Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
A small fish, a child in short trousers, wants to be grown up. He hangs around the big fish at their underwater pool hall, smoking a cigarette and trying to be one of them, and they laugh at him and sing Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser's "Small Fry", the hit song that tells a kid to go home and act his age. His mother scolds him too. Determined to prove himself, the small fry swims off alone and finds a fisherman's bait, which he takes as a dare; he is hooked, hauled toward the surface and the frying pan, and his grown-up airs vanish as he screams for his mother. The big fish and his mother rescue him by biting through the line, and the small fry goes home, chastened, to be a child a little longer, with the song reprised over the ending.
Why It Matters
- The film is built around a current hit, "Small Fry", which Bing Crosby had recorded in 1938, and it is one of the few Fleischer cartoons whose title song was a genuine standard rather than a studio composition; the underwater pool hall, with its cigarettes and tough-guy fish, is the studio's old urban manner transplanted to the sea floor.
- It is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright having lapsed with most of the Color Classics. Willard Bowsky and Orestes Calpini, the Popeye unit's animators, give it a snappier pace than the Waldman films around it.
Notes and Trivia
- Carmichael and Loesser wrote "Small Fry" for the 1938 film Sing You Sinners.
- The hooked-fish climax repeats Educated Fish from two years before.
- See also: Educated Fish (1937), The Playful Polar Bears (1938), The Barnyard Brat (1939).
