Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
A narrator, in the solemn voice of a nature documentary, takes the audience on a tour of America's wild places, and every scene undercuts him. At Yosemite, a tourist ignores the signs and offers a bear a sandwich, and the bear tells him off. A "shy little deer" turns out to do a Mae West impression. A scoutmaster leads an absurd number of Boy Scouts into a filling station washroom. A park ranger rushes to a cigar dropped by a careless tourist, not to stamp it out but to smoke it. At Bryce Canyon a natural bridge is a dental bridge, gold tooth and all. In Alaska, a polar bear whom the narrator says is kept warm by his coat sits shivering. A husky sets off to walk 5,000 miles to California and keeps reappearing all through the film. A bobcat stalking a baby quail can't bring himself to do it and breaks down in tears. In New Mexico a lizard sheds her skin like a striptease, and the film politely blacks out. At the end the husky arrives in California, and his long walk gets its punchline.
Why It Matters
- It is Avery's travelogue parody at full speed: the gap between the narrator's sincerity and what the camera shows is the whole joke, and the running gag of the husky's cross-country trek pays off at the end. The film makes playful use of split screen and rotoscoped live action.
- Avery's spot-gag documentary parodies at Warner Bros. created a format the studio returned to again and again, and the dark edge of some gags, such as a frog who takes out a pistol and shoots himself, shows how far Avery was pushing what a cartoon could joke about in 1940.
Notes and Trivia
- At nearly ten minutes, it is one of the longest Merrie Melodies.
- The frog suicide gag, followed by a "management is not responsible for lame puns" sign, is cut from television prints.
- See also: A Wild Hare (1940).