1939 Number: 091B
Title: She Married a Cop: "Paddy The Pig"
Studio: Warner Bros. (technically Schlesinger, but that won't help with my tags, which are inaccurately WB)/ "Mammoth Pictures"
Date: 7/12/39
Credits:
"Produced
by Linda Fay
Music by
Ralph Reed
and Burton Lane
Sung by
Jimmy Duffy"
Series: Paddy the Pig *the series itself is fictional)
Running time (of viewed version): 2:46 (with live action, in the relevant clip)
Synopsis: Paddy Pig tries to woo his sweetheart, and somehow does so, apparently by means of song with some cat backup singers.
Comments: What's the deal, you may be asking. This is an animated sequence from the 1939 Republic film "She Married a Cop", directed by Sidney Salkow (whose credits include four Lone Wolf movies, Tillie the Toiler, and the Vincent Price vehicle Last Man On Earth, aka the original movie version of I Am Legend/the Omega Man) and starring Phil Regan and Jean Parker.
One gets the impression movie people think the appropriate reaction to being in a cartoon is "The horror! How dare they use our song in a cartoon!" The cats look better than the pigs. The drawings in studio seem to have extremely dark linework for animation drawings; likely a function of needing to be visible in the movie. The art is fairly unlike any of the rest of the Schlesinger output at the time, but then I'm comparing Porky style pigs in my head. The eyes seem more like Dalton/Hardaway than the other directors (see Porky and Teabiscuit for an especially dense set of examples in screen caps; the listed animator on that is Herman Cohen, so if credit wasn't randomly revolving, which it may have been, it's possible he's the guy with that trademark); it's common to have upper and lower lids show up in D/H cartoons; Bob Clampett sometimes gives that impression, but it's usually actually a cheek, not a lower eyelid, doing the job.
The two movie posters in the one screen cap are both 1939 movies, including a movie from April also directed by Salkow, "Street of Missing Men". The other is "Man of Conquest", about Sam Houston.
She Married a Cop was eventually remade as Sioux City Sue (with Walter Lantz animation) in 1947.
Schlesinger is mentioned working with Republic in the 5/27 BoxOffice, but for "The Fighting Irish" (presumably eventually the Knute Rockne story, altho it is possible this was an error and this movie was meant in the story, which does after all involve some fighting and some Irish; if there's no animated sequence in the Knute Rockne Story, I'd guess this theory is correct).
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/a-lost-warner-bros-cartoon.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqwYLSNPouc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA3ojENt_io
Since Republic didn't make cartoons, any idea where the interiors of the animation studio were shot?
ReplyDeleteI would assume a soundstage set (which I would assume even if Republic had their own animation studio, for ease of mic-ing the thing). I doubt they would interrupt production in a working studio to essentially clear it entirely out when they could buy/rent minimal equipment and stick it on a fairly standard office set.
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