It's the Little King's Day Out

A Royal Good Time (1934)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actors (but it's basically a silent movie)
Director: Geo. Stallings

Rating: Six of Ten Stars

The Little King heads out for a day at the funfair and ends up causing chaos.

"A Royal Good Time" is one of nine cartoons that the Van Beuren Corporation produced based on "The Little King" comic strip (which ran from 1931 to 1975, ending with the death of its creator and only artist/writer Otto Soglow). Van Beuren licensed The Little King as the strip moved from "The New Yorker Magazine" 

Like many of those adaptations, this one opens with a segment that embodies the look and feel off Soglow's strip, but swiftly veers into territory that's comfortable and typical for the Van Beuren writers and animators: Loosely designed, rubbery characters embroiled in zany, surreal situations and chase scenes full of non-stop sight gags. 

Not unexpectedly, "A Royal Good Time" follows this pattern. The opening plays like a Soglow cartoon put into motion with the Little King heading off to the funfair to use his own rifle at the target game. Once he reaches the fairground, however, the look of the characters change, as does the nature of the story. As I've mentioned before, there is a significant different in the character designs between the Little King and those who work as servants in his palace and in his government, and the common people in the rest of his nation. Those differences in character designs are even more striking here, especially because the Little King has to pass through a "checkpoint" to get into the realm of these commoners (the fairgrounds). Up until watching this installment of the series, I was leaning toward chalking these differences in character designs to the Van Beuren operation wanted to keep a certain look about their cartoons. However, I am coming around to the idea that lead animator Jim Tyre, who reportedly was dedicated to making "The Little King" faithful to Soglow's original strip and the highest quality possible, was actually using character designs to set the king and his court apart from the rest of country and showing how they, essentially exist in different worlds. It's an element that doesn't add a whole lot to the simple and chaotic storylines of the episodes, but I think that I've been giving too little credit to Tyre for his work on this series, which I already thought was pretty good.

All that said, compared to other "The Little King" episodes that Tyre helmed, this one is at the lower end of the quality spectrum. The Carnie/Van Beuren-look characters are a bit unstable in their looks from scene to scene, and the backgrounds aren't quite as well done as in other Tyre efforts (although they are still worlds beyond what is typical in some "Tom and Jerry" episodes. The main chase scene is also initiated by an event that doesn't make any sense--basically, The Little King disrupts a magic act in such a way that I think would be just as impressive to the audience as if it had been executed the right way. Nonetheless, the magician gets angry and proceeds to chase The Little King with a sword, intend on killing him. The ending is also very weak and feels very much like "we don't know how to end this, so here's a bit of surreal silliness that doesn't connect to a darn thing you've just sat through." (I think a straight-up "non-ending" like what we got in "Jolly Good Felons" would have been preferable to how "A Royal Good Time" ends.)

There are things I did like about "A Royal Good Time"--and liked a lot. Several of the sideshow acts The Little King witnesses are vehicles for some funny sight gags, as well as just being clever little story elements all by themselves. The Sword Swallower who put the tip of the sword through to the chair he is sitting might make for a nice real-world magic trick, and the giant who is actually a dozen lilliputians in a trench coat are actually a better act than what they're being passed off as. The mind-reader bit was an old gag when this film was made, but it's still funny the way it's timed and executed here.

If you've got 8 minutes to spare, you could do worse than spending them watching "A Royal Good Time", which I've embedded below for your convenience! Check it out and let me know what you think!