Classic Cartoon Cavalcade - Thur. June 9th - 8PM

Oddball Films Media • Jun 8, 2016

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Classic Cartoon Cavalcade, an evening of some of our very favorite classic cartoons hand-picked from the San Francisco Media Archive's massive collection. From the 1930s-1950s, from the silly to the sexy with a little Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies (including works by Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones), UPA, Terrytoons Fleischer Brothers, Walt Di$ney and imitators, just to name a few. This time around, we've got a triple shot of that beloved stuttering swine: Porky. He visits a house haunted with leprechauns and is transported to a Dali-esque landscape in Chuck Jones' The Wearing of the Grin (1951) and he teams up with Daffy to run a baby factory gone amuck in Bob Clampett's Baby Bottleneck (1946). From the brilliant Tex Avery see the very first Daffy Duck cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt (1937) and see why that "crazy, darn fool duck" bounced and cackled his way into our hearts. Avery also brings us Roy Rogers' early band "Sons of the Pioneers" voice the yodels of the feuding hillbillies of A Feud There Was (1938). Bugs Bunny is up against the heavyweight champ and impersonates the announcer in Rabbit Punch (1948). Merrie Melodies gives us a shot at classic Hollywood with Bogey, Bacall, and one horny wolf in the uncensored version of Bacall to Arms (1946). Foghorn Leghorn gets tricked into marrying the spinster hen Prissy in Of Rice and Hen (1953). Mighty Mouse makes revisionist poetry in a bizarro version of Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus (1944) - this time with a happy ending! The world's most famous mouse joins an all-star extravaganza in the early Di$ney short: Mi©key's Gala Premiere (1933) Plus! Mr. Magoo in Pink and Blue Blues, Betty Boop is a Dancing Fool (1932), Tweety is looking for Room and Bird (1951) and more! It's a night of wit, wackiness and wabbits all screened from 16mm prints.



Date: Thursday, June 9th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 


Featuring:

Mi©key’s Gala Premiere (B+W, 1933, Burt Gillett)

Mi©key and Minnie attend the premiere of the Big Mouse’s new hit cartoon in this animation from the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age. All the stars of the day are at the show, and most of them are ruthlessly lampooned. Get a taste of Hollywood’s lost glamour in this cavalcade of in-jokes and personal attacks.


Mr. Magoo Pink and Blue Blues (Color, 1952, Pete Burness)
Magoo plays babysitter while a bandit is on the loose. After confusing the baby with the dog, the dog with the bandit and the bandit with the baby, Magoo ends up half-wittedly saving the day.

Baby Bottleneck (Color, 1946, Robert Clampett)
Porky and Daffy have got to take over the baby factory after a series of snafus that leave a mother goose with a skunk, a dog with a baby hippo, and a kitten gets delivered to a family of mice.  Can the swine and foul frenemies get to the bottom of the motherly mixups and straighten out some wayward storks?



Wreck of the Hesperus (B+W, 1944, Mannie Davis)
The first official Mighty Mouse cartoon (as he was known as Super Mouse originally). A very strange retelling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bleak tale of pride in the face of nature's wrath. A fisherman takes his lovely daughter along on an exhibition into treacherous waters.  When the ship is met with a storm the sailor ties his daughter to the mast to keep her from going overboard.  In Longfellow's version both the father and the daughter drown, only they didn't have Mighty Mouse in Longfellow's day, and sure enough the super powerful rodent is soon on his way to save not only them, but the mice from the ship as well - who have resorted to using donuts as life rafts.  Mighty Mouse pulls the whole ship to safety and they all get a ticker tape parade! 




Bacall To Arms (Color, 1946, Robert Clampett)
Directed by an un-credited Bob Clampett, this uncensored Merrie Melodies release features some great Hollywood star caricatures and an appearance from that lecherous lupine Wolfy who's gots his eyes set on the stunning Lauren Bacall- and a nasty final blackface gag (which hit the cutting room floor in modern times).


The Wearing of the Grin (Color, 1951, Chuck Jones)
Porky gets caught in a storm and ends up staying the night at a haunted hotel run by Leprechauns. Two of the little men suspect the swine of eyeing their golden fortune so they put Porky on trial and sentence him to wear magical green shoes that transport him to a Salvador Daliesque nightmare world.

Rabbit Punch (Color, 1948, Chuck Jones)
Bugs' loud mouth gets him into the boxing ring against the heavyweight champion of the world and he's got to reach deep into his bag of tricks to outwit the meathead.  He steals the announcer's mic and hijacks the PA, dresses up as a popcorn vendor, impersonates a doctor, shoots himself like an arrow out of a bow, gets tied to some train tracks, and ice skates around the rink with greased up paws.




Of Rice and Hen (Color, 1953, Robert McKimson)

Prissy decides to jump off the barn because she can't "get a man" and have chicks.  Foghorn catches her, and she falls in love with him.  He goes about his business of harassing the barnyard dog, who decides to help Prissie "land" Foghorn as a husband since he knows it will annoy Foghorn.  They do it by making Foghorn jealous - the dog dresses as a rooster and pretends to court Prissy, and when Foghorn goes over to fight him, the other hens marvel. Foghorn ends up marrying Prissy, and he seems to regret it instantly.




Porky's Duck Hunt (B+W, 1937, Tex Avery)
It's Daffy Duck's debut! Porky is all ready for his duck hunting expedition, only he wasn't counting on running into "a crazy, darn fool duck" like Daffy.  Of course, his every plan is foiled, and once again returns home empty handed.  This classic features a bevy of hilarious gags including electric eel utilization, hiccuping dogs, bizarre celebrity sightings, a boatful of drunk fish serenading the pond and Porky yelling "This wasn't in the script!"


A Feud there Was (Color, 1938, Tex Avery)
The McCoys and the Weavers are two feuding hillbilly clans. A very early and different version of Elmer Fudd "Peacemaker", attempts to end the fighting; but violence and zaniness win out. Featuring yodels and music by Roy Rogers' cowboy band Sons of the Pioneers (Tumbling Tumbleweeds) for that authentic, down-home sound.

Room and Bird (1951, Color, Friz Freleng)
If Tweety Bird isn't the cutest character in the Looney Tunes universe, we don’t know who is! Owning a pet canary who has a stalker as manic as Sylvester must make apartment hunting rather hard for Granny. She sneaks her yellow friend into the "pet-free" Spinster Arms Hotel and all the usual Freleng chaos ensues. Non-stop chases, a livid house detective and beautifully rendered backgrounds make this a winner.

The Dancing Fool (B+W, 1932, Dave Fleischer)

Bimbo and Koko are sign painters hired to paint the lettering on the window of “Betty Boop’s Dancing School". Inside Betty teaches her friends how to shake their tail feathers to the tune of "Dancing to Save Your Soul." This cartoon provides us with a glimpse of the kind of dancing and outfits that would be banned from Betty’s cartoons only two years later.





Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.