'Stone Age Stunts' leaves something to be desired

Stone Age Stunts (1930)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actors (but this is basically a silent movie)
Director: John Foster and Mannie Davis
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Pre-historic mice (who are basically Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse clones) go dancing at a club, get into a fight with a bully, and end up literally bringing the house down.

An entry in the long-running Aesop's Fables anthology series, "Stone Age Stunts" is seven minutes of crudely animated nonsense. Along the way, there are some scenes that will make you squirm if you have any sensitivity to the issues surrounding domestic violence. (There are riffs on the old cartoon caveman hitting his mate over the head with his club and dragging her off, but they are taken to uncomfortable extremes here.)

The saving grace (and only thing that makes watching this worthwhile) is the music. The animation and the music go perfectly together, and the only humorous that aren't uncomfortable to watch, grotesque, or inexplicably weird (or some combination of all three) are those involving music. The cavemouse suddenly being able to use his club as a flute is amusing, and the sequence that starts at roughly the halfway mark with a band of cartoon animals using other cartoon animals as instruments and a hilarious nightclub act make sitting through the more unpleasant bits worthwhile.

As I always try to do with the Van Beuren productions I review, you can watch it for yourself, right here in this post, and see if you think I'm right or wrong in my estimation of this one. Just click on the video below.

(Trivia: Although the amorous mice who are the stars of "Stone Age Stunts" had been appearing in Aesop's Fables episodes since the early 1920s, their appearances changed to be similar to that of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse once those characters became hits for Disney. Eventually, the Walt Disney Company filed suit against the Van Beuren Corporation. Disney didn't see damages--they just wanted Van Beuren to stop putting Mickey and Minnie look-alikes in crude situations in crudely animated cartoons.)

Musical Monday with the Interrupters

On Wednesday, Jan. 20, Joseph R. Biden is going to be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States of America. As a warm-up for that event, we bring you the Interrupters, a California-based ska/punk band that's been performing and touring together since 2011.




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A modern attempt at silent comedy style

"Charlie's Chase" is a student film I came across when it showed up when I did a search for "Charley Chase". I've posted a number of student films to this blog over the years that tried to capture the feel and spirit of silent movies, but few been as successful as this one.

Check it out. It's short--just one minute long--and it's quite amusing. (One gag doesn't come off quite right, but I think the rest are excellent when one considers what this is.)

Charlie's Chase (2018)

Starring: Anonymous Actors

Director: Tuatea Schmidt

Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Click here to check out what the maker of this film has been up to recently.

The Growing-up of Emma Peel: Part Eleven

Click on the images for larger, more easily read versions.

The Avengers Dossier, Page One

As mentioned here, 2021 is The Year of the Avengers here at Shades of Gray. This is the first in a series of posts (that will appear every other Friday) which will bring you pictures of and factoids about actresses and actors who played supporting parts on a recently reviewed episode.

JEANETTE STERKE
Jeanette Sterke played Janet Crane in "Too Many Christmas Trees". She's a psychic who may or may not be part of an effort to draw secrets from the minds of British government agents.

Sterke was born in 1933 and immigrated from Czechoslovakia to England as child, together with her parents who fled the Nazi invasion. From 1954 through her retirement from acting in 1986, she worked steadily in television. Her stint as the troupe who filled the cast on the anthology series "The BCC Sunday Night Theatre" from 1954 - 1957 and her recurring role on "The Doctors" (1970) serving as her biggest career footprint. Over the decades, Sterke also worked extensively on stage and made a few film appearances (with parts in "The Safecracker" (1957) and "The Story of David" (1976), just to name a couple).

It's the End of the Road for Grampy

Zula Hula (1937)
Starring: Jack Mercer (as the voice of Grampy) and Mae Questel (as the voice of Betty Boop)

Directors: Dave Fleischer

Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

A plane crash leaves Grampy and Betty stranded on a tropical island. Grampy puts his genius for jury-rigging to work, recreating all the comforts of civilization and even turning a hostile native tribe friendly.

"Zula Hula" first appeared in movie theaters on December 24, 1937. It was the final cartoon released by the Fleischer Studios that year. It was also the final appearance of Grampy, an occassional guest star in the Betty Boop series of cartoons, but who almost always got top billing and took the lead in most episodes in which he appeared.

Watching "Zula Hula", it doesn't feel like Grampy is done at this point. Not only is Betty once again reduced to a supporting role in her own series, but it was an improvement quality-wise over "Service With a Smile" (released in November of 1937), which was already lots of fun. In fact, it almost seemed like Grampy was getting a second wind, as the two final cartoons out of his ten appearances were as amusing and cute as the very first one. This one also benefits greatly from the fact that Gramy's inventions are fun and creative. (I found the anti-crash device on his private plane, his automated fishing device, and his turning an airplane engine into a musical device particularly amusing. His failed attempt to create a water clock, and Betty's comment about it, is also a funny moment.)

A big negative in "Zula Hula", however, is Grampy behaving completely out of character from how he's been portrayed in two of the best previous entries in the series. In "A Song a Day" and "Be Human", Grampy was concerned with the health, well-being, and ethical treatment of animals to the point where I jokingly said he'd make a great mascot for PETA. I feel that the Grampy we have in this film would be targeted for an ass-kicking by the Grampy in the two above-mentioned cartoons due to the way he abuses animals here, especially the way he turns a monkey into the motor powering a gyrocopter.

I suppose the cartoon natives on the island can also be considered a negative since their design will undoubtedly cause palpitations among those with a tendency to see racism everywhere. From a 21st century perspective, the design of the natives characters does appear to be racist, although if they artists were going for full-on racism would they, yet again, have portrayed the native culture as a weird mix of African and Polynesian flavors? Personally, that annoyed me more than the physical design of the characters--but since this is the second time I've encountered this in a "Betty Boop" cartoon, I suppose this is just how jungle-dwelling natives are in her world. 

I am further willing to overlook any perceived racism in the design of the native characters, because the song and dance number that closes out "Zula Hula" is one of the best to be featured in the Grampy cartoons, with a perfect mix of weird visual gags, silly cartoon dancing, and catchy music.

Take a few minutes to enjoy Grampy's final adventure right now. And feel free to leave a comment if you agree or disagree with any of my takes on it.

The Jane Birken Quarterly

 Actress and model Jane Birkin turns 75 in December this year, and we're celebrating the milestone for all of 2021 with pictures and the Jane Birken Quarterly!

'The Mystic Hour' is an uneven mess

The Mystic Hour (aka "At Twelve Midnight") (1933)
Starring: Charles Hutchison, Lucille Powers, Charles Middleton, Montagu Love, and Edith Thornton

Director:  Melville Delay

Rating: Five of Ten Stars

When the heroic Robert Randall (Hutchison) is chasing down a thief, he meets the beautiful Mary Marshall (Powers), and it's love at first sight. Their future together is threatened not only by Mary's corrupt ward (Middleton) who wants to cover up the fact he's stolen her inheritance, but also by the vengeful criminal mastermind, The Fox (Love).

"The Mystic Hour" opens with a really nicely done, moody and soundless sequence of a burglary... but it's all downhill from there. There's a nice idea at the heart of this film--with family intrigues crossing with the criminal underworld--but it's boring and muddled in the way it's executed and performed by a cast that seems to be suffering under poor direction or maybe just bad at ad-libbing. On more than one occasion, the actors and actresses seem confused as to what they are even doing in a particular scene.

One interesting aspect of the film is the choice of actor to play it's hero--Charles Hutchison may be the least attractive romantic lead in a film we're supposed to take seriously that I've ever come across. I can't decide if this a head-scratching move or a piece of brilliant casting. Perhaps he was cast for his ability as a stuntman (assuming he did his own stunts), because the action scenes of this film are by far its best moments, even if they are almost ruined and made ridiculous by the undercranking.

Aside from the too-brief action sequences, there's not a whole lot to recommend "The Mystic Hour" and it barely managed to earn the lowest possible Five of Ten rating. I think even the director knew he had a film that was in trouble--exciting action bits but boooooooring everything else--and an effort was made to liven things up with scenes of a pretty lady wearing  varying degrees of very little. (It's a time-honored tradition that one, which has been the fallback position of B-movies since the invention of the camera up to the present day.)

Musical Monday with Noisia

"Tommy's Theme", released by Noisia in 2012, is interesting music supported by an even more interesting music video. Both make me hope that we've left much of the bullshit of the past couple years behind behind with 2020 but also remind me of the fear that we haven't.

Noisia is a three-member Dutch band who makes electronic music in a wide variety of styles. You can learn more about them at their official website by clicking here.

Tom & Jerry flame out as firemen

Hook & Ladder Hokum (1933)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actors
Directors: George Stallings and Frank Tashlin
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Tom and Jerry are firemen trying to rescue top floor residents of a building that's burning down.

The Tom & Jerry series was erratic in quality level and apparent target audience from, literally, the very beginning of the series, but few feel as uninspired as "Hook and Ladder Hokum". The gags are tepid and repeative; the jazzy wall-to-wall music, which is often the saving grace of the weaker entries, serves its purpose but is mostly unremarkable; and the whole affair feels derivative of previous Tom & Jerry adventures, as if no one involved with the series was even trying anymore. 

Perhaps "Hook and Ladder Hokum" was more entertaining to 1930s audiences than it is the modern viewer, because of some of its relevance by the passage of time? Much of the material here is poking fun at silent comedies and dramas about firemen (like "The Garage" from 1920), and there's one bit that feels like a reference to a public figure that movie goers in 1933 was assumed to know: A portrait comes to life and mocks Jerry for losing to Tom in a game of checkers, and it's animated in a different style than all other characters in the film, and the voice sounds like it's intended to be a spoof of someone, but this 21st century viewer has no idea who that someone was. (If some of you out there better versed in 1930s pop culture can identify the mystery target of spoofing, please fill me in down below, in the comments sections... after watching the cartoon embedded right here in this post.)

Given the inconsistent nature of the Tom & Jerry series, it's impossible for me to tell whether the lackluster nature of "Hook and Ladder Hokum" was there from the beginning or is the result of eighty years of pop culture evolution. On the one hand, there is some fine animation here--Tom & Jerry have rarely looked better--but on the other hand, there's the recycled gags. Whatever the reasons, this fourth-from-final entry in the series is among the weakest.