A wacky travelogue takes us to the forests of Yosemite, the rocks of Brice Canyon, the frozen wastes of Alaska, the desert wastes of New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the ... Read allA wacky travelogue takes us to the forests of Yosemite, the rocks of Brice Canyon, the frozen wastes of Alaska, the desert wastes of New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the giant redwoods of California.A wacky travelogue takes us to the forests of Yosemite, the rocks of Brice Canyon, the frozen wastes of Alaska, the desert wastes of New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the giant redwoods of California.
Lou Marcelle
- Narrator
- (voice)
Bea Benaderet
- Deer
- (voice)
- (uncredited)
- …
Sara Berner
- Various
- (voice)
- (uncredited)
Karlton Kadell
- Narrator
- (voice)
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe sequence where the lizard sheds its skin was rotoscoped from a film of a striptease artist that studio manager Henry Binder had hired at the request of Tex Avery. Both men waited until after the film was completed to admit to Leon Schlesinger that they had hired her and filmed her at the studio for that purpose.
- GoofsThe narrator states "In the desert wastes of New Mexico..." while showing saguaro cactus. BUT saguaros do not grow in New Mexico. They grow ONLY in the Sonoran Desert, which is in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
- Alternate versionsAll current prints have deleted the scene of a frog committing suicide (the infamous "frog croaking" gag).
- ConnectionsFeatured in Looney Tunes 50th Anniversary (1986)
Featured review
Amusing Tex Avery travelogue parody
The Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon, "Cross Country Detours" (1940), is one of a number of Tex Avery-directed animated parodies of the kind of all-encompassing travelogue and documentary short that the studios used to turn out for theaters to show with their movies back in the golden age of Hollywood. These cartoons use a narrator who sounds exactly like the kind of narrator such films used (and may indeed have been one of them). This cartoon focuses on sights and sounds in America's national parks in the west and up north (Alaska). There are 13 gag sequences in all. (The segments involving the dog headed from Alaska to California and leading up to the Redwoods finale all count as one gag.) One of the gag segments involves a frog "croaking" (figure it out) and has been cut from TV prints of this. (Beware of TV prints of Warner Bros. cartoons, especially the older ones, pre-1947.)
The gags tend to be more clever than funny. They often involve interaction between the syrupy narrator and the animals being observed, who speak up to counter the narrator's invariably smug assumptions. (E.g., the polar bear stuck on a floating slab of ice taking issue with the narrator's insistence on how "warm" the bear is.) The animals are very realistically drawn and animated, even when they behave out of character, e.g. the bobcat having a meltdown or, most famously, the lizard "shedding its skin" by doing a striptease, to the tune of "It Had to Be You." In one of the documentaries I've seen on the Warner Bros. animation unit, there was black-and-white live-action footage of a woman executing the movements of a striptease filmed expressly for use in rotoscoping the drawings for this segment. As a masterpiece of rotoscoped animation (in which the drawings are traced over live-action movements), this sequence should be celebrated, never mind that it's also funny and pretty risqué for the era. Also, the cartoon boasts remarkably detailed background paintings of such landmarks as Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and, in one sequence showing beavers at work, Hoover Dam.
In the Grand Canyon "echo" sequence, I believe the tourist is a caricature of Tex Avery himself and that Avery supplies the voice for the character. (He occasionally supplied a big booming laugh to characters in his cartoons, like the hippo in the audience in "Hamateur Night," 1939.) Other Avery films like this, filled with spot gags, include "Detouring America," "Land of the Midnight Fun," "Screwball Football," "Holiday Highlights," and "Wacky Wildlife."
The gags tend to be more clever than funny. They often involve interaction between the syrupy narrator and the animals being observed, who speak up to counter the narrator's invariably smug assumptions. (E.g., the polar bear stuck on a floating slab of ice taking issue with the narrator's insistence on how "warm" the bear is.) The animals are very realistically drawn and animated, even when they behave out of character, e.g. the bobcat having a meltdown or, most famously, the lizard "shedding its skin" by doing a striptease, to the tune of "It Had to Be You." In one of the documentaries I've seen on the Warner Bros. animation unit, there was black-and-white live-action footage of a woman executing the movements of a striptease filmed expressly for use in rotoscoping the drawings for this segment. As a masterpiece of rotoscoped animation (in which the drawings are traced over live-action movements), this sequence should be celebrated, never mind that it's also funny and pretty risqué for the era. Also, the cartoon boasts remarkably detailed background paintings of such landmarks as Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and, in one sequence showing beavers at work, Hoover Dam.
In the Grand Canyon "echo" sequence, I believe the tourist is a caricature of Tex Avery himself and that Avery supplies the voice for the character. (He occasionally supplied a big booming laugh to characters in his cartoons, like the hippo in the audience in "Hamateur Night," 1939.) Other Avery films like this, filled with spot gags, include "Detouring America," "Land of the Midnight Fun," "Screwball Football," "Holiday Highlights," and "Wacky Wildlife."
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- BrianDanaCamp
- Jun 14, 2010
Details
- Release date
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- Also known as
- Vista Panorâmica
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- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- Runtime10 minutes
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1
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Top Gap
By what name was Cross Country Detours (1940) officially released in Canada in English?
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