Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Spunky the burro, the foal of Hunky and Spunky, is small for his age and tired of being pushed around by the bigger animals of the farm, and he discovers vitamin hay, a special feed that promises strength. He eats it, and whether by the hay's virtue or his own belief in it he takes on the bully who has been tormenting him and comes out on top, with his mother Hunky watching; the film plays the spinach joke of the studio's Popeye series in a barnyard key, the hay standing in for the can. The animals who laughed at the little burro learn better, and Spunky ends the film as the farm's small champion. Documentation of the film beyond the series filmography is thin, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- It is the last of the thirty-six Color Classics, the series that had begun with Poor Cinderella in 1934, and the last of the seven Hunky and Spunky cartoons; it was made in the Fleischers' final year in Miami, as the studio sank under the costs of Mr. Bug Goes to Town, and it closes a series that had carried the studio's ambitions to rival the Silly Symphonies.
- No renewal appears for it in the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1967-70, so it is in the US public domain; several earlier Color Classics, by contrast, were renewed by the television distributors.
Notes and Trivia
- The title is a pun on the vitamin craze of the early 1940s, when fortified foods were new.
- Otto Feuer, co-animator, also worked on the Superman series that year.
- See also: Hunky and Spunky (1938), The Barnyard Brat (1939), Snubbed by a Snob (1940).