Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
A travelogue of a town where everything is backwards or upside down, narrated in the deadpan manner of the newsreel travel shorts the cartoon parodies. In Crazytown the houses are built from the roof down, the cars are driven from the back seat, the fire brigade sets fires and the police commit the crimes, dogs walk their owners, fish go fishing for men, the barber shaves the customer's hat, and the citizens eat their soup with forks and their steak with spoons. The gags come one after another with no plot to hold them, each a reversal of something ordinary, and the narrator's unflappable commentary is the joke's other half. The tour ends with the visitor fleeing town and the narrator recommending it warmly.
Why It Matters
- The spot-gag travelogue was a form Tex Avery invented at Warner Bros. and MGM, and this is Famous Studios' late version of it, with Isadore Klein's gags more gentle than Avery's and Al Eugster's animation clean and quick; it is one of the few Noveltoons of the 1950s with no series character, a one-off in a schedule otherwise given to Casper, Huey and Herman.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it was reissued theatrically in September 1959, late in the studio's life; the manifest carries it at 26 February 1954, the series filmography at 6 February.
Notes and Trivia
- Klein had drawn a Crazytown-like reversal strip for newspapers in the 1930s.
- Famous Studios was renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios in 1956.
- See also: Cross Country Detours (1940), Cat o' Nine Ails (1948), Pest Pupil (1957).