Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Late at night in a kitchen the vegetables are asleep when a cloaked figure creeps in and kidnaps Mother Carrot and her children. A potato policeman investigates. He trails the figure to a beer hall, a crate of root beer, calls for reinforcements and raids it, dragging out the fruits and vegetables inside for questioning. The interrogations are the film's centre: a corn cob is given the third degree in a toaster, an orange is squeezed in a juicer, an egg is hard-boiled in a frying pan, and all of them prove innocent. The cloaked figure returns and attacks the cops; two of them chase it on an egg beater ridden like a motorcycle, the beater catches the cloak and tears it off, and the kidnapper is revealed as a gang of mice with pliers. Mother Carrot and her babies are found in a mousetrap in the wall, the mice are lured into a cage, and the kitchen sleeps again.
Why It Matters
- It is a gangster-film parody with vegetables, the third degree in a toaster being the best single joke, and Joe Stultz's script keeps the police-procedural structure intact from kidnapping to raid to confession; it is one of the last Color Classics with the studio's old urban wit rather than its later sentiment.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright having lapsed with most of the series, and it was among the first cartoons made in Miami with Winston Sharples, the studio's new musical director, who would score Famous Studios' output for twenty years.
Notes and Trivia
- Joe Stultz later wrote for Warner Bros.' Frank Tashlin unit.
- The kitchen-at-night setting is a cousin of the toy-shop-at-midnight cartoon.
- See also: Small Fry (1939), The Barnyard Brat (1939), Ants in the Plants (1940).
