Nutty News (1942) User Reviews

Black Out in Black and White

[boblipton · 8/10 · 17 November 2008]

A series of black-out gags, the sort of tidbits you might get in the news reels in the era, but sharply written by Warren Foster, beautifully directed by the inimitable Bob Clampett and narrated in the radio-perfect voice of --- Elmer Fudd? While a couple fall flat, you might get an idea of how good this is by comparing it to HOBBY HORSE LAFFS, produced by Termite Terrace the same year, but written by Melvin Miller and directed by Norm McCabe, who would disappear into the army later in the year and who would never direct a cartoon again.

Schlesinger was moving production towards all color shorts, but there would be a few more through 1943, mostly directed by Frank Tashlin. By the end of 1944, all major cartoon production in the US would be in color.

Though many of my fellow Warnologists misapprehend that this brief cartoon contains . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 22 August 2017]

. . . many Warner Bros. warnings to We Americans of (The Then) Far Future from Warner's crack team of Animated Shorts Seers (aka, the Looney Tuners) about Red Commie KGB Chief Vlad "The Mad Russian" Putin and his Deplorable White House Sock Puppet Don Juan Rump, a close examination of NUTTY NEWS proves that this may NOT be the case. True, the moose in the opening scene strongly resembles Putin and the moose's lackey duped hunter bears a resemblance to Rump. True, the Italian barber's mechanism for facilitating unruly toddler haircuts puts one in mind of Rump's frequent 3 AM Tweet Storms. It should go without saying that the salacious "Frank Punny" artist sketching a young nude female model smacks of Rump's Terroristic Invasion of the Moscow changing room full of naked cringing teens culled from around the world for one of Rump's "Sex Tourism" so-called "Beauty Pageants." It's almost a given that the fireflies screaming "It's a Blackout" in the American South call to mind Putin's Black voter suppression efforts throughout the USA in the 2016 Rigged Presidential Election. And the rabbits multiplying sequence may foreshadow for some this week's USA Today cover story about the U.S. Secret Service being forced to mandate mind-boggling UNPAID overtime hours for its Special Agents to keep up with all the FOR-PROFIT (and often Highly Treasonous) Globe Trotting of the burgeoning Rump clan. The "chickens can't swim" segment prognosticates Steve Bannon's figurative drowning last week for some. And the Loyal Patriotic 99 Per Center Normal Average True Blue Union Label American picketing the city construction site (6:21) may seem like one of Warner's frequent reminders that Lucifer's Three C's (Communism, Conservatism, and Job-Killing Corrupt Corporate Capitalism) are now, in our "Enlightened" 21st Century, fully interchangeable, just as the episode of the "Lead Dog" of the Fox Hunt pack making out WITH THE FOX ITSELF (!!, 5:54) could Harken Forward to the infamous and on-going Bromance between Putin and Rump (further hinted at by the fact that NUTTY NEWS shares an MPAA censorship number--7987--with something called TULIPS SHALL GROW, a title conjuring up Putin's top White House Operative, Third Lady Melancholia Rump and her pair of two lips Down There).

However, it's probably the consensus of Today's Leading Warnologists that the key passage of NUTTY NEWS is when famed baseball pitcher "Carl Bubble" unsuccessfully tries to emulate George Washington in tossing a silver dollar across our National Capital's Potomac River. This bit is based upon Real Life New York Giants Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell, #11, who racked up 253 victories (against only 154 defeats) from 1928 through 1943. Though this season's few remaining Detroit Tigers fans are currently plopping down seven bucks a shot for Ty Cobb Statue Souvenir Cups (as will some of the Deplorable Yankees Fellow Travelers tonight in Detroit), NONE of these plastic one quart pop cups are being purchased by any Bengal Aficionado who's viewed NUTTY NEWS. Such a masochistic exercise would be like rubbing salt into a fresh wound. WHO can forget that it was these very same sad-sack Tigers who signed Hubbell to his first contract, or that it was this very same Cobb--as the Tigers' player-manager--who kept Hubbell in the bush leagues for THREE YEARS just because Cobb hated Hubbell's "screwball" (aka, the "Fadeaway Pitch")?