lupercal

Avery meets Freud. Two dogs (a father and son who look like a cross between Droopy and Goofy) are preparing to duck-hunt. The ducks of course know exactly what time the season starts and ends, and… this is really peripheral.

They wing a mother duck. Her egg falls onto the boat and hatches. The hatchling is disturbingly sensual and seductively feminine, even doing a strip-tease with her shell.. The father and son try to kill (him/her); they stick their obviously phallic shotguns into the water and shoot, to no effect. The duckling screws up through the bottom of the boat. The guys ejaculate through their ears. The younger male sticks his cock/rifle down through the orifice in the bottom of the boat; the duckling clamps the muzzle with a peg, rendering it impotent. The father touches it: it explodes.

More impotency ensues as son tries to start outboard motor without success. Loads of good sight gags follow, from Mt Rushmore, School Crossing to the wonderful running out of technicolor into b/w (shades of running off the edge of the frame). Then a magic, phallic tree sprouts; the father uses the son to try to cut it down; the son rebels.

Other than that, good Tex Avery.

Loop

I find myself so much in agreement with the previous reviewer, in terms of just about everything, including his rating, that I wonder if I shouldn't merely write 'see above', or merely give a rating without a written review.

I'll try to justify this excursion into 'ibid', however fractionally.

To me this short rings bells not merely with MGM and Avery cartoons, but with (yes, you probably see this coming) the 'Spy vs Spy' format of Warner shorts. More expressly the prey thwarts the predator; the herbivore thwarts the carnivore; the smart little guy beats the dumb big guy.

This has been so done to death so predictably that I just wish a wolf would kill a sheep for once. Well, at least here the whole cast are predators: two feline, one canine - but in the end it's still the Tweetie effect: the weakest character triumphs.

That being said, I enjoy Avery's Bren-gun sight-gags and edgier narrative somewhat more than I enjoy the average WB analog from the same era. Avery always gives the impression that he's in danger of really running amuck, rather than contriving a cleverly controlled opus ala Chuck Jones. Maybe it's a Beatles vs Stones thing. Ironically I like The Kinks.

When I stumbled across this cartoon in my WB vol whatever, I remembered Disney's 'Black Pete', and how he was revised over the years into the same sort of denial as 'Song of the South'. Is Bad Luck 'Blackie' a similar figure?

No, not really. He's just a black cat, far as I can see.

Loop

This cartoon is mental. I’ve been trying to think of a direction to come at it from, but they all fail.

At its most basic, it’s a morality tale. Andy spies some apples (why a panda wants apples is another mystery), and is tempted and warned both by his devlish and saintly avatars. Nothing new under the sun there. But when he goes over that barbed-wire fence and eats spray-painted apples, and then hallucinates, we’re in ‘Mickey’s Garden’ psilocybin territory.

What ensues ranges from French Can Can dancing apple cores to Dante’s 7th level of Hell which involves being force-fed apples on a lathe, and god knows what other things. Only to wake up and find that… well, shouldn’t spoil it all for you.

The animation and backgrounds are really quite good. All the same:

Walt, Ben, Milt – you have something to answer for.

Up jumped the devil in a white nightgown, indeed.

Loop

Oh, Lord - I did the profile for this, God knows how many years ago, and never wrote a review? I must have been busy.

This was the first animated TV show, folks. Nevermind 'Flintstones'; this pre-dated it by well over a decade. It first aired in 1949-50. It is THE piece of TV animation history.

So what? It was first, but was it any good?

Oh, yes.

I don't know why, but I remember this from my early childhood. I don't know why, because it was made more than twenty years before I could have seen it, but that b/w rabbit on his white horse is punched into my mind like Apollo 13.

In the very first episode CR rescues Rags the Tiger from (I think) a circus, and they become the classic lead/sidekick combunation. The eps were serial shorts, not standalone shorts. In this way they resembled cinema serial shorts like Rin Tin Tin.

Crusader Rabbit differs from the early HB TV animation in that its legacy is so obviously Tex Avery and WB. The show is aimed at adults; the gags are really funny, even today, without being offensive in any way. It's adult, funny and cute. That's a combination very rarely acheived in any medium.

The animation in the early eps (oddly I have no memory of the later colour eps) is sometimes non-existant. Often it just looks like storyboards, with some animation chucked in now and again. Somehow this doesn't matter at all. And after all, it looks good alongside godawful rubbish like those Marvel TV series from 25+ years later.

CC and Rags - what a fantastic, loveable, hilarious pair. Is this on DVD?

This is the business.

Loop

Well, the consensus so far seems to be, 'I'll give this 1.5, but look it up only if you're a CB fan'. Well it was on TV locally: I recorded it and watched it thre times. So here is a review from a non CB fan. I think it deserves equal air-time. I think the earilier reviews require/invite it.

It is utter, godawful, uber-saccharin, nonsensical fingers down the throat utter garbage.

It is so nauseatingly cute, incoherent and horrible; so full of desperately dire nursery rubbish that it made me want to smash my own face in. THERE'SI haven't seen the first movie, and after this trauma I absolutely do not want to.