Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
A hungry lion in the jungle, all appetite and no success, sets out to catch his dinner, and the dinner is smarter than he is. The prey, a small, quick animal who has heard every one of the lion's approaches before, leads him through a sequence of failed ambushes: the lion in disguise, the lion in a trap of his own making, the lion flattened, scorched and dropped off a cliff, each failure greeted with the same sheepish grin to the audience. The title's pun is the lion's own greeting to his meals, and the film is a chain of blackout gags rather than a story, ending with the lion as hungry as he began. The filmography entry is the only documentation, so the synopsis is taken from the cartoon as it survives.
Why It Matters
- The Hungry Lion was one of the Noveltoons' attempts at a Wile E. Coyote figure, a predator defined by failure, and Larz Bourne's gag script shows the studio absorbing the Warner Bros. chase formula that was then taking over American cartoons; Myron Waldman's lion, with his great soft paws and apologetic face, is more likeable than his hunger.
- 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 belongs to the brief period when the Noveltoons were trying new characters every month before settling on Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip and Little Audrey.
Notes and Trivia
- Larz Bourne later wrote Popeye's Bride and Gloom and Spooky Swabs.
- The lion did not return; the studio preferred its established stars.
- See also: Teacher's Pest (1950), Quack-a-Doodle-Doo (1950), Fast and Furry-ous (1949).