Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
The kids of Gene Byrnes's newspaper strip Reg'lar Fellers, Jimmie Dugan and his gang, pool their money and buy a run-down old touring car from a seedy used-car dealer for fifty cents down. The car is a wreck with a personality, and the children know nothing about driving it. Their joyride through town is a catalogue of mechanical disasters, parts falling off, the engine coughing, the steering with a mind of its own, pedestrians and livestock scattering, until the car and its crew go off a cliff. The children survive, the car does not, and the gang is left, as in the strip, poorer and no wiser. The film runs nine minutes, long for the series, and is the only ComiColor based on a comic strip rather than a tale.
Why It Matters
- It is the last ComiColor cartoon and the last film of the Iwerks studio's first phase, made as Pat Powers withdrew his money, and its subject, a gang of ordinary American kids rather than fairy-tale figures, shows Iwerks trying a new direction too late; the car's collapse, piece by piece, is the kind of mechanical comedy he had always done best.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed. Tommy Bupp, a child actor from the Our Gang school, voices Jimmie, and the Reg'lar Fellers licence, from a strip then at the height of its popularity, is a sign of the studio's hope for a continuing series that never came.
Notes and Trivia
- Iwerks went on to make Gran'pop Monkey cartoons for a British backer and then returned to Disney in 1940 as a technician.
- Reg'lar Fellers was also filmed in live action in 1941.
- See also: Little Boy Blue (1936), Tom Thumb (1936), Fiddlesticks (1930).
