Holiday Highlights (1940) User Reviews

Has its moments, but this is my least favorite Tex Avery cartoon.

[llltdesq · 7/10 · 23 November 2002]

This cartoon is really atypical of Tex Avery in that entirely too many of the gags are either verbal or sight gags that require verbal assistance to make any sense of at all-a surefire killer for a sight gag. The pacing-largely unavoidable here-is too slow and a few gags just aren't that funny. At least one dies completely. There are moments here, but Avery did this type of short more successfully with other cartoons (such as A Gander At Mother Goose) and, while I still don't think he did any really bad cartoons, this is as close as he came to doing one. Recommended for die-hard Avery fans, who'll watch anything he did (like me).

Fibber McGee's holidays

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 19 March 2010]

As always, Tex Avery lampoons an otherwise "normal" topic with a series of blackout gags. In this case, a number of the year's notable holidays are the target. The part about leap year was apparently an old tradition in which girls were supposed to propose to boys on leap year. George Washington's birthday incorporates the cherry tree...and an Artie Auerbach quote. The characters in the graduation sequence are caricatures of Gildersleeve and Fibber McGee from the radio show "Fibber McGee and Molly".

The part about there being two Thanksgivings is because Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving back a week, which the Republicans didn't like. Just like the current health care bill, they can't agree on anything! Why the absence of St. Patrick's Day and Independence Day? Who knows. All in all, "Holiday Highlights" isn't Avery's best cartoon, but worth seeing, if only once.

When you separate the Wheat from the Chaff . . .

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 28 June 2017]

. . . the core of this rather insipid Merrie Melodies outing from incipient Warner Bros. sell-out, director Tex Avery, is that the moldy Racist piece of parchment from the 1700s, the National Suicide Pact sometimes referred to as the U.S. Constitution--MUST BE REPEALED AND REPLACED, preferably at a peaceful Constitutional Convention (but ultimately, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY) immediately! Though this general message is sprinkled throughout HOLIDAY HIGHLIGHTS by Warner Bros.' always prophetic prognosticators of urgent warnings for We Americans of (The Then) Far Future, it's perhaps spelled out most clearly with the "Election Day Holiday" (no one else has ever placed this event among major celebrations of the USA), which Warner's Animated Shorts Seers boys (aka, The Looney Tuners) mark on the calendar as Nov. 21 for Patriotic True Blue Democrats and Nov. 28 for Red Commie KGB Chief Vlad "The Mad Russian" Putin's co-opted Red Stater Repug Party. This highlights the fact that the Repugs have used the fraudulent Racist "Electoral College" joker clause in the Deplorable 1700s Constitution to Rig Our Election AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE a whopping 5 times (more than 10% of the total, and TWICE in the past 16 years!!), overturning the TRUE Election Day results. That's why the Red Commie Putin Repugs are so desperately inventing Mumbo Jumbo theories of "Originalism" out of Whole Cloth, and why ANYONE paying lip service to such Fascist Tyrannical Malarky is now or shortly will be roasting like the Holiday chestnut over an open fire!