User Reviews

Just watched this Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon on YouTube. In this one, lots of giant mice (who look a little like Mickey but in actuality they're probably modeled on the Paul Terry mice since New York animators worked there and at the Fleischer studio) are getting water from a gadget pulled by a dog's tail. Later on, one of them bribes that same dog by giving a bone turned from a pair of dice (just found out from the previous poster that "bones" are slang for dice). Another one is trying to wash a giraffe's neck. First, he climbs on his spots and then he sits on a sleeping hippo's stomach which rises when he snores. The weirdest scenes are when we see another mouse washing a cat like laundry by squeezing him and then when he washes a pig, a drunk dog comes by and uses his bottle cork on the pig's tail as an opener! Just before the title song, a rabbit conductor assembles his crew and then tells the audience-in a loud stilted way-to follow the Bouncing Ball. He then appears at the song's end stepping on the words and singing obnoxiously before one more sequence ends the short. Quite amusingly funny though a little primitive as evidenced by the heavy line drawings on white background which was the result of some overlapping paper cut out "slash" technique used by the studio at the time before the switch to celluloid. On that note, I recommend I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles for any animation buff who's very curious about these early talkie animated efforts. P.S. The narrator who refers to the rabbit as "funny boy" as he instructs us to the song is the voice of Billy Murray, a singer who participated in these early talkie Fleischer shorts and was the original voice of Bimbo.

This is an odd little entry from Fleischer in their Screen Song sing-along series. About half animation, half sing-along and a little hard to describe. Because I want to discuss some details, this is a spoiler warning:

There really isn't all that much to this one. It starts out with mice taking buckets of water and splashing them on an elephant bathing behind a screen and just kind of goes on from there. Either mice are scrubbing other animals or the animals are washing themselves.

There are two bits which I particularly like-one where a mouse is bathing cats using a tub and washboard, like a laundrywoman and a bit where a mouse, trying to get a sleeping dog to continue cranking a water-pump, pulls a pair of dice from his pocket and they morph into a bone (a slang expression for dice is "bones").

After the cleaning finishes, a rather odd rabbit assembles the animals into an orchestra and then very exaggeratedly tells the audience that they will be playing the title tune and encourages the audience to sing along by following the "bouncing ball".

There follows the standard lyric display, though the last part features the rabbit in place of the ball and the words change as he steps on them. The animation is nice, though the song is rather melancholy and the singing is uninspired. Worth tracking down.