"The Ducktators" is a barnyard tale that mirrors the beginnings of WWII. It's got an "Animal Farm" sort of vibe, only funny. It all starts with a great out-of-tune opening theme and a stinking Nazi egg on the title card. The vocal work is outstanding and there is a ton of energy. The Dove of Peace eventually kicks butt and disposes of the Ducktators. This is another very interesting time capsule with some unfortunate stereotypes, but times were desperate and different.
As usual, Freleng's timing is impeccable. The gags are slow to start but the pace really picks up about halfway through. The bit with the robot pilot and the way it scampers to find a parachute is hilarious, and when Sam says he's going to count to ten and Bugs pulls the bomb drop lever at like...4, it works because it's so unexpected. Gravity is defied repeatedly in this short, but it never gets old. Bugs' use of the "air brakes" is a great way to end the cartoon. The way that the plane stops a split second before crashing into a house is classic.
Love Claude the Cat but the Frisky Puppy and that bark is annoying in a "Bandit" (Johnny Quest) kind of way. Claude's reactions are always classic.
It took a couple of minutes, but once this got going it turned out to be a very good short. I know I've seen this before, but I couldn't remember most of the bits. The gag with the rocking chair was very familiar as it used to be one of the frequent segments shown before/after a commercial on the old Bugs Bunny-Road Runner show. Daffy is such a worm in so many of these cartoons. I don't recall if his personality as a heartless, hapless hustler occurs most often in McKimson shorts, but this is the side of him that I like the most. Porky is actually enjoyable in this. He's naive in a way, but the way he gets Daffy blown up and banged up seems almost intentional.
The wartime cartoons are very interesting in that they are a snapshot in time and even though most of the references are probably missed, they are important as an archive. I was hoping the spitz joke would have ended with the dog lifting his leg to put out the fires. The character animations were fun, but I was disappointed that the gags were so predictable.
Pete Puma is kind of funny, with that laugh or whatever it is. Honestly though, this short is kind of dull. The best part about this cartoon is when Bugs disguises himself as Paul Puma, because Mel Blanc's vocal performance is hilarious.
Duck Drake sets off to solve a case and prove that a lovely lady duck is guilty. With his usual flair, Daffy causes all of his own problems with that ego of his. There's not a lot to this and it's just a slightly above average McKimson short to me.
Another short I'd never seen before. Lots of good energy, and as someone who enjoys lawn care, I'm a little sympathetic watching the man's lot get torn up. I don't know that I cared much about the gophers because I've seen the stereotypes so many times before. The final scene with one of the gophers kinking the hose to hold back the water was really well done. You could almost feel the pressure. The sound effects are great.
The main character is so self-centered (he spends time at his job as a graphic artist drawing a self-portrait) that's he's hard to feel sorry for. The fact that he simply, slowly, slips from existence is a cool concept, but it would have been more impactful if he would have been a more likeable character.
This was a ghost story that really offered nothing in the way of scares. I think this would have been better if there had been some additional backstory, but it probably would have needed its run time stretched, or they could have written a couple of times that Millicent (Sandra Dee) heard her dead sister Marian tap-dancing out of the script. It gets an extra point for some of Szwarc's directorial flourishes.
It was interesting to watch how Director Jeannot Szwarc tried to hide how diminutive Mickey Rooney was. He needed to do as much as he could to sell Rooney's tough guy mob boss role (Kolodny) as someone who was important enough for Raymond Massey's "collector" (Dr, Glendon) to have alongside his other possessions, Hitler and Amelia Earhart, for example. The classic Serling ending was pretty neat, but again, I can't believe that Dr. Glendon would want Kolodny in his collection. The opening shot, zoomed-in extremely close to Rooney's pasta-stuffed mouth is a grotesque highlight.
Random thoughts to match the random gags in this short...It's kind of cool that Elmer Fudd's voice is doing the narration. I love the moose bit more than I should. Wow, the multiplying rabbits gag is one of the worst ever. It was good to see the little Scottish Terrier again. This is one of the most disjointed feeling cartoons that I've ever watched. Still, it's not all bad.
Yeah, this one is not good. I'll give it 2 points for the creative character names and 1 point for the guy who says "I was cheatin" with the phonograph strapped to his back.
A great cartoon with amazing animation and probably the coolest looking Bugs ever. It's loaded with action and features a frantic score. This has never been released on home video and it's undoubtedly because of the crazy, out-of-left-field ending that will certainly offend many.
The Randas and May are still terrible characters with emotional and personal problems stacked one on top of another. Kurt Russell's Lee Shaw is resigned to making vague statements that do nothing but give the viewer no information about Monarch, except that it's a dysfunctional organization. This episode is devoid of practically any kaiju action, but I may have fallen asleep.
There's nothing very original about this, but its got some quite likeable characters and some really solid special effects. The explosions and fire of the military's offensive against the giant troll being the most impressive.
The battle of Foghorn and Barnyard Dawg continues and this time they employ the skills of a boxing banty rooster instead of Henery Hawk or that drooling weasel. McKimson apparently kept searching for a character to maximize the potential fun of the war between Foghorn and Dawg but this boxing rooster was not the answer. It's still a decent cartoon but one of the lesser Foghorn Leghorns.
A fun short with another battle between Foghorn Leghorn, Barnyard Dawg, and Henery Hawk. While it's not going to score a lot of points with viewers' more modern sensibilities, I'll process it as one of the better McKimson-Foghorn cartoons. Mel Blanc's voice acting is absolutely amazing. He brings so much life to the characters. Without him, Warner Brothers cartoons would not be as entertaining. My favorite gag in this short is when Foghorn gives Henery Hawk a "hen grenade" to slip under Dawg to keep warm. It explodes, blowing Henery out of the doghouse and leaving the dog with a fried egg sizzling on his belly (which he picks up and casually tosses away).
A particularly strong moment of pain is when Foghorn's wife bashes him over the head with a rolling pin. The sound that the pin makes when she whacks him is loud. Love that sound.
It's one of my favorites because of the interplay between Spike the Bulldog and Chester, his adoring sidekick. Actually, Chester is the benefit of the old switcheroo. A panther that has escaped from a zoo is hiding in the same alley as Sylvester, and tough-dog Spike is unwittingly being roughed up by the panther instead of Sylvester. The way that Chester beats up Sylvester and twirls him up and over the fence while cans and garbage fly is pure Freleng, timed with music and sounds to perfection. The short, terse vocal delivery by Mel Blanc when performing as Spike is hilarious. Spike comes off as a tough mobster sort and the way he speaks is absolute gold.
Elmer is looking for gold and Bugs is a pest. This early fat Elmer is my favorite version of Elmer, but there just aren't a lot of funny gags in this short. Bugs is as mischievous as ever, in fact, he's almost malevolent.
This is a great one that I don't think I'd ever seen before. It's cool to watch a McCabe-directed short. Daffy is nuts in the best way and the wolf and weasel are terrific. The voice acting is top notch. I've never heard of the credited animator, Vive Risto. My favorite gags are when Daffy crashes into the frozen lake, looks at the camera and just says "Ice", and when Daffy and the wolf race through the door and the wolf leaves the door open and the weasel opens the door, but it's actually closed, and he slams into the wall.
This is pretty meh, especially because it has a happy ending. But the innocence and overall naivety of the parents are funny. The father comes off as mean but this was 40 years ago, it seems like his protective behavior was actually warranted. As someone who has been in Information Technology since the time this episode was made, it was fun to see Justine Bateman working on the old PC and dot matrix printer.
This sat in my Watchlist for a long time. It's not been available to stream anywhere. Because I'm a nut for stop-motion effects, dinosaurs, and maybe even for cave women, I coughed up the $20 for the blu-ray and watched it. It's not a good movie. There are lots of barely clothed cave people shouting "AKEETA!!!!!" every other word. It's uncertain what that word actually means because all of the actors apparently just made up a language as they filmed.
Basically, Sanna and Tara form a bond and everyone else chases them around. If caught, they will be killed because Sanna (Victoria Vetri) was supposed to be sacrificed, escaped, and has made the sun angry or some such thing. In the end, there's a happy ending as the moon is formed from the sun (???!!!), and everyone is killed by a massive tidal wave except Sanna and Tara, and a swinging couple that they've befriended.
The stop-motion effects were very well done by Jim Danforth. There were a couple of lesser effects where they glued fins and stuff to a lizard, crocodile, and Komodo dragon, and I'd like to think that Danforth had nothing to do with those misfires. I'm assuming it was done by some other scrub who was forced to do so by cost-cutting executives.
In summary, this was not much of a movie, but it was fun to watch. I liked the effects overall, and was very impressed with Victoria Vetri and Magna Konopka, for reasons that might be obvious, but that's my business.
This felt disjointed and scattershot for most of the film's runtime, but I enjoyed the way the storytelling hopped around. There was something building and embarrassingly, I caught on awfully late. The three main actors were great. Margot Robbie is just beautiful and likeable. Brad Pitt is cool, tough and caring. DiCaprio's portrayal of the fictional Rick Dalton is the MVP, though. He's such a multi-dimensional character and it would be fun to see more of his Dalton's behind-the scenes antics.
The revisionist history tale is fine, but it's always about the dialog with Tarantino. It was fun to just follow these characters around.
This is probably the weakest of the shorts that features the Three Bears. Papa Bear is both a sad sack and a maniac. If only he would pay attention to Mama Bear. It would have saved him a lot of pain. "But Henry…"
Danny Aiello is really good as usual and he's the reason why I ranked this where I did. Even stories that are only tangentially related to gambling are boring.
Really like the actor who plays Harvey, and for a decent amount of time, I thought he was faking his back pain. But it was his wife Nadine and her nagging that supposedly caused it. The actress who plays Nadine is good, too. Dr. Roebuck is a sinister fellow, who's motivation and origins remain unclear.
I think it might be wrong to kind of like this short. The animation is low-grade compared to those of the Looney Tunes golden age. The action is sluggish and the cheapness of it is obvious. But there's just something about Uncle Big Bad (Wolf) that I like. His voice and his frustration with how poorly his traps are going are funny. There's some pretty good timing, too. Especially the cannon gag. The bad puns that wrap up the cartoon are face palm worthy.
Interpretation of the Dr. Seuss story and it works really well. There's a bit of a Looney Tunes flair to it and it's memorable for the great animation. It's so colorful and true to the source material. It's just mostly a cute story and not particularly funny.
Porky tries to fight off a dog in search of an owner. Is this an early version of Charlie the Dog? Maybe. The ending bit where the dog falls from the window of Porky's penthouse looks painful.
