Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Short Synopsis
Moe Hare, a lanky, wisecracking rabbit in a striped convict's uniform, has broken out of jail. Two burly policemen race after him, vaulting over a roadblock in the countryside, and Moe scrambles over barbed-wire fences to get away. Tommy Tortoise, slow, steady and stubborn, sets out to track him down as a detective, following the trail with dogged patience. Moe keeps escaping in ever faster ways, leaping and dodging, darting past a shed marked "Danger: Ammunition", and finally roaring off across a lake in a motorboat. But however fast the hare runs, the tortoise keeps turning up on his trail, in a reworking of the tortoise-and-hare fable as a cops-and-robbers chase. Exactly how Tommy finally catches Moe is not described in the sources this book could check.
Why It Matters
- The film's design, with clean flat colours, simplified landscapes and graphic shapes, shows Famous Studios fully adopting the modern mid-1950s style that UPA had popularised, and the motorboat and ammunition-shed gags give the chase a punchy, cartoony rhythm.
- Tommy Tortoise and Moe Hare were a recurring pair in Famous Studios' Noveltoons in the 1950s, another retelling of the old fable, competing with Disney's Toby Tortoise and Max Hare and with Warner's Cecil Turtle. Their films show how the studios recycled the same fable for very different comic personalities.
Notes and Trivia
- The title is a pun on "slow but sure", the moral of the tortoise-and-hare fable.
- Robert Little painted the backgrounds.
- See also: The Tortoise and the Hare (1935), Swab the Duck (1956).