Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
A baseball game between two teams of animals, with the sport's every convention turned into a gag: the pitcher's wind-up that never ends, the batter who swings at everything, the umpire who is blind, the outfielder who climbs the fence after a ball and keeps climbing, the base-stealer who literally steals the base, the seventh-inning stretch taken by the whole stadium at once. The game builds to a bases-loaded climax and a home run that circles the park. Then the Famous Studios bouncing ball appears over the lyrics of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and the audience is invited to sing, in the Screen Songs manner the studio had revived the year before, with a few more baseball gags worked into the song.
Why It Matters
- It is a representative of the revived Screen Songs, the Fleischer sing-along format that Famous Studios brought back in Technicolor in 1947 and ran until 1951, each film a themed gag reel followed by a bouncing-ball chorus; the baseball film is one of the better ones, and the song is the sport's anthem.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the colour Screen Songs that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it is commonly found in public-domain cartoon packages and on baseball nostalgia compilations.
Notes and Trivia
- Robert Connavale, the story man, wrote many of the Screen Songs and later Popeye cartoons.
- The 1908 song was itself in the public domain by the time the cartoon was made.
- See also: The Mite Makes Right (1948), Flip Flap (1948), Spree for All (1946).