![]() ![]() Shorty gets lunch at Swifty’s Quick Lunch restaurant.ĬALL ME A TAXI (7/64) Kneitel/Taras. SERVICE WITH A SMILE (6/64) Kneitel/Tafuri. Shorty gets the works when he goes for a haircut at Swifty’s Barber Shop. Swifty is a lazy salesman at a men’s clothing store Shorty comes in and wants to buy a new suit. Swifty and Shorty are repairing a giant clock on top of a skyscraper.Ī FRIEND IN TWEED (5/64) Kneitel/Dressler. Swifty and Shorty attend a boat show at the convention center, where Shorty wins a door prize of a 35 foot catamaran.įIX THAT CLOCK (5/64) Kneitel/Pattengill. Swifty runs Shorty through a rigorous physical fitness program. Shorty panhandles on Madison Avenue until he meets Swifty.įIZZICLE FIZZLE (4/64) Kneitel/Klein. Based on one of Eddie Lawrence’s recordings. PANHANDLING ON MADISON AVE (4/64) Kneitel/Taras. The introduction of Swifty and Shorty in Paramount’s in-house trade newsletter, “Paramount World”. Junkman Muggy-Doo convinces his pal Osh to try his hand at becoming a TV Star. ![]() MUGGY-DOO BOY CAT (12/63) Hal Seeger/Myron Waldman. When the Gremlins go out on Boy Scout Day to do bad deeds, Goodie follows along to undo the damage. GOODIE’S GOOD DEED (11/63) Kneitel/Pattengill. A fox reading some Aesop’s Fables decides to prove that foxes can steal grapes – from Luigi’s Vineyard. Harmonica tells a group kids a story about a pig family that keeps their home spotless. Goodie The Gremlin tells his nephew some bedtime stories about the Fountain of Youth and Indians. TELL ME A BADTIME STORY (10/63) Kneitel/Reden. Harry Happy has a split personality – Upbeat and personable at work, but at home he becomes a mad tyrant screaming orders to his harried wife. TV executives come up with a kid’s quiz show with questions they believe no one can answer – until they meet their first contestant, Ollie the Owl. When the evil Gremlins give a dog a bad case of hiccup, Goodie tries to cure the problem. THE SHEEPISH WOLF (11/63) Kneitel/Tafuri. A dog with no license is given a chance by the dog catcher to find himself a new home. An attempt to revive the Screen Songs with a sing along about “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. A hobo riding the rails gets off in the town of Utopia. Skat the Cat tries to get Gramps back to Texas with a phony telegram about striking oil. GRAMPS TO THE RESCUE (9/63) Kneitel/Reden. Let’s take a closer look at the theatricals: Myron Waldman animated and the best that can be said is that it’s certainly more visually “energetic” than the other Paramount theatricals of the era. Muggy-Doo Boy Cat – Paramount filled out their release schedule with a pick-up of an independent film – this time a TV pilot by Hal Seeger based on his 1953 comic book (drawn by Irv Spector).Harry Happy, a final shot at an “adult-skewing” Modern Madcap, featuring a fellow with a scary bi-polar personality a borderline wife-beater.Hobo’s Holiday, a desperate attempt to salvage something left over from the Fleischer/Famous catalog – the bouncing-ball Screen Song! This one-shot attempt is done with such little enthusiasm it was probably booed off the screen.Goodie Gremlin and miscellaneous funny animals now populate both series, perhaps hoping Harvey Comics would one day purchase these from Paramount as Harveytoon filler material. The images exist to support the dialogue, and they just barely do that.Īs for the 63-64 theatrical Noveltoons and Modern Madcaps – the series designations no longer have any real meaning. Panhandling On Madison Avenue, Call Me A Taxi (embed below), The Once Over… you can hear what they were going for. Seriously, turn off the picture, sit back and just listen. ![]() The ones written by Lawrence – some are routines lifted directly off his old comedy records – are very funny to listen to. Thus the Paramount powers-that-be decided to transform Percy and Ralph into the alliterative Swifty and Shorty and took a chance committing to 16 shorts (not counting the previous four Percy and Ralph’s – making an even 20), perhaps hoping to crash the networks with their own series of adult-skewing animated comedies by flooding the market in Spring-Summer 1964. Lawrence was a versatile voice artist, a funny writer and clever in coming up with comic situations. I love Eddie Lawrence – and Seymour Kneitel did too. Why nine cartoons (an odd number)? Why the sudden boost in the number of theatricals? I do not have all the answers – but I speculate that Swifty and Shorty was Paramount’s response to the current spate of prime time television cartoons – “Illustrated radio” as Chuck Jones has coined them – where, like Calvin and The Colonel, they recruited vocal comedians to do routines that work as radio, but not necessarily as cartoons in the classic sense. The Comic Kings are out and Swifty and Shorty have been added to the mix. ![]()
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