Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
In a barnyard kingdom the rooster is king, a fat, vain monarch on a throne of straw, and he is choosing a queen. The hens of the kingdom are paraded before him in a beauty contest, each one preening, posturing and singing for his favour, while the king's courtiers keep order and the cockerels of the court look on with envy. The king's eye falls on a modest young hen who has not entered, and he pursues her; she wants none of him, and his courtship becomes a chase across the barnyard, through the coops and over the fences, with the rejected contestants in pursuit of them both. The king ends the film humbled and the young hen free, and the beauty contest is left without a winner. Production notes on the film are thin, and the synopsis above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- The barnyard as a royal court, with the rooster's harem as a beauty pageant, is a Fleischer joke about the Miss America contests of the decade, and the king is a good portrait of vanity; the parade of hens gives the animators a run of caricatures in the studio's older, more grotesque style.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among those NTA let lapse in the 1950s. It is a minor Color Classic, but a characteristic one, and it shows the series' animal-society formula applied with more satire than usual.
Notes and Trivia
- The title is the name of a creamed-chicken dish then on every hotel menu.
- Nicholas Tafuri, co-animator, later worked on the Superman series.
- See also: Bunny Mooning (1937), A Car-Tune Portrait (1937), Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936).
