Studio: Bray Productions
Distributor: Paramount Pictures (Paramount Bray Pictograph)
Short Synopsis
Detailed plot records for this short are thin; this account follows the surviving 16 mm print. Bobby Bumps, the mischievous small boy of Earl Hurd's series, is preoccupied with the story that babies are delivered by the stork, and he and his bulldog Fido talk it over. The question of how to get one is put to them plainly in a speech balloon: "Yes but where ya gonna get yer stork?" Bobby sets to work on the back porch with tools and boards, building something to get hold of one. Other frames show Bobby riding on the shoulders of a man in a bowler hat beside a gift box tied with a large bow, in an open landscape with a signpost. How the scheme resolves is not described in any source this book could check, so the punchline is left for the viewer.
Why It Matters
- The comedy is all child's logic: take the stork story literally and try to do something about it. Hurd draws Bobby and Fido with simple, solid shapes over detailed still backgrounds, and the speech-balloon dialogue gives the film the feel of a Sunday comic page in motion.
- The Bobby Bumps films were the first cartoons produced with the cel process that Hurd patented with J. R. Bray in 1914: characters drawn on transparent celluloid laid over painted backgrounds. Bray and Hurd collected licence fees on the method from other studios until 1932, and cel animation remained the industry's standard for most of the century.
Notes and Trivia
- Bobby was modelled on R. F. Outcault's comic-strip boy Buster Brown.
- Each Bobby Bumps cartoon opens with a cartoonist's hand drawing Bobby, Fido and the scenery.
- The notes accompanying the surviving print, from the Stathes Collection, warn that Hurd's designs for the series' Black characters, Bobby's friend Chok'lit and the family maid Goldie, are grotesque caricatures.
- See also: Bobby Bumps at the Circus (1916).