Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Two stowaways share a lifeboat on a cruise liner: Sammy Seagull, a tough, Popeye-like gull, and Cecil Crow, a gangly crow from Oakville, Iowa, who has come along only because he wants to see a hula dancer. As the ship passes a tropical island, they spot one, a pretty bird in a grass skirt, and both fly off to win her. They compete with gifts of pearls and with aerobatic stunts, skywriting with a cigar. Cecil fails at everything. In a diving contest he lands inside a shark and then on a sea turtle, and a starfish beats him up. He does manage to rescue Sammy from drowning. Then a gorilla, introduced as "I'm the Villain As You Didn't Know", carries off the hula dancer. Cecil follows them behind a bush and, out of sight, beats the gorilla effortlessly. The dancer falls for him, and the cartoon ends with Cecil and his bride sailing away from the island with a family of children, leaving Sammy behind.
Why It Matters
- Cecil, a lanky hayseed voiced by Pinto Colvig in his Goofy voice, is the comic surprise: the hopeless loser who wins in the end. Avery's off-screen fight behind a bush and the gorilla's mock-melodramatic introduction are typical of his habit of skipping the expected payoff.
- It was the last cartoon Tex Avery directed at Warner Bros., finished by Bob Clampett after Avery left for MGM, and released without his name. It closes the run of films in which Avery shaped the studio's fast, irreverent comic style.
Notes and Trivia
- It is one of several non-Disney cartoons in which Pinto Colvig used his Goofy voice.
- The title puns on "Aloha Oe", the Hawaiian song, and on "hooey", slang for nonsense.
- See also: A Wild Hare (1940), All This and Rabbit Stew (1941).