Interesting Viewing: Our Jean McElvane Rounds Up The Best of Traveling And Military Serving Animate Shorts//
NIAD Art Center
There are many ways and reasons you can travel and not just for vacation.
NIAD artist Jean McElvane returns to our blog with another timely post. This one is a Top 20 of videos featuring travel and military service.
She says, “The idea for this email came from moving one place to another. Starting off to Pismo Beach, (aka Pepto Bismo Beach).”
And Jean has gathered up the hilarity (much of it from the classic Warner Brothers’ Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes) on many forms of travel and the branches of the service: plane, rocket, naval ship, tunneling and even leaping through the air.
Christopher Columbus is sure that the world is as round as his head. The King insists that it’s as flat as Columbus’ head (which he flattens). Bugs, a ship’s mascot, helps Columbus demonstrate the planet’s roundness by tossing a baseball, which comes back from the other direction, covered with travel stickers (making better use of the sole good gag in the 1939 Looney Tune Kristopher Kolumbus Jr.
We flash back to the origin of Super Rabbit, where a scientist named Professor Canafrazz fortifies some carrots, which Bugs eats, and now he can “leap tall buildings, et cetera, etc etera… Noting the newspaper story of Cottontail Smith, the notorious Texas Rabbit, Bugs ducks into a phone booth to change, and comes out in a Little Bo Peep outfit.
In this parody of Superman, Daffy is “Cluck Trent,” a mild-mannered reporter at a major metropolitan daily newspaper, Cluck takes a mild-mannered pill and hears something from the editor’s office. The editor is watching a crime drama about Aardvark Ratnik, a fictional mad Russian villain who threatens to “blow up everything” in his hell-bent scheme for world domination.
Conrad Cat’s attempts to keep the battleship decks swabbed are frustrated by Daffy’s tricks, like putting paint in his bucket, and by unexpected appearances of the pint-sized Admiral.
Bugs Bunny and his cousin, Clyde Rabbit, revisit the Bugs’ past adventures, while looking at a scrapbook. The first segment has Bugs pitching in a Major League baseball game. Next, the rabbit becomes a heavyweight boxer, fighting for the title in Madison Square Garden.
