Columbia | STWALLSKULL

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM: Uncle John’s Crazy Town has been posting a lot of amazing looking stills from old Columbia Krazy Kat cartoons. I have always arbitrarily & stupidly dismissed these cartoons without watching them, as they totally ignored the “source material”… George Herriman’s brilliant Krazy Kat comic strips. It appears that in spite of their apparent disdain for or dismissal of Herriman’s work, their cartoons stand on their own as something werra werra interesting. From seeing the stills he has posted, they look pretty amazing… I’m going to have to see what Columbia Krazy Kats I can hunt down on the internet. Check out the short clip of the devious looking mesmerist doing his thing from the Krazy Kat cartoon Svengarlic by clicking the above image… and then check out the rest of the blog to see Kat stills.

An incredible Charles Mintz produced cartoon animated by Manny Gould for Columbia Pictures. Unfortunately, some of it is cut off, but it is still utterly fantastic. What a great soundtrack! They start with some Cab Calloway style hi-de-ho mixed with a Mills Brothers-esque monkey making music with his mouth, move into something that sounds a lot like Jungle Fever (which I know through the Mills Brothers), and finish with St. Louis Blues. The person who posted this on DailyMotion thinks the soundtrack was most likely by Les Hite and his Orchestra.

Please note: The monkey jazz musicians in this cartoon could definitely be read as a racial slur if you’re inclined to read monkeys as a racial slur. If this sort of thing offends you, you may not want to view it.

Go here to see a whole lot of other classic monkey cartoons on this website.

STWALLSKULL

Amusements, diversions, whirligigs, geegaws, humbugs and comics, comics, comics.

Category Archives: Columbia

INTERESTING LINKS: Krazy Kat in the Kolumbia Kartoons at Uncle John’s Crazy Town: October 14th, 2008

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Swing, Monkey, Swing (1937)

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Scrappy in Let’s Ring Doorbells (1935)