Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Junior, a small boy who hates school, plays truant and runs into Wolfie, the slick, hungry wolf of the Noveltoons, who sees in the boy a meal and offers himself as a private tutor to lure him home. The lessons are the film: Wolfie teaches arithmetic, geography and spelling with examples that all lead to the boy ending up in the pot, and Junior, who is not as stupid as he looks, turns every lesson back on the teacher, so that the wolf is the one who gets the dunce's cap, the ruler and the detention. The boy goes back to school in the end, having learned more from the wolf than the wolf intended, and Wolfie goes hungry. The filmography entry is the only documentation, so the synopsis is taken from the cartoon as it survives.
Why It Matters
- It is Wolfie's last appearance in the Noveltoons, after which the character moved into the Casper series as a recurring menace, and it pairs him with Junior, one of the studio's several small-boy characters of the period; Myron Waldman's animation of the wolf's false gentility is the film's chief pleasure.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it was reissued theatrically in September 1955; the title pun recurs in two other cartoons of the era, so the date is needed to identify it.
Notes and Trivia
- Wolfie's voice, by Jackson Beck, is a smooth confidence man's, unlike Beck's Bluto.
- Gordon Whittier, co-animator, was one of the studio's younger staff who stayed into the 1960s.
- See also: Quack-a-Doodle-Doo (1950), Pleased to Eat You (1950), Sheep Shape (1946).