Studio: Walter Lantz Productions
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Produced by: Walter Lantz
Short Synopsis
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, now a Universal character under Walter Lantz, is a cop on the beat in the Bowery, New York's skid row of saloons, dance halls and toughs. He falls in with a girl at a rowdy dance, where the Bowery waltz becomes a rough-house routine, and when a hulking villain carries her off, Oswald gives chase up the side of a skyscraper for a rooftop rescue in the manner of the stage melodramas the title parodies. The cartoon is built on its music, in the way of the first sound cartoons: the dance, the chase and the fight are cut to the beat, and the characters keep stopping to bounce to it. The film's picture elements survive less well than its soundtrack, and detailed descriptions are few, so the outline here follows the catalogue summaries.
Why It Matters
- Lantz's first year with Oswald is a fascinating mess, and this short shows it: the rabbit is still a Disney-like rubber-hose figure, Bill Nolan's animation is loose and fast, and the studio is learning sound as it goes, with every movement a musical beat. The Bowery setting, with its slang and low-life types, is the kind of urban material Universal's cartoons took from its live-action pictures.
- Universal had taken Oswald from Disney in 1928 and given him to Lantz in 1929; these 1930 films are the first products of the arrangement, made in the studio on the Universal lot, which makes Lantz the first cartoon producer to work inside a major film studio. Oswald would be Lantz's star for another eight years before Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker replaced him.
Notes and Trivia
- Bill Nolan, the co-director, had animated Krazy Kat for Winkler in the 1920s and is credited with developing rubber-hose animation.
- The title plays on "Bowery B'hoys", the 1840s street gang type, and on the slang "bimbo" for a tough.
- See also: Stomach Trouble (1927), My Pal Paul (1930), The Clown (1931).