Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Buddy runs a beer garden, and the whole place is a musical number: the patrons sing "Oh du lieber Augustin", a band plays, the bartender fills mugs that a trombone pushes down the bar for Buddy to top with foam, his girl Cookie knits pretzels which the dog salts, tongue sandwiches sing and lap up their own mustard, and an impatient customer swallows his beer, mug and waiter in one gulp. Buddy makes an instrument out of the glassware and leads the crowd, and the climax is a floor show in which a sultry singer turns out, when her skirt catches, to be Buddy's dog in a costume, to the fury of the amorous drunk in the front row. The film was released a month before the repeal of Prohibition and is a celebration of beer from start to finish.
Why It Matters
- The sandwich chorus and the trombone bartender are good gags, and the whole cartoon has the bounce of a studio that had just discovered beer was legal again; Buddy is a nonentity, but the room around him is alive. Frank Tashlin, later the director of Jayne Mansfield comedies, gets his first Warner credit here under his pen name.
- Buddy was the character Schlesinger's new staff invented to replace Bosko when Harman and Ising walked out in 1933, and he is famous for being forgettable; Chuck Jones called him "Bosko in whiteface". His 23 cartoons are the low point between the Harman-Ising years and the arrival of Avery, Freleng and Porky Pig, which is exactly why one of them belongs here: this is the studio at its weakest, with the talent that would save it already in the room.
Notes and Trivia
- Earl Duvall, a former Disney story man, directed only five Warner cartoons before leaving.
- Beer of 3.2 per cent had been legalised in April 1933; full repeal came on 5 December.
- See also: Sittin' on a Backyard Fence (1933), How Do I Know It's Sunday (1934), Bosko the Doughboy (1931).
