Review of Land of the Midnight Fun

For a cartoon from 1939, this one isn't bad and it holds up reasonably well. However, many viewers who love classic cartoons would be shocked to hear that it's from Tex Avery--a man who created some of the most wonderful cartoon shorts of the 1940s and 50 with MGM. However, before this he worked for Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes and his films are much different. Some of this is because Avery hadn't fully developed his bizarro sensibilities with cartoons and part of it was because Looney Tunes simply was afraid to let him make the sort of strange cartoons he wanted to make. As a result, "Land of the Midnight Sun" is amazingly conventional for an Avery outing...and filled with ultra cornball jokes. They aren't all bad and the animation is nice...but when you compare this to such Avery classics as "Swingshift Cinderella" (made just a few years later), it comes up wanting. Worth seeing...and worth skipping. And, by the way, penguins do NOT live in the Arctic! Additionally, the object the ship is resting on is the iconic Trilon of the 1939 New York World's Fair.