“Mother Goose Goes Hollywood”

To be fair, I’m not sure anyone predicted that people would still be watching this short nearly ninety years later. They also couldn’t have known that one of the people in it would die only three years later and almost immediately fade into obscurity. But man, this is a heck of a proof that you shouldn’t base your cartoon, or much of anything really, on blind pop culture references, because I know who maybe half these people are without looking them up, and I’m doing pretty well. As a child, I knew even fewer. Still, at least this one has the Marx Brothers and not the Ritz Brothers.

There are a handful of nursery rhymes. It’s funny, though, because they’re being told with celebrities of 1938 as characters. That’s it. That’s the cartoon. Funnily enough given the next year’s cartoon, Donald Duck gets a brief cameo and is, as in the other, more recognizable to modern audiences than about half the other celebrities. Even in this viewing I wasn’t sure if Eddie Cantor was supposed to be Al Jolson, because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an Eddie Cantor movie. Likewise George Arliss or Joe Penner—it’s Penner who would be dead in three years.

Let us start with three of the people. Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and Stepin Fetchit. And, yes, all of them are racist caricatures. And they were voiced by Danny Webb, who was of Hungarian descent. It’s damning with faint praise to say that they are no more exaggerated than Charles Laughton, at least, and their lips are drawn no larger than Martha Raye’s. And at least some of the singing is done by the Four Blackbirds, a quartet of black performers. Disney’s racial issues from this era involve a lot of damning with faint praise, after all.

Some of the caricatures are exaggerated enough so that I have a hard time recognizing them even knowing the performer; on the other hand, you get a near-exact Freddie Bartholomew. W. C. Fields is mostly just a series of circles, though he’s also portraying Humpty Dumpty. Katherine Hepburn is more exaggerated than Spencer Tracy—whom she had not yet met in real life but with whom she shares a scene here. It’s hard to miss the Marx Brothers, and with Clark Gable, you just get the ears and the rest of the image follows.

It’s hard to care about this cartoon this week of all weeks. Disney managed to lose four billion dollars in a weekend by caving to a corrupt administration, after all, and a dopey cartoon from 1938 is not terribly foremost in anyone’s mind after that. Even if it does have a pitch-perfect Laurel and Hardy bit. It’s the best part of the short. Disney has always managed to give us a bright moment or two even when what surrounds it is somewhere between worthless and appalling.