Studio: Walter Lantz Productions
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Produced by: Walter Lantz
Short Synopsis
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit meets Paul Whiteman, the bandleader billed as the King of Jazz, who appears as a round cartoon caricature with his little moustache. The two become pals, and the cartoon is a string of musical turns built around Whiteman's hits: Oswald plays, dances and conducts, the band's instruments come to life, and the rabbit's body becomes an instrument in the rubber-hose way of 1930, stretching and twanging to the beat of "Happy Feet" and the Whiteman repertoire. The film was made as a cartoon companion to Universal's live-action Whiteman revue King of Jazz, released two months earlier, which itself contained a Lantz cartoon sequence.
Why It Matters
- The Lantz studio's early sound cartoons are at their best when they stop pretending to have plots and simply play music, and My Pal Paul is a pure example: the caricature of Whiteman is affectionate and accurate, and the animation of Oswald conducting an orchestra of living instruments is as inventive as anything Disney was doing with Mickey in the same months.
- The film is a piece of cross-promotion from the first year of the sound era, when Universal was selling its expensive Technicolor King of Jazz and used its cartoon star to help. Lantz's sequence in that feature was the first Technicolor cartoon ever shown; this black-and-white follow-up kept the connection alive and shows the studio's house composer, James Dietrich, working with the Whiteman arrangements.
Notes and Trivia
- Pinto Colvig, who voiced Oswald here, later became the voice of Goofy at Disney.
- Whiteman also appeared in cartoon form in Max Fleischer's Screen Songs of the period.
- See also: Bowery Bimbos (1930), The Clown (1931), Making Good (1932).