I bought this title from a guy who claims that he got this and dozens of other 16mm IB Tech Paramount cartoons (they were mostly all 1960s shorts, this was one of the few exceptions) from a retired theater owner. By the looks of some of their conditions, they’ve seen better days, and were probably stacked for years under a leaky radiator or toilet by said theater owner. This is by no means any sort of extraordinary cartoon, but it does have an Irv Spector story that’s ahead of its time warning about the hazards of smoking, and an ending that was obviously hacked off when Harvey bought it. There’s a lot of great Marty Taras animation in this one too.
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Some nice animation during the “willpower” scene. So were any of the 60s shorts from Culhane’s time heading the studio?
Alas,there weren’t. They were mostly the Kneitel and Sparbers. I lucked out with TV Fuddlehead and Bakshi’s Marvin Digs though!
Moral? Never bum a “coffin-nail” off Buzzy! You may just get what you asked for!
What was the original ending to this cartoon?
Fairly decent cartoon by Famous Studios standards for 1954.
The smoke ring that dissolves in the middle to the Paramount mountain is the original ending. The Harvey version just cuts from the exhale to the end jack-in-the-box title.
(This is kind of a companion piece to 1961’s “In the Nicotine”. Too bad Spector didn’t do one more, or he could have had a smoking trilogy like his “matchmaker” trio from 1957-60.)
this actually has some really cool drawings and relatively solid animation in it. Especially in the beginning. thanks for posting!!
How did the cat who sounds like Katnip but isn’t Katnip manage to see through his thumb and read the word “meat”, since his right thumb is covering the word?
Wow, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I dunno, mebbie its narratives of addiction in a cartoon, wherein our protagonist is not only bested by his addiction, but is brutalized and tormented by an impish stranger simply for following a nominal intent to kill this stranger!! All the excesses of tobacco paraphernalia! Stange admixture of Golden Age old-main-street backgrounds and the turn to modernism, later. Pretty nice. Mebbie its the secondary, obsolete nature of the characters…