The Shark Film Office

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with my animation website,  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.] Rabbitson Crusoe  (1956) Dir.: Friz Freleng TC4P Rating: 7/9 Species: a purple shark named Dopey Dick, who is a little bit dopey and kind of a dick. Believe it or not, I still own my very first edition of Daniel Defoe's classic novel,  Robinson Crusoe . Please don't read that incorrectly. I do  not  own the first edition of  Robinson Crusoe . Considering that the novel is just a hair under three hundred years old – having been first published in 1719, and thought by many scholars to be the first true novel in the English language – that would now make me a multi-thousand-aire, at least (and I am definitely not that at the moment). No, the first edition of...

[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...