Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Little Audrey has been reading crime comics instead of her nursery rhymes, and when she falls asleep the two collide. Her dream is Mother Goose Land as a hard-boiled detective story: Humpty Dumpty has been pushed off his wall, and a private eye in a trench coat investigates, questioning Little Boy Blue, Old King Cole, the Three Men in a Tub and the rest as suspects and witnesses in the manner of the radio thrillers of the day, with a gangster gander as the villain. The nursery rhymes are recited as police reports and the chase runs through the Mother Goose landscape with tommy guns and getaway cars. Audrey wakes, cured of crime comics, and goes back to her rhymes, or so the ending suggests.
Why It Matters
- The collision of nursery rhyme and film noir is a good comic idea, topical in 1950 when crime comics were under attack from parents' groups, and Isadore Klein's script plays both idioms straight; Bill Tytla's unit gives the Mother Goose figures a solidity the usual Noveltoon lacked. It is often the Audrey cartoon that historians single out from the series.
- 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 1955; it is a Famous Studios production, not a Disney one, despite the title's echo of Disney's Goofy.
Notes and Trivia
- The crime-comics scare culminated in the Senate hearings and the Comics Code of 1954.
- Jackson Beck narrates the detective's voice-over in his radio manner.
- See also: Tarts and Flowers (1950), The Mite Makes Right (1948).