Another gorgeous Fleischer Brothers cartoon with a delightful Cab Calloway soundtrack… this one to his greatest hit, Minnie the Moocher. Here Cab is rotoscoped into a big goofy ghost walrus, of all things. Those Fleischer Brothers sure had some great taste in music.
Another one of the Fleischer Brothers’ best cartoons… this one is their (pre-Disney) version of Snow White. It doesn’t follow the Snow White story closely at all… not that the Disney one does either… but in this one the story is a largely ignored framework on which to build some cartoon craziness… sure, there are some dwarfs in there for about fifteen seconds, a witch and a magic mirror… there’s also a dragon with three duck heads on it’s head. The highlight is when Koko the Clown is transformed into an eerie spectre singing and dancing Cab Calloway’s St. James Infirmary… it may just be me, but besides being funny, I find this scene genuinely chilling as well… it makes the hair stand up on my neck. Stare in the face of your own mortality in the empty eyes of Koko the Clown…
This may be the most surreal cartoon the Fleischer Brothers ever made (although it has a lot of good competition).
I’m a big fan of Fleischer Studios cartoons and of Mills Brothers music… here are the two together.
The Mills Brothers were somewhat of a novelty act, since the only instrument they used in the 30’s was a guitar… the rest of the “instruments” were produced by their voices. The music would be just as enjoyable without knowing this, though.
If you dig the music of the Mills Brothers, check out this well-made and inexpensive collection of their best recordings from JSP Records. You may wanna check out the rest of the stuff in the JSP Records catalog too… as well as Proper Records. Those two publishers are putting an amazing quantity of wonderful old music into well-researched, inexpensive cd box set collections.
One of my favorite cartoons of all time, from Fleischer Studios circa 1931.