Gag and Baggage

The late Famous Studios Screen Songs cartoon starts with the usual bunch of gags. In this one, they relate to railroads, because the song that's going to get the bouncing ball treatment is "I've Been Working On The Railroad."

That makes this one of the few Screen Songs about an actual folk song. At least, there's no known song writer. The tune seems to have been borrowed from von Suppe, but the words first appear in a collection of.songs from Princeton University, where they've been working on the levee, not the railroad.

I wasn't terribly impressed by the gags in this one.

While it was an inconsistent series, the Kartunes series from Famous Studios was still worth watching, even if for most of the cartoons it was one time watch level rather than repeat viewings. Some of the cartoons were not great, with the first half generally being better than the second in most of them. But the weakest ones still managed to not be misfires (unlike the better known Screen Song cartoons), more watchable but uneven, and the best surprisingly very good, like for example the first 'Vegetable Vaudeville'.

'Gag and Baggage' is one of the more average, lesser Kartunes cartoons. It's not a bad cartoon, don't consider any of them inherently bad, and has some very strong things. It also sadly fails in some rather crucial components. It could have done with a lot more imagination, the pacing problems are more obvious here than in the first two Kartunes cartoons and veers on being a little too cute, but the animation and music in particular are enough to make 'Gag and Baggage' worth a one off look.

Am going to start with the good. It is beautifully animated. The colours are vibrant and there is meticulous attention to detail in the backgrounds. If there was one aspect that was consistently good in Famous Studios' 1940s and 1950s output, it was the music scoring. And it is outstanding here. The orchestration has a lot of energy and there are some truly luscious sounds throughout.

There are some amusing gags in the first half, corny but amusing. The characters are lively and have personality.

Having said all of that, 'Gag and Baggage' is still not great. The second half is not as good as the first, it's made up of the singalong and while the song itself is a lot of fun the singalong material wise felt too cutesy and was in serious need of variety.

It is also in this half where there are some serious pacing issues as a result, with the pace being quite tedious. Actually did find the pace on the dull side throughout, but the singalong was where it was at its most obvious. As to be expected, the plot is non existent and a series of gags of the blackout kind and it is generally very predictable.

Concluding, rather average. 5/10.