Title: Yip- Yip- Yippee (Yip Yip Yippee from some sources; it's unclear to me if the title card I viewed is original or not)
Studio: Fleischer
Date: 8/11/39
Credits:
Directed by
Dave Fleischer
Animated by
Roland Crandall
and
Robert Bemiller
Series: Betty Boop (not a misprint here)
Running time (of viewed version): 6:03
Synopsis: Soda jerk becomes sheriff, but his/a horse saves the day.
Comments: One of the two cartoons (the last two Betty Boops) I sourced from YouTube, thus the incredibly low quality of the images (and matted or squashed to 1.85, I believe). This one is the generally harder to find of the two, as it doesn't have Betty Boop in it (except in the series name) to recommend it to people. This opens with pan flute music. And it shows the title card twice, once with UM&M credits and once without. The time without that indicia showcases someone yelling the title in partying fashion; there was that cartoon with the drunk fawn yelling it in a similar fashion in MGM's Petunia National Park. There's Hawaiian guitar in the opening (which uses the stereoptical moving backgrounds, incidentally). The overall sound does not sound like the other '39 Fleischer cartoons (to this point, at least); even the song doesn't sound right. I think the hero is Pinto Colvig (tho he sounds a bit like Burl Ives when singing). The gum machine makes a puking sound when it coughs up its gum. The pigs get spun into pigskins (footballs, that is). The William Tell Overture gets played (on a pan flute, or maybe a recorder). The cartoon looks extra primitive, but it may be due to the extra primitive viewing format. "They call me a drugstore cowboy, cuz I'm jerking sodas all day"... Wow. It looks like a feed store sign has been blurred out; anyone with a decent copy able to read what it says? Another one of a few primitive looking Fleischers for the year. Like a smoother version of a Lantz Mello-Drama.
Bye bye Betty, your last cartoon didn't know you at all (unless it turned out all your adventures were the dream of an autistic kid with a snow globe, which apparently in 1939 meant an ineffective cowboy dreaming of his life as a flapper girl while minding a drug store).
This cartoon is approximately the beginning of the last third of the '39s. I completed watching the official count cartoons (except the missing Old Fire Horse) a week and a half ago, so now the entries just need to be posted, and all the side things need to get done.
I suppose the alternative theory would be Betty walked out on her contract -- a woman can take being part of only so many Pudgy cartoons, you know -- and the Fleischers did the last short without her (kind of like the last season of "Laverne & Shirley" without Shirley). It is odd that for a cartoon that seems so poorly thought out, they'd pull out the 3-D process, which, AFAIK, is the only time the tabletop setup was used in a B&W cartoon done in Miami.
ReplyDeleteAn Oct. 1939 ad in the Chicago Tribune lists the cartoon as 'Yip Yip Yippy.'
ReplyDeleteJust watched this and like it. Too bad the print is so murky. Some good gags and some classic Fleischer weirdness. I think the instrument used is an ocarina. Also known as a sweet potato.
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