Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Four small penguins are curious about an abandoned cabin on the ice. Their mother warns them in song that curiosity killed the cat, then undermines her own lecture by poking at a stovepipe they have knocked down. The penguins slide in through the chimney and investigate everything, and everything hurts them: two of them scald themselves with a kettle, one is flung by a gramophone turntable, one sneezes himself across the room over a pepper pot, one gets his beak stuck in the barrel of a gun. Then one of them finds the matches. The fire he starts comes alive, a grinning flame that chases him round the cabin and grows as it goes, and the penguins flee for their lives as the cabin burns, tumbling out into the snow and home to their mother, cured of curiosity for the moment.
Why It Matters
- The living fire is the Fleischers' oldest trick, and here it is used as a safety lesson for small children, the cabin's dangers, kettle, gun, matches, laid out one by one; Myron Waldman's penguins, tubby and anxious, are first cousins of his Pudgy, and Lillian Friedman animated several of them.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright having lapsed with most of the Color Classics, and it was widely shown on television in the 1950s and 1960s, where its don't-play-with-matches message suited the schedulers; it is one of the better-looking late Color Classics.
Notes and Trivia
- Disney's Peculiar Penguins of 1934 had made penguins a fashionable cartoon subject.
- Hicks Lokey left for Disney shortly after this film.
- See also: A Car-Tune Portrait (1937), Educated Fish (1937), Arctic Antics (1930).
