Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Merrie Melodies)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
A barn show, with the banner lit by fireflies and the animals filing in as the orchestra tunes up. A conductor who looks like Leopold Stokowski rises out of a piano, is enraged when the audience's shushing makes more noise than the talking, conducts a first number punctuated by animal noises that turn out to be part of the score, wrecks his own podium and leaves in disgust. Three white rabbits sing the title song, joined by three ducks who look exactly like Donald, two dogs do a vaudeville act, three pigs of different sizes sing, and six chickens dance. One drunken dog in the audience boos everything, is thrown out, comes back twice and is thrown out again, then finds a cart of pepper and sprays the house with it, so that the sneezing audience blows the feathers off the chicken chorus for the finale.
Why It Matters
- Freleng's talent for the animal revue is on display, with the Stokowski caricature and the sneezing finale as the high points, and the drunken heckler is a good running gag; the film is a compact anthology of the musical turns the Merrie Melodies were built on, two years before the series went to colour.
- The ducks who look like Donald, four months after his debut, are an early sign of how fast the Warner studio copied Disney's hits, and the animators are Bob Clampett and Bob McKimson, both future directors, in their first year at Schlesinger's.
Notes and Trivia
- The song came from the Warner film Upperworld (1934).
- Stokowski, then conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was caricatured by every cartoon studio before Disney finally got him for Fantasia.
- See also: How Do I Know It's Sunday (1934), The Wise Little Hen (1934), Sittin' on a Backyard Fence (1933).
