Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
Little Boy Blue is a shepherd boy with a horn, and the sheep in his care are the Iwerks studio's usual flock of woolly comedians. He falls asleep under the haystack, as the rhyme requires, and while he sleeps the Big Bad Wolf, a lean, lip-licking villain in the manner of Disney's, slips in among the sheep in disguise and begins picking them off. The sheep's panic finally wakes the boy, who blows his horn, and the rest of the film is the wolf's rout: the sheep, the cow and the boy together chase him across the meadow and out of the rhyme, with the horn as rallying call. The boy ends the film awake and vigilant, for the moment. The Wikipedia entry is a stub, and the account above is drawn from the film itself; some home-movie prints retitle it The Big Bad Wolf.
Why It Matters
- The rhyme has four lines and no plot, so the film borrows the wolf from Three Little Pigs, then three years old, and turns the sleeping shepherd into a warning against inattention; the wolf is a good copy of Disney's, and the sheep stampede is briskly animated for a studio near the end of its money.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it circulates under two titles, which has caused some confusion in public-domain catalogues; it is one of the last ComiColors, with Art Turkisher scoring after Carl Stalling's departure for Warner Bros.
Notes and Trivia
- Castle Films sold the ComiColors for home projection in the 1940s under new titles.
- Only two ComiColors followed this one before the series ended.
- See also: Tom Thumb (1936), Happy Days (1936), Three Little Pigs (1933).
