The Shark Film Office

Plane Dumb  (1932, Van Beuren Studios)  Dir.: John Foster and George Rufle TC4P Rating: 4/9 So, I spent some time years back on this site heaping light praise upon a much-neglected series like Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry shorts, and then I ran into the film  Plane Dumb . The title  Plane Dumb  could very nearly describe the actions of the filmmakers as they contrived to create this wannabe  Amos N' Andy  homage. Apparently, donning blackface not only helped disguise the very white Tom and Jerry as they roamed about Africa in 1932, but it also lowered their IQs to the negative, changed your speech patterns automatically, and somehow also mad their disarrayed and lighter-colored hair instantly become short, dark and curly. Ah, the magical properties of a common makeup kit! I read a couple of reviews for this cartoon short years ago where each of the writers complained that Tom and Jerry were traveling to Africa "for no good reason". Let m...

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with my animation blog,  Cinema 4: Cel Bloc , about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.] The Wreck of the Hesperus  (1944) Dir.: Mannie Davis TC4P Rating: 6/9 Species: cartoon sharks, a small but very hungry pack of them. Sharks versus Mighty Mouse? Say it IS so! It is! The 1944 short,  The Wreck of the Hesperus , was the eighth Mighty Mouse short churned out by the Terrytoons studio from October of 1942 through December of 1961. When I say "churned out," I mean it; they knocked out eighty of these babies in that span. [OK, technically, the first 77 were released theatrically through 1954, and the final three were completed later in the decade for television, but that means they crammed even more Mighty Mouse into a still smaller time frame. That can be eith...