Old Cartoons
Now Playing: UPA Animated Shorts Program
Living in a time when most kids' cartoon fare is loud and obnoxious (not to mention computer-animated), it's comforting to immerse oneself in old-school 'toons, with a more gentle tone and emphasis on characters. This program of United Productions of America animated shorts wasn't uniformly great, but it was certainly illuminating as a collection of cultural artifacts from the 1950s. In these more sensitive times, no one could get away with creating a character so un-PC as Mr. Magoo, who I've never found especially funny so much as fascinating as an image of blind people once sold to children- bumbling, clueless, and invariably lucky enough to survive even the most perilous misadventures. Another cartoon that was dated but nonetheless interesting was A UNICORN IN THE GARDEN, based on a James Thurber story of a henpecked husband whose harridan wife is all to eager to ship him off to the asylum after he claims to see the titular unicorn. Naturally the husband really has seen the unicorn, the wife doesn't even bother to look in the garden, and in the end he turns the tables on her by getting her locked up instead. The shorts that have dated better have done so mainly because of their more universal messages, as in THE OOMPAHS, a stylishly-drawn tale of paternal acceptance focusing on a family of brass instruments. Here, a tuba father demands that his mischievious trumpet son play classical music, when he's rather be having fun with his friends, who put together form a Dixieland band. Naturally, one of a fringe benefits of this short is upbeat and jazzy music, and that's pretty typical of most of the shorts in the series, at least half of which were scored by the great David Raksin, if I remember correctly. The best of them all was the classic GERALD MCBOING-BOING, a funny and inventive portrait of a little boy who speaks in sound effects. Poor Gerald drives his parents crazy and can't make any friends until he's discovered by a radio producer and becomes a star overnight, and the idea that he might have grown up to star in POLICE ACADEMY movies doesn't make the short itself any less enjoyable.