User Reviews

This is the second Happy Hooligan cartoon I watched on YouTube, the first being A Trip to the Moon. In this one, Happy is constantly reminded to work but he just wants to sleep to his heart's content. When he's told to chop some wood, he gets distracted by a spider who builds a web that goes all the way to the sky and that Happy manages to climb to a cloud where St. Peter tells him to go to work but since he just rests on that cloud, Peter kicks him to under the ground where he winds up in The Other Place. He's told by Satan to work there, too! I'll stop there and just say I was pretty amused by the premise but the ending puzzled me. I don't want to reveal what happened, just if you want to find out, watch The Spider and the Fly (what fly?) on YouTube.

When Happy Hooligan climbs a spider web up to Heaven, Saint Peter tells him that everyone works. When Happy refuses, Peter beats him up and throws him all the way down to Hell, where things don't go well either.

Happy Hooligan was a very popular comic strip in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. When Hearst expanded his sable of comic strips into the movies, it was one of the earlier series. Here, directed by Gregory LaCava and with animation by Bill Nolan, we find that it's a very simple and not terribly interesting idea for a strip. Happy is lazy. He suffers for it.

Nonetheless, because this is a very early cartoon, there are points of interest. First is the bizarre early inklings of cartoon physics, in which spiders can build these huge vertical webs and people can climb them. The other is the way that Hell is drawn: side lit and very dramatic.

LaCava would not remain in animation. By the middle of the next decade, he would be directing comedy features. By the 1930s he would be a leading director of crazy comedy and is probably best remembered for MY MAN GODFREY. That desire for the realism of real humans in comic and dramatic situations can be glimpsed even here.