The truth is we LOVE cartoons, even those loved by no one, including the artists who made them, at this blog and, Labor Day is no exception. While the posts on the Cartoon Research website covered Industrial Cartoons at length, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog shall nonetheless offer our two cents on Labor Day cartoons we'll be watching this weekend. We'll start with Otto Messmer's fearless Felix The Cat, who proves himself a most effective feline organizer in Felix Revolts.
Bugs Bunny, while fighting to keep his home, tackles labor/management issues at a construction site and tangles with a brawny, bullheaded and boneheaded foreman - a bad boss if there ever was one - in Homeless Hare, directed by Chuck Jones.
Also much beloved here is Porky's Bear Facts, a particularly hilarious B&W Looney Tune directed by Friz Freleng.
Porky's Bear Facts is part of a sub-genre of subversive cartoons that turn the Grasshopper & The Ants fable upside-down. What particularly cracks this blogger up is the song that the bear living in the dilapidated, deteriorating and ramshackle shack next to industrious Farmer Porky sings, beginning at 1:25 . . . HILARIOUS! Even better: in a dig at human nature, the cartoon animal anti-protagonists learn absolutely nothing and are even more slovenly at the end. For those who yearned to hear the line "and then. . . the ants dropped dead of heart attacks," this is your cartoon.
And speaking of derelict bears and cartoons which skewer a Disney-esque "good work is its own reward" premise mercilessly, there's The House That Jack Built (1939), one among many Columbia Color Rhapsody cartoons cranked out by the prolific production crew led by Art Davis and Sid Marcus. The premise: a seedy panhandler bear and his goofy ostrich pal, a scuzzy "Ham & Bud" style duo if there ever was one, interfere with the obnoxiously industrious Jack Beaver's attempts to clean house.
A post on the Cartoons Of 1939 blog that panned The House That Jack Built offered a very perceptive observation about it, "This cartoon is feverish; not that it moves quickly, just that it feels like it was born of a fevered brain." EXACTLY!
In typical Columbia cartoon fashion, "Jack Beaver" is such a jerk that he manages to make the bear and ostrich look good. At one point, in a gag that would be used to considerably greater effect a few years later in Mexican Joy Ride with Daffy Duck, the embattled beaver pulls a rifle possessing the fire power of a tommy gun used in the infamous 1929 St. Valentine Day's Massacre on the grimy pair.
Love the loosey-goosey animation on Joe the Ostrich throughout.
Don't know if this is Art Davis' animation - that would be for the experts and especially those possessing Charles Mintz Studio drafts to answer - but the movement is quite lively indeed. The mayhem-filled ostrich sequences and those involving the "Termite Wrecking Co." are the standouts. In the singular opinion of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, while The House That Jack Built does not compare to the brilliantly funny cartoons Bob Clampett was directing at Schlesinger/WB in 1939, it beats the heck out of the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies made by the Ben Hardaway & Cal Dalton unit, as well as Chuck Jones' early attempts to imitate Disney - and everything emerging from the Walter Lantz Studio and Terrytoons then.
Shifting gears entirely, here's Hell Bent For Election, sponsored by UAW and made to promote FDR's 1944 campaign by a crew including many moonlighting artists from the Warner Brothers and Screen Gems studios and directed by Chuck Jones. It's a fascinating history lesson and among the first films by United Productions Of America (a.k.a. UPA).
Again, Jonathan Boschen’s series of articles on the Cartoon Research website remain the last word on Labor Day themed animation: Industrial Cartoons part one, page two and page three.
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