Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Flip Flap is a baby seal in a circus, the star of the seal act, who balances balls on his nose and claps his flippers for the crowd, and who is lonely for the Arctic home he was taken from. The cartoon follows his escape from the circus and his attempt to get back to the ice, with the city, the trainer and the distance all against him, and the narrator telling the story as a children's picture book. Whether he reaches home or is reconciled to the circus is the film's gentle question, resolved in the sentimental manner of Myron Waldman, whose Pudgy cartoons it resembles. Documentation beyond the series filmography is thin, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- It is the only Noveltoon made in Polacolor, a two-colour process Paramount tried briefly when Technicolor printing was scarce after the war, which gives it a look unlike anything else in the series; and it was written from a children's book by Bee Lewi and Mickey Klar Marks, an unusual literary source for Famous Studios.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse; its Polacolor prints have faded badly, which is why most circulating copies look brown.
Notes and Trivia
- The manifest carries the film at 20 February 1948; the series filmography gives 13 February.
- Ken Roberts, the narrator, was a radio announcer best known for The Shadow.
- See also: Base Brawl (1948), The Bored Cuckoo (1948), Making Friends (1936).