Smoky Joe

Title: Smoky Joe
Studio: Terry
Date: 1945
Credits:
Story by
John Foster
Directed by
Connie Rasinski
Music by
Philip A. Scheib
Series: -
Running time (of viewed version): 6:30

Synopsis: An old fire horse is decommissioned, goes into retirement, and then tries to be useful, in some sort of wishy washy moral that horses are better than trucks, as is demonstrated by the continued use of horses instead of trucks in firefighting today.


















Comments: See the entry on The Old Fire Horse for additional background on this 1945 cartoon here:
http://cartoonsof1939.blogspot.com/2010/07/098-old-fire-horse.html
So as we have what may be a remake of the missing cartoon, here's an entry for it.
There's a muddy face gag which is almost a black face gag, but I don't think it ultimately is. The song involves turning the horse into glue. The narrator sounds like Albert Brooks and Alan Young. If this _is_ a remake of an earlier cartoon, the studio was markedly creatively bankrupt. It's not the recycling per se; it's making this lackluster of a cartoon when they didn't have to bother with making new stuff up that is the damning part. The opening shot of the barn does look like the horse is gray; but they couldn't have just painted over the backgrounds, could they? The marching band actually looks like it's taken from earlier than 1939, with its little basic mouse and tiny eyes.