Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Snuffy Smith, the shiftless, shotgun-toting hillbilly of the Barney Google strip, is at home in his mountain shack with his wife Loweezy when the law comes calling: a revenue agent is after his moonshine still. The cartoon is the running battle between the little hillbilly and the city man, fought with Snuffy's shotgun, his jug, his hound and the terrain, and with the revenuer's dignity coming off worst in every exchange, from the trick fence to the exploding still. Snuffy wins, as he does in the strip, and the agent retreats down the mountain. Plot documentation is thin, since the film was long thought lost, and the account above follows the cartoon as it survives.
Why It Matters
- It is the only animated Snuffy Smith of the theatrical era, licensed from King Features, and it is animated in part by Jim Tyer, the wildest draughtsman in New York animation, whose rubbery distortions are visible in the chase; Otto Messmer, the creator of Felix the Cat, shares the story credit, one of his few Famous Studios jobs.
- The film was considered lost for decades until a single black-and-white print surfaced, and it is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse; the Technicolor original is still missing.
Notes and Trivia
- Snuffy Smith had taken over Billy DeBeck's strip from Barney Google in the 1930s and appeared in two live-action features in 1942.
- Jim Tyer later became Terrytoons' most distinctive animator.
- See also: Sheep Shape (1946), The Stupidstitious Cat (1947), Felix in Hollywood (1923).