Review of Symphony in Slang

"Symphony in Slang" is an American cartoon from 1951, in color of course and this one is almost 70 years old now and runs for slightly under 7 minutes as they usually do. It is still easy to find today thanks to the involvement of director Tex Avery, who made this one not in the latter stages of his career, but still way past his most prolific days. Rich Hogan wrote the story and this is from the final works of his career, even if he lived on for several decades still at that point. John Brown does the voice work for all the characters here and that is a rare occurence because despite being a prolific actor, cartoons were really not his thing and this is an exception. I kinda liked his voice. Actually it was more entertaining than the hipster's pretty forgettable physicall appearance. Hipster vs. Webster you could say as the man at the entrance of the heavenly gates needs work from the dictionary guru Noah Webster (also long deceased of course) in order to understand what the new guy is talking about at all. And even Webster struggles with the man's constant use of very visual language. Not graphic or so. So the film is told in its entirety like that. We see what things would actually look like if these weren't just proverbs. I will give you some examples: We see a piano player playing by ear, so he actually uses his ear instead of his fingers. Then we see a woman being the mother of several little ones. And there are no children depicted, but several numbers, well "ones" only of course. I think that is enough. You are getting the idea. I think it is okay for this running time, still with the weaker jokes, it gets a bit repetitive, but most of the jokes are fine and also to understand for somebody who isn't a native English speaker like myself. There are also several really obvious inclusions like the fact that he laughed himself to death, even if that did not really fit in this context. A bit of a pity that the final one with the cat did nothing for me as I simply did not know the phrase. Maybe it's me, maybe it has aged in a way where people today are just not using it anymore in general I am not sure. But it doesn't matter anyway. Little fun cartoon we have here that linguists may really enjoy the hell out of it. Feel free to depict that visually in front of your imaginary eye too. And then go watch these 7 minutes. Thumbs up!