Moonlight for Two

The early films by Looney Tunes were vastly different in style from their more familiar output from the 1940s and 50s. While the 40s and 50s brought sarcastic characters and good old fashioned violence (yay, violence!), the early ones were much more cutesy and very often relied on singing. Most of them, in my biased opinion, are pretty hard to take and the cuter they were and more singing in them, the worse they generally were to watch. This style can be attributed to two things. First, singing and cute cartoons were often produced by other studios...though Looney Tunes seemed to take it to an extreme. Second, the direction team of Harmon-Ising just LOVED this type of cartoon...and when they left to go to MGM, the quality and enjoyability of the Looney Tunes films improved considerably.

"Moonlight for Two" is one of these singing cutesy cartoons, though it was less cute than most...which made it easier to watch. But hearing the girl in the short (who looked like Bosco's girlfriend, though Bosco was notably absent) sing...uggh...it was just awful. And, this wasn't the only singing portion....and which is why despite it being well animated and well made, I simply didn't enjoy it. The hero is Goopy Geer, a character the studio wanted to groom for stardom but who soon disappeared...something VERY common in early Looney Tunes films. They had a real difficulty coming up with likable and familiar characters for quite a few years...and insipid plots and singing sure didn't help them.