Alas, instead of preparing for this weekend's National Raisin and Spice Bar Day and National Caramel Day, the gang here has been watching the stock market party like it's 1929, crash like a motor sports catastrophe and plummet like a cheating knuckleballer's 78 mph pitch laden with foreign substances. Even Bert Lahr is losing it!
All we can think of (as we bite what's left of our nails) is the movies and cartoons of the Great Depression, a time no sane person wants to return to. Among the best: Frank Capra's 1932 film American Madness, starring Walter Huston.
One of the most memorable of the short subjects that tackled the Depression was Charley Chase in the Hal Roach comedy THE PANIC IS ON (1931).
A slew of animated cartoons from the early sound era directly address the Depression. Ub Iwerks' Flip The Frog series frequently places our cartoon heroes on the streets and in bread lines.
Even the always plucky Oswald The Lucky Rabbit got hit by hard times.
The Charles Mintz Studio practically specialized in topical cartoons in the early 1930's.
THE FLOP HOUSE is as much an excuse to go-for-broke in the wacky sight gags department as social commentary. Were destitute cartoon animals, no doubt wiped out by the stock market crash, living in flop houses? Yes. Did the ever-enterprising Scrappy run a flop house? Yes.
Eventually, the extended hard times led to a sub-genre of cartoons, known as "let's beat that darn Depression with good will, hard work and a happy song." Hugh Harman & Rudy Ising's jaunty musical from the MGM Happy Harmony series, Hey-Hey Fever (1935), brings the Great Depression and its devastation to Mother Goose Land!
The epitome of this sub-genre remains the Ben Harrison & Manny Gould crew's Color Rhapsody LET'S GO (1937). Even insects got clobbered by the 1930's!
