Big Man from the North

Not being able to think of anything to blog about today, I decided to watch another of the cartoon extras from the Warner Gangsters set I've mentioned a couple of times before. (I think it's three cartoons down, three to go.) This time, it was Big Man from the North, on the Smart Money disk.

Bosko, looking like a monkey, is a Mountie in a decidedly non-RCMP uniform. His superior officer tells him to go bring back a certain notorious criminal. Bosko goes to the saloon, dances with a peach of a female and plays piano for her, and then gets the guy, who I think is supposed to be a bear. That's the plot, such as it is; in these 1930s cartoons there's often not much of a plot going on.

But there was still a lot interesting about the movie. First of, multiple characters were depantsed to the point that you could see their butt cracks; second was the card at the end, pictured above. Bosko actually says "That's all folks!" Also, there's the line about being licensed through the Bray-Hurd patents. I had to look that up, and as it turns out J.R. Bray and Earl Hurd each got patents for using transparencies in animation: if you've got a static background and one character moving, you can put the background on a transparency and only have to draw the movements of the character. It's the forefather of the cel, as I understand it. (I'm not an expert on animation.)