Given the choice between posting about April Fool's Day, National Ferret Day (April 2) or the soon approaching first day of baseball season, we At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog go with MLB opening day. So, to end March, the baseball fans at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog go hog wild with baseball cartoons!
In Buddy's Bearcats, the always scintillating "Mr. Excitement" and star of Looney Tunes from the early days of the Leon Schlesinger Studio, Buddy, is the hometown hero of his baseball team. While some of the gags are more than a tad grotesque, the snappy action combined with Norman Spencer's uncharacteristically jaunty musical score makes for an enjoyable cartoon.
As fate would have it, Major League Baseball on Thursday announced its master 2021 Major League regular season schedule, which will begin with all 30 Major League Clubs playing on (that's right) April 1 - April Fool's Day. Can this blogger wait? No!
This writer's first experience of baseball well preceded his first pilgrimage to windy and always "chill" Candlestick Park to see the San Francisco Giants (Mays! McCovey! Marichal! Perry!). It was reading the celebrated comic strip Peanuts, in which Charlie Brown's woeful team was considerably worse than the execrable 40-122 New York Mets of 1962. Eventually the softball saga from the daily comics found its way into paperback reissues and the second animated version of the gang. Still love the comics of Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz.
The Schulz comics certainly had a genuine cuteness factor, served with dry wit, and once in a blue moon (or three, or eight) a Warner Brothers cartoon strayed, unwittingly or reluctantly, into that "Disney cute" territory.
Usually an uncharacteristically cute Merrie Melodie cartoon would be directed by Chuck Jones, but in this case the director is the guy who arguably was the greatest animator ever to work at Warner Brothers Animation - Robert McKimson.
It is stretching it to call this a baseball cartoon, as Hobo Bobo's pachyderm protagonist yearns to play ball, but does not swing the bat and rival Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig during the 6:38 running time, but who cares - love that elephant!
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog believe strongly that ultra-goofiness within a totally off-the-wall cartoon universe constitutes a vision as much as a high-falutin' French New Wave flick, so here's a cartoon by our friends at the Van Beuren studio.
No studio could combine primitive animation with delirious, off-the-grid wacko ideas quite like Van Beuren in the early 1930's. They stick with the off-the-wall program - perfection be damned!
There are good, bad and indifferent cartoons about baseball and the following, The Ball Game, a "bugs swinging bats" opus from the Aesop's Fables series, manages to be all three of those simultaneously . . . and also is quite funny. We note that one of the usual suspects from the studio's often hilarious Tom & Jerry series, animator, storyman and sometimes director George Rufle, is in the opening credits.
Speaking of Friz Freleng, the director of Baseball Bugs, arguably the greatest film about baseball ever made, he and his Merrie Melodies crew produced a terrific cartoon about the national pastime 10 years earlier.
That would be Boulevardier from the Bronx, based on the charming song and dance number performed by Jack Oakie and Joan Blondell in the Dick Powell - Ruby Keeler musical Colleen.
The baseball team's (literally) crowing star pitcher is cocky in more ways than one, and elements of this cartoon recall Disney's Silly Symphony Cock Of The Walk. While Friz Freleng's cartoons were in the process of moving away from the Silly Symphonies Lite seen in much of the industry, this would be an instance of his Merrie Melodies matching the Disney studio in their genre, on a fraction of the budget. Baseball fans will note the reference to pitcher Dizzy Dean.
This cartoon was so good that a bunch of the animation from Boulevardier from the Bronx got used again for Freleng's 1940 Looney Tune Porky's Baseball Broadcast.
Released theatrically on January 27, 1936 - eight months before Boulevardier from the Bronx - was the Walter Lantz studio's Oswald Rabbit cartoon Soft Ball Game. Expanding upon the concept of arachnid baseball seen in the Aesops Fable cartoon, not only rabbits and insects play ball but gorillas, porcupines, turtles and octopi. The ideas throughout are very clever. It's a standout among the later Ozzie The Lucky Rabbit cartoons.
This would not be the only Walter Lantz opus about baseball. The early and enjoyably grotesque "goony bird" design of Woody Woodpecker (before Shamus Culhane and Art Heineman came along to give the Woodster a makeover) inadvertently and impudently ends up on the diamond in The Screwball.
We close with an ingenious mashup of bits from two of this blogger's favorite animated cartoons about baseball. The following poster on DailyMotion combines HOW TO PLAY BASEBALL and BASEBALL BUGS, two masterpieces.
Play Ball!
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