Shorts for February 25, 2016

The same shorts get shown over and over on TCM during February, since they want to restrict themselves to shorts that were Oscar-nominated, and een then they don't have access to all the shorts. Just imagine if they still had the rights to the Looney Tunes and MGM cartoons.

Take Seeing Hands, which is airing just after midnight tonight, following MASH (10:00 PM, 116 min plus an intro and outro). This Pete Smith short about a blind man who has become useful in the war effort is one I blogged about back in 2014, and mentioned again last year. It's interesting not only for the subject material, but also because it's one of the more serious Pete Smith shorts. I think I've mentioned more than enough times that I'm not the biggest fan of Smith's brand of humor.

Tomorrow morning at about 6:37 AM, there's The Man Without a Country, which was the subject of a blog post back in February 2013. It's been a while since I've seen this one, to be honest.

There's one that I don't think I've seen at all: Beyond the Line of Duty, at 12:36 PM tomorrow. This is one of the many military-themed shorts Warner Bros. released during the war. If memory serves they're the ones who did the shorts of the various military bands as well. This one looks at a real Air Corps (there was no separate Air Force until after the war) pilot who signed up after Pearl Harbor and one of the missions that made him and his crew a hero; the pilot apparently plays himself and went on to become a lieutenant general.