Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures / The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Full title: The Dover Boys at Pimento University; or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall. At Pimento University, "good old P.U.", the students sing the school anthem in barbershop style. The narrator, in the overblown manner of early-1900s boys' adventure books, introduces the three Dover brothers: athletic Tom, thin Dick and plump, curly-haired Larry. They set off to collect "their" fiancée, the dainty Dora Standpipe, from Miss Cheddar's Female Academy for an outing in the park. Watching them is the villain, Dan Backslide, "the former sneak of Roquefort Hall", who loves Dora (or rather her father's money). While the Dovers play hide-and-seek, Backslide steals a runabout and carries Dora off to a remote mountain lodge. There he discovers that Dora is anything but dainty: still crying for help, she gives him a thorough beating. A scout semaphores for help, the Dover Boys rush to the rescue, and as they swing at the reeling Backslide he drops to the floor, so they punch each other out instead. Dora strolls off with an odd, grey-bearded little man in an old-fashioned bathing suit, who has shuffled across the screen at intervals all through the film to "While Strolling Through the Park One Day".
Why It Matters
- The animation is the joke. Jones and his team move characters from pose to pose in a single frame, with smeared drawings in between, so the Dovers seem to jump between stiff poses; it mimics the stilted heroes of the books and was an early, radical use of stylised, limited animation. Michael Barrier asked whether it was the first "modern" cartoon.
- It anticipated by a decade the graphic style UPA and others made famous in the 1950s. Warner's management reportedly disliked it at the time, but it has become one of Jones's most admired films, and animation professionals voted it number 49 in The 50 Greatest Cartoons in 1994.
Notes and Trivia
- It parodies the Rover Boys, a popular juvenile book series of the early 1900s.
- The school song is sung to the tune of "Sweet Genevieve".
- Its copyright lapsed and it entered the public domain in 1970.
- See also: The Egg Collector (1940), Porky's Midnight Matinee (1941).