Masterful Movie

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I saw this last night as the lead-in to the showing of the 1933 classic, King Kong. With the distance of time and evolved social awareness, I found this to be very offensive. Technically, it seemed quite rushed. The finesse of period Woody Woodpecker cartoons was totally absent. There was a very thin script, which seemed unnecessarily harsh in telling an angry story. This old white guy was appalled. I can only assume that the person who chose this short did so to magnify the evolution of national social consciousness.

SUCCESS IN ANY field spawns both imitation and parody. It has long been said that: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." If this is so (and we're sure it is)then the spoof, the send-up and that old standby, parody should rank right up there also. (And don't forget Lampoon, either!) THIS 1933 CARTOON short does a credible job in recreating in cartoon world similar settings that mimic Skull Island of KING KONG fame. The cartoon opens up with Pooch the Pup and his female companion already having arrived on their version of that mysterious island far southwest of Borneo, New Guinea, Java, Sumatra and Australia. They arrive during the sacrificial rite that offers up a female native to the giant godlike ape.THROUGH SOME ERROR, Pooch's lady friend get's switched and is taken by the super simian, who apparently would actually have eaten her as a tiny morsel of his dinner. Cupid appears and does his bit with bow and does his thing; which renders the big ape helpless. (This in a direct spoof of the quotation in the opening credits and prelude to the KING KONG story of" ".......and he (the Beast) was as one dead." AFTER THE INTRODUCTION of an all-purpose dinosaur from either the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods and their version of the Kong vs. Tyrannosaurus bout, a brief tip of the hat to MGM's TARZAN THE APEMAN, the capture of the ape sees his sight gag ridden trip to the big exposition of "Klunk" in NYC. His eventual escape and final fate is sealed with his tumbling off the skyscraper and his crashing and burning!! WE CAN SUPPOSE that this was a very amusing to audiences of the day. We did our best to look at it both analytically, as well as objectively. Having done so, we can only suppose that it produced about a 5 or 6 on the old Laugh Meter. Like any theatrically released picture, its appeal and enjoyment factor would rise when viewed as a part of a live, red-blooded and breathing audience.ONE ELEMENT THAT jumps out of the screen at a viewer in this 21st Century is the casual use of racial stereotypes concerning the native (indigenous, aboriginal peoples). Their character design was that of those being derivative of the Minstrel Show.WE HAVE JUST only today heard of this title and screened it for the first time. It is one in a series of POOCH THE PUP Cartoons produced for Universal Pictures by Walter Lantz. This predated his successes with ANDY PANDA, WOODY WOODPECKER, WALLY WALRUS, CHILLY WILLY and others.

Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz was quick off the mark with this animated parody of King Kong, which came out in 1933, the very same year as the classic monster movie; but perhaps he should have taken a little more time, because in his rush he forgot to include any decent gags or memorable characters.Giant amorous ape aside, the main character is Pooch, a generic 1930s animated animal (dog?) vaguely reminiscent of Betty Boop's pal Bimbo. Then again, he's a bit like Mickey Mouse. Or Felix the Cat. When his equally generic girlfriend is abducted by King Klunk, Pooch sets off in hot pursuit to rescue her.Technically and stylistically, this early cartoon is fairly typical of the era, with repetitive use of looped frames to extend the action, random inanimate objects coming to life, and politically incorrect depictions of natives, but with humour that is as prehistoric as the titular ape's home it will probably be of little interest to anyone but animation historians or avid fans of King Kong who feel the need to watch anything remotely related to the film.

While back issues of Mad Magazine afford us the opportunity to study contemporary movie parodies since the 1950s, KING KLUNK, produced by the Walter Lantz animation unit at Universal Pictures, gives us a rare opportunity to see what happens when a famous monster film from 1933, KING KONG, is parodied in a nine-minute cartoon the same year. The hero here is Pooch the Pup, billed prominently in the credits, a dog character apparently modeled on Bimbo from the Betty Boop cartoons. He plays a filmmaker who journeys to the island of King Klunk with his unnamed light-colored female dog girlfriend. He takes with him a camera fastened to a tripod, which, in the fashion of cartoons of the era, walks on its own through the jungle.The natives on the island are portrayed in the typically stereotyped big-lipped fashion of cartoon "cannibals" in the 1930s. However, this cartoon does something really interesting in the midst of the racial stereotyping. You may recall that in KING KONG, the island natives had picked a girl from their village to be sacrificed to Kong, but once they spot blonde Fay Wray they completely forget about the native girl, who's never seen or heard from again in the film. Well, this cartoon doesn't forget her. When giant gorilla King Klunk spots Pooch's girlfriend, he decides he'd rather have her than the native sacrifice, so he deftly picks up the girlfriend as she's walking behind Pooch and replaces her with the native girl, all without alerting Pooch who then takes the native girl's hand. When Pooch turns and sees her and reacts with shock, the native girl declares "Goona," presumably the word in her language for love, and begins chasing Pooch with great ardor.The action quickly shifts to the pursuit of Klunk and Pooch's girl and includes a fight between Klunk and a dinosaur, as in the original, and an encounter between Klunk and a dinosaur egg, followed quickly by a voyage to New York, Klunk in chains on a Broadway stage, and Klunk's rampage through the city. (Just as Kong indiscriminately chomped on New Yorkers or dropped them to their deaths on the street below, Klunk picks up handfuls of fleeing pedestrians and tosses them off to the side.) Klunk takes Pooch's girlfriend again and climbs with her to the top of a building identified only as the "Broken Arms." Pooch takes to the air in a plane and combats Klunk singlehanded.In the final shot, the native girl makes a surprise return appearance with a gag bit that clearly broke a prevailing racial taboo of the era. It's quite a clever and subversive bombshell in an otherwise uninspired and not very funny cartoon.Klunk himself is, for the most part, a growling, drooling, fanged gorilla monster and, despite being hit with a native Cupid's arrow, is never quite convincing as the lovestruck ape Kong was in the live-action film. The match with the dinosaur is fun, though, with Pooch providing blow-by-blow commentary. This cartoon is found in the "Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection" DVD box set.