Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Blackie the Lamb, the wisecracking black sheep of A Lamb in a Jam, is minding the flock when a wolf comes down from the hills with lamb chops in mind. The wolf tries disguise, a sheepskin, a shepherd's cloak, and he tries force, and Blackie, who is small but far quicker than his enemy, turns every attempt against him: the sheepskin is swapped for something less comfortable, the cloak is used to march the wolf into the sheep dip, and each trap the wolf sets closes on the wolf. The rest of the flock, placid and stupid, grazes through the whole affair. The wolf is driven off the farm in the end, and Blackie, as in his other films, gets the last word to the camera. Plot documentation beyond the series filmography is thin, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- It is the best of the Blackie cartoons, with a proper antagonist in place of the shearing plot, and Joe Stultz's script gives the lamb the tough-guy patter of a 1940s radio comic; the wolf is a cousin of Avery's and Famous Studios' later Wolfie, who would appear in the Noveltoons until 1950.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it circulates in television prints; it was the last Blackie cartoon, the studio turning to Casper and Little Audrey the following year.
Notes and Trivia
- John Gentilella, co-animator, later animated Popeye's Bride and Gloom.
- The title pun on "shipshape" is the kind the studio's titles ran on for twenty years.
- See also: A Lamb in a Jam (1945), Teacher's Pest (1950), Spree for All (1946).