Detouring America

What with my plan being to post about Easter offerings early today, I decided that I wanted to watch a short for a second post today actually reviewing a movie. So I put in the DVD of Each Dawn I Die, and from the "Warner Night at the Movies" selections I watched the cartoon Detouring America.

This one is a spoof on the Traveltalks and other travelogue shorts that the studios were cranking out in the 1930s, and starts with a humorous disclaimer based on the disclaimer in regular movies:



After that, there's a running gag about a "human fly" climbing the Empire State Building Safety Last! style, with sight-gag visits to various states. Some of the gags are predictable, such as one with logs being floated down a river; when you see there's a second river crossing it, you can guess what happens. Others are more interesting, like the literally rolling hills, or the cliff-dwelling Indians who walk down the cliffs on two feet, perpendicular to the vertical cliffs and parallel to the ground.

On the DVD, there's a disclaimer before the start of the short about the racial stereotypes of the time. I'm assuming that the biggest problem the folks at Warner Home Video would have is with this scene:



Sure, the black guy has very exaggerated features, and his singing "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (the Eskimo literally carries him back, as though Alaska and Virginia share a border). But this being a cartoon, every human is a caricature, including the white guys:



There are better shorts out there, to be sure, but considering this is an extra on a regular DVD, and it's only eight minutes, you won't really go wrong watching it.