Sunday Cartoons

Trying to cheer up, mostly unsuccessfully, the pissed-off and snowstorm-addled reprobates at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are watching Toby The Pup cartoons.



Seven of the 12 Toby cartoons remain in the lost film Twilight Zone. The Tobys are less gritty in design and sensibility than the Scrappy series, and in some sequences resemble Ben Harrison and Manny Gould's contemporaneous Krazy Kat, also produced by Charles Mintz.



Alas, the Toby The Pup cartoons were so unloved that several in the 12-entry series remain lost almost 100 years later.



One urban legend goes that producer Charles Mintz was so incensed by the failure of the Toby cartoons to score a boffo Mickey Mouse style mega-hit for RKO Radio Pictures in 1930-1931 that he had all the original 35mm negatives and prints buried! That's a great story, but seems unlikely. . .



Produced by the Charles Mintz Studio for RKO Radio Pictures release, the Tobys were made by the same crew that subsequently produced Columbia's Scrappy series.



That crew would be led by the highly imaginative Dick Huemer, supported by his fellow ex-Fleischer animators Sid Marcus and Art Davis. The jaunty musical scores were by Joe De Nat, who re-used the Toby The Pup opening a few years later as main title theme for Columbia's Color Rhapsodies.



Huemer, who ultimately spent three decades working for Walt Disney Productions as part of a prolfic story writing team with Joe Grant, regarded his Mintz Studio cartoons as dreadful at best, an embarrassment. No surprise there: he subsequently worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia.



In this writer's cartoon-crazed opinion, the Tobys equal or surpass the wacky Fleischer Studio hijinx from the same period and also rival the contemporaneous Disney cartoons for animation technique, early 1930's "rubber hose" style.



Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films has found heretofore lost Toby cartoons with French titles. Hence, it is possible to compare two versions of Toby in The Museum.



The Toby cartoons never got distributed to U.S. television and were largely unseen for several decades. They were mentioned in Radio Pictures' print ads, presumably with some expectation that the cartoons would give Mickey Mouse at least a bit of competition for the Depression-era moviegoing audience.