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Casper is in his Sunday newspaper funnies section, looking around for friends. After frightening off the people in his strip, he looks over to the next one, in which a ground hog is asking what a shadow is. The vague answer inspires Casper to pretend to be the ground hog's shadow.

It's the standard Casper story, and as such doesn't hold much interest for me. However, there's a nice bit of mind messing in choosing to make Casper not only exist in his own comic strip, but aware of it. And, eventually, play around with what I can only describe as the geometry of comic-strip space. Even though they don't end up doing anything significant with it, it's a nice idea.