If you read Adam Abraham’s When Magoo Flew, you’ll walk away from it thinking Rocky Road to Ruin, a 1943 Screen Gems cartoon by directed by Paul Sommer and John Hubley, is a more important film than it really is. It’s creepily similar to Chuck Jones’s The Dover Boys in both design and story due to artist John McLeish doing work (and narration) on both films. I’d have posted this earlier, but I wanted to get a decent transfer of it from my own collection and do some tinkering to the color (this was originally a Kodak safety print on the orange side). It was never remastered by Sony to the best of my knowledge (it was certainly not part of the Totally Tooned In syndication package).
The preeminence of Rocky Road to Ruin over The Dover Boys in Abraham’s text is one of the more annoying parts of his book, as I noted. It introduces an attitude that demands, whether intentionally or not, deference from one film for inspiring another. There may be something to that, if it weren’t for the fact that the earlier Warner cartoon succeeds in every way the later Screen Gems cartoon fails. The Jones cartoon is a masterwork of stylized animation, design, and dry humor. The Columbia cartoon’s animation is blocky and weak, with the filmmakers completely disregarding story, characterization, and comedy. A comparison of the two films doesn’t prove the ‘modern’ intelligentsia’s superiority, but is an apt example of how the leaders at WB knew how to handle their conscious experiments and make them work, whereas those at Coulumbia knew they had interesting ideas but had no idea how to effectively execute them.
Ralph Stevenson’s book on animation, published just prior to the increased focus on Warners’ output, referred to Elmer Fudd as “A Magoo-like character”, as part of an overall denigration of the studio’s output as simply mindless cartoon violence. So for UPA aficionados to warp the animation history timeline in order to champion their cause isn’t a new phenomenon.
“RRtoR” proves if nothing else that people should stop denigrating Tedd Peirce’s writing abilities. The other point is not only are the settings and designs a weak second to Jones’ “Dover Boys”, Chuck and Michael Maltese would borrow something from this cartoon — the basic story arc for “Fresh Airedale” two years later, and again, made a far better cartoon (while also having the guts not to cop out on the “life in unfair” message at the finish).
I agree that Columbia’s cartoon staff had a Grand Canyon between their forward-thinking ideas and their ability to coherently translate them into something that works.
I see this time and again in their mid-1940s cartoons. I get a sense of excitement at something new in the air, and sometimes that something translates well (PROF. SMALL AND MR. TALL, portions of GIDDY YAPPING, portions of WILLOUGHBY’S MAGIC HAT, etc.). More often, the end result is something quirky, clunky and failed–although interesting, to be sure.
Their success rate is higher than the cartoons that followed. To be honest, most post-1946 Columbias are a train wreck. A train wreck I can’t look away from, with fascination–but a train wreck nonetheless.
I’m glad the Columbia cartoons exist. Their main value, now, is to give us historians/aficionados a way to view the Warners, Lantz and MGM cartoons with some perspective. The success/failure rate of the Screen Gems cartoon unit somehow leavens the percentage of hits and flops at the other big Hollywood units. By comparison, they help us to see how on-target so much of the WB/MGM output was.
The Lantz cartoons probably come the closest to the Columbias in their WTF-enriched content and ratio of disasters to successes. Indeed, there’s very little (aside from better animation, backgrounds and music) to distinguish a Dick Lundy Woody Woodpecker cartoon like THE COO-COO BIRD from the contemporary Columbia efforts.
The mid-1940s Columbias are important cartoons, despite their chronic failings. I wish the staff were better able to harness their almost unconscious grasp on Something New. Animation history would ultimately be worse off without these cartoons.
The only Columbia cartoons that I find myself even wanting to watch are the Fox and Crow shorts, and even a few of those were just weird.
Did I miss something? Was there any point to the poor imitation of a Fleischer Screen Song?
It’s really not that bad, even though it’s not “Dover Boys” quality. Like much of Hubley’s later UPA output, the designs take center stage. It was still moderately entertaining and occasionally clever.
There is an eerie resemblance between Waldo and Phineas in this cartoon and one of the Dover Boys and the villain in that WB cartoon, heightened by the “gay ’90s” setting. As for the book trumping this cartoon up, sometimes authors do have a tendency to focus extra praise on films/cartoons that are perceived as underrated or relatively obscure.
Sell me the 16mm print, Thad – I like this very Jay Ward-ish cartoon! It’s to The Dover Boys what Lennie Tristano is to Count Basie, or, for that matter, Andy Kaufman to Rodney Dangerfield.
This film is just bad. It has none of the grace, excellent animation or even the wit of the design of The Dover Boys. Like most Columbia gems from the early 40s, the story is near pathetic making them all almost unwatchable. Hubley’s work in this film is as tentative as it was in many of the other films he did at this point. He was just starting to grasp what was possible when he took charge of the design, and he didn’t have the confidence to pull it off. John McGrew was miles above him at this early point in his career.
I’m usually most interested in the aesthetics of a cartoon, however, at some point the comparison breaks down between these two cartoons to a mere couple of, perhaps, superficial resemblances, namely, design and setting. The stories diverge wildly, it seems to me. The dramatis personae may be seen to compare closely, but Jones was partaking in a genre rip as old as peasant theatre, or perhaps Homer himself, never mind the juvenile literature of the fin de siecle. Doubtless Dover Boys is the more economical, forceful and funny of the two. Dover Boys seems much celebrated and widely acknowledged by the cognoscenti for its precursory status to the ‘Modern Turn’, why do we still make the case here, now?
…but this is all academic. ha.
I’m really not interested in beating up on this poor little experimental cartoon, since failed film experiments can often be just as lovable as those floppy collapsing airplanes from old newsreels. I was glad to finally see this one, but it makes me think of Hubley’s quote from Leonard Maltin’s book in which he refers to doing a Horatio Alger spoof called “From Rags to Riches to Rags”. I see no listing by that title in the Columbia cartoon filmography. Could Hub have been refering to this film?
CORRECTION: The title Hub mentioned was “From Rags to Rags”.
FROM RAGS TO RAGS was the working title for the cartoon THE ROCKY ROAD TO RUIN. That’s no doubt why it stuck in Hubley’s memory.
I really tried to like this cartoon, but let’s face it. In comparison to The Dover Boys, this cartoon was a huge flop and I’m surprised John Hubley had any involvement in it. Very slow pacing, unsure and mushy timing, and not really entertaining at all. It had a pretentious feeling to it and tried to be too clever and stylish while leaving out all the elements that made The Dover Boys such a masterpiece, like the satire and funny smear animation.
Anyways, thanks for posting this, Thad. My appreciation for the Warner Bros. cartoons and Chuck Jones went up even more because of this, though I still love a lot of what Hubley did in his career.
Mulling my earlier comment, I can’t help but confess a certain bogus quality to my reasoning, – reaching back from vaudville to the birth of Western culture. If we agree then that the one cartoon was literally built on the other, this begs the question, are cartoons thus such marginal storytelling, daresay literary, vehicles that we differentiate them and establish their debts on the basis of genre, style and setting alone?
Faithfully submitted, Douglas C. Nietermeyer.
For the record, this film was restored by Sony but was not included on TOTALLY TOONED IN for a variety of reasons I no longer remember. There are several Screen Gems color cartoons and many UPA cartoons that never made it to that show – but they exist!
Thanks for the confirmation, Jerry.