Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Blackie, a small black lamb with a sharp tongue, is the only sheep on the farm who objects to shearing time. While the rest of the flock lines up to give up its wool, Blackie hides, and the farmer's shears and the farm dog spend the cartoon trying to catch him: he is chased through the barn, the haystack and the farmhouse, bluffs his way out of corners and talks back at every turn. The wool is wanted for the war, which the cartoon makes plain in its posters and dialogue, and Blackie's resistance is treated as selfish rather than heroic. In the end he is caught and shorn, and the final gag has him in his skin, shivering, with his fleece gone to the war effort and his pride with it. Reliable plot documentation beyond the series filmography is thin, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- Blackie the Lamb was Famous Studios' first attempt at a recurring Noveltoon star, a wisecracking Brooklyn lamb who appeared in a handful of cartoons in 1944-46, and this is the one most often seen; Dave Tendlar's animation and the wartime shearing theme place it precisely in the spring of 1945.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse in the 1950s, which has kept it in circulation long after Blackie himself was forgotten.
Notes and Trivia
- Blackie returned in Sheep Shape in 1946, with a wolf for an antagonist.
- Wool was a controlled war material in the United States from 1942.
- See also: Sheep Shape (1946), Suddenly It's Spring (1944), A Self-Made Mongrel (1945).