Happy July 4th, 2020 from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog!

On July 4th of this lousy pandemic year, Hallelujah, your blogmeister is not dead - YIPPEE KEYEYOH KAYAY - and continues wearing face masks featuring Bugs Bunny or hula girls!



This 4th of July has the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog wanting to ring up our British friends across the pond, ask why they didn't botch the public health response to the coronavirus outbreak massively as we have here - and also find a way to share a delicious East Kent Goldings hopped pub ale via Zoom.



Alas, our 4th of July offering will not be a British Animated Productions, David Hand Studio or Halas and Batchelor opus, but an Academy Award winning cartoon from the MGM studio in Hollywood, U.S.A.



This is among my favorites from Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's Tom & Jerry series and features its clever synthesis of Disney/Harman-Ising (MGM era) style character animation with "Warner Brothers rowdyism."



This opus, with the cat and mouse stars celebrating July 4th by lighting an unending supply of fireworks on, around and through each other, was produced just a year or two after the Rudy Ising cartoons that launched Tom & Jerry.



While Yankee Doodle Mouse demonstrates some of the Disney-esque animation style seen in such initial cartoons in the Tom & Jerry series as Puss Gets The Boot, the transition towards the wackier, faster approach from the latter 1940's (no doubt influenced by the arrival at MGM of Tex Avery, the fastest cartoon director/comedy gag mind in the West) is well underway.

Yankee Doodle Mouse features dynamic animation, especially by the brilliant Irv Spence, and the drawing style is stylistically quite a ways from the streamlined Tom & Jerry of the 1950's. Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera and crew's creative synchronization with Scott Bradley's music, a key cornerstone of the series, is already apparent.



This dyed-in-the-wool animation buff feels strongly that the Tom & Jerry cartoons peaked in 1944-1947. The following 1945 Tom & Jerry classic, Tee For Two, would be tied with Quiet Please! as personal favorites; an entire episode of the Cartoon Logic podcast was devoted to it.

While the Tom & Jerry cartoons were still handsomely produced and beautifully animated in the 1950's, in this writer's opinion, they would became much less compelling, less overtly musical and more likely to lapse into formula. At least Hanna & Barbera's Tom & Jerrys, even at their worst, were still far superior to Famous Studios' painfully unfunny Herman & Katnip cartoons.



Happy July 4th, everybody! The gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog shall celebrate the 4th, after tipping our battered top hats to recently passed comedy great Carl Reiner, to whom we say "thanks a million for the ten million laughs."







Shall be watching the following July 4th perennial starring Jimmy Cagney as well.