Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/05/watch-this-infamously-awful-cartoon-from-1943.html
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That was far better than I expected. The 3 1/2 minutes of talking didn’t seem like filler to me, as I would have guessed by the description. The cat actually had some kind of character apart from wanting to eat mice, he also wanted to dress well (despite, or perhaps due to, having no other clothes).
The part that followed was a generic cat chases mice sequence with a forced and random ending. I’d have cut the last few minutes, not the key 3 1/2 in the middle.
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What makes it particularly so “infamously awful”? Is it just that it lacks a punch-line/end? Given the year, one can’t help but wonder what political allegory might’ve occurred to the audience. And it was even nominated for an Academy award.
whoops, i mistyped, the studio “Color Rhapsody” (“Color” yet black and white?) had two contemporaneous cartoons Holiday Land and The Little Match Girl nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons).
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The voice work was pretty great, but I assume it was nominated for animated short?
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I thought it was pretty good.
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@frauenfelder, can you explain to one who is hopelessly BB-unenlightened what makes this so awful?
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I can imagine if you go in expecting Tom and Jerry from your cat and mouse cartoon, several minutes of back-and-forth dialog is not supposed to be on the menu and could be somewhat infuriating.
Having read that the cartoon was terrible, I think I was primed for something detestably dull and it didn’t match that at all.
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I mean,
it’s not racist
so how bad can it be?
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Well, there was a war on.
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Given that the “infamously awful” evaluation came from someone on Reddit, I’d say Reddit makes it awful, because Reddit makes just about everything awful.
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Once they got the belled collar on the cat, how could he have snuck into their celebration area unnoticed and attach bells to all of their tails? Shouldn’t they have been able to hear him now?
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I get it! The cat’s Hitler, right?
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I wonder if he’s any relation to Phil Roman, the animator who founded the studio that produced The Simpsons, King of the Hill and The Family Guy for much of those series’ runs (among others). Phil would have been in middle school when this short came out.
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They were singing and celebrating!
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Euh, why is this awful? I was expecting something racist or sexist or whatever and in the end it’s just a very normal cartoon for that era. It was actually enjoyable, I thought.
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The only thing I find awful about it is the same problem I have with Tom and Jerry cartoons. The annoyingly cute mice win.
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It wasn’t awful. I feel cheated.
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I agree with everyone above, this was far from terrible. The voice acting in particular was quite good.
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Hi there, I’m the guy who shared this on reddit. I had no idea this post would gather quite the attention outside the site, let alone draw a lot of disagreement with my statement, and that’s perfectly fine! Maybe my title was a bit of click-bait, especially considering this short is just scratching the surface of Screen Gems’ averagely bad output, with exceptions obviously like with every studio (good or bad), some of which people above already pointed out. But in the very few communities that know of this studio’s existence, Mass Mouse Meeting was usually a talking point to attest for the low quality of Screen Gems’ output. Not to mention, it was also one of the studio’s cartoons Leonard Maltin talked about (and was said to have similarly panned) in his book ‘Of Mice and Magic’, which I actually ordered around the same time as posting this on reddit and am quite excited for it! In the end, I just wanted to share an obscure piece of media from an animation studio most of you likely never heard of until now.
That said, I do want to get this out of the way: there is absolutely NO political or racial allegory to be found in this particular short, that’s not why I say this is really bad (and let’s just say there’s a reason I only called Mass Mouse Meeting one of the worst rather than the ABSOLUTE worst, check out Kongo Roo (1946) if you want to see gobbledygook and racism intertwined, and I’m almost positive there’s still even worse from Screen Gems, so many lost films….). This particular short is bad because it spent the first 5 out of the 6 minutes drawing out two scenes, in the meeting hall and with the cat, that could have easily been 30 seconds and 1 minute shorter, respectively. Frankly, we especially did not need the cat to slowly guess the gift incorrectly THAT many times. Anyway, shortening those scenes would have left more time to either create a better payoff at the end or allowed for another quick scene or two to keep the plot moving instead of meandering with their dialogue. Whether it’s an extra chase scene, or the mouse trying to fight off his jitters after leaving the meeting and before meeting the cat, I’m not saying it would have been perfect or even good, but at least it would have felt like a short someone wanted to create, albeit flawed. Instead, we got something that felt like it (and given Screen Gems, probably was the case) was under a deadline and forcing the writers to come up with the bare minimum, only to unnaturally extend it as much as feasibly possible. Ripping off properties from other studios was common at the time, but 3-minute plots turned into 6-minute plots was a unique weakness for Screen Gems.
Look, I wasn’t expecting a Tom and Jerry knockoff of sorts (Famous Studios’ Herman and Katnip were more than enough), but to reiterate what I said on reddit (in case you haven’t seen my responses to some comments there), there’s a huge difference between something like the Hunting Trilogy where Bugs and Daffy essentially discuss who the slapstick should happen to between each shot, versus Mass Mouse Meeting where as stated above, was simply drawn out to meet the minimum runtime. As I mentioned at the start, this short was just an example of the type of lackluster output Screen Gems was putting out, reflecting the studio’s budget constraints and frequent turnover. So while it doesn’t stand out that much within Screen Gems’ output (which again in retrospect maybe made ‘THE WORST’ aspect of my post title misleading, especially since I was thinking of sharing more shorts from the studio at some point), it’s still an infamous example as far as the Golden Age of Animation is concerned.
I should add one last thing, from a technical standpoint, specifically the animation and voice acting, Screen Gems’ shorts were always at least decent, Mass Mouse Meeting was no exception. Dare I say, it can get very good in some shorts. Unfortunately, these aspects can only take a cartoon so far if the story and characters are not engaging, which was the case for me here and again, is the theme among many of this studio’s shorts. Anyway, that’s my take on the cartoon, I’m not looking to change anyone’s minds here, but simply explain where I was coming from with this.
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Thanks for stopping by and clearing that up!
You said Screen Gems made some very good shorts. Are any of those available online?
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