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Happy-Go-Luckies
In Happy-Go-Luckies a pair of ukulele-strumming railroad hoboes fake their way into a dog show and make off with the prize loot. “Two heads are better than one” is the moral. To modern eyes, our trickster duo may look like two dogs—in the show they pretend to be one long dog—but audiences of the ’20s would have recognized a dog-and-cat team. The black body, white face, and sharp ears would have been most familiar from the greatest jazz-era trickster cat, Felix. Dogs and cats—much easier to animate than humans—were everywhere in silent cartoons. Terry, like most early film animators, had begun as a newspaper cartoonist, and his first strip, working with his brother as a teenager for the San Francisco Call, was about the adventures of a dog named Alonzo.
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Reviews
Best movie of this year hands down!
Wonderful Movie
Undescribable Perfection
Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
In the late 30s and 1940s, Paul Terry produced a ton of cartoons--most of which were pretty awful. With the likes of Heckle & Jeckle and Mighty Mouse among his BEST offerings at the time, it's no wonder you practically never see any of these films any more on TV--though they were unfortunately pretty commonly shown on television when I was a kid. Because of these shorts, I have always disliked Terry's work and assumed all of his stuff was like this. Fortunately, however, when Turner Classic Movies recently showed "Happy Go Luckies" I didn't turn off the cartoon immediately after seeing Terry's name on the title card.Unlike his later work, "Happy Go Luckies" is funny and very imaginative. While the animation is only fair (about the quality you'd see in a Felix the Cat cartoon), the story was wacky and imaginative--with a cat and his friend a dog having some insane adventures which began on a really odd train. The bottom line is that this one is pretty good and I'll try to look for some of Terry's older films, as this one was about on-par with the average cartoon of the time.
. . . and it's always nice to see cartoons that predate the Talking Rodent. This seven-minute short has a plot you can follow and characters with whom you can empathize. Best of all, they're not charging you an arm & a leg for 3D glasses which often DETRACT from the viewing experience, but which will make your kids hate you for being "cheap" if you refuse to buckle in to the movie Megacorp's ubiquitous brainwashing campaign. Hopefully, the Douse Da Mouse Movement will continue to grow. Today's film makers are as hamstrung by ONE Megacorporation's perversion of copyright concepts through it continual bribery of Congress and the Courts to achieve the infinity of extensions it demands as everyone else would be if William Shakespeare's lawyers had copyrighted all his pet phrases, and sued everyone using them today for a rat's ransom. The irony is that nearly all of the Mouse House's top hits were STOLEN from those who came just before Steamboat Willie steamrolled the world! How many bucks are the starving descendants of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo getting from the Rodent Who Ate the Real World?
Happy Go Luckies (1923) *** (out of 4) This seven-minute animated film from Paul Terry has a few weak spots but for the most part its full of laughs and certainly plenty of imagination. The film starts off as a dog and cat decide to jump on a train for a simple ride but this turns out not to be the case and they wind up in a small town where they both enter a dog contest so that they can win some money. Terry has over one-thousand producing credits and nearly one-hundred and fifty directing credits to his name but I'm not overly familiar with his work. This short certainly made me want to try and locate some others because I was really impressed with not only the animation but all the imagination that went into it. One of the highlights in the film has the train trying to go over a step mountain but it's parts only going over one at a time. Just check out all the detail as one box car goes over at a time while the rest are slowly catching up to the front. The comedy really comes into play at the end once we get to the contest and the dog and cat must work together to make it appear that they're both one long dog. The effect is quite funny and the pay-off is rather hilarious even though you see it coming from a mile away. The animation style was extremely good and I especially liked the small details that were in nearly every frame of the picture.
The cat and the dog are out riding the rails when they encounter some trains out having a good time.This early Paul Terry-Aesop's Fables cartoon is a fairly good effort, albeit the version I saw ran a bit short. The cars in the train are given a bit of action and personality.The whole effort is bolstered immeasurably by the lively score of Michael Mortilla, best known for his work on the CHAPLIN AT MUTUAL DVD. It's jazzy score with some nice sound effects attached and if you like, you can see it on his website at http://www.midilifecrisis.com/HTML/NFPF_Frameset.html.
