Wild Wild World

This cartoon, which has some funny moments, but isn't really terribly novel, uses an old gag about finding an old reel of film that it purports shows "life as it was", way back whenever. The narrator is a spoof on Dave Garroway, a television personality back in the 1950s and 1960s. If memory serves, he was one of the first, if not the first, to host the "Today" show. What follows are a number of gags (lots of sight gags) and a very loose plot, the kind of thing Tex Avery did to better effect twenty years and more earlier. The ending is telegraphed rather obviously. Okay, but nothing special.

I remember having seen Robert McKimson's "Wild Wild World" on TV when I was about five. I only loosely understood it - I mostly interpreted cavemen hitting dinosaurs with clubs - and my favorite part was the end scene. Now that I'm old enough to understand the cartoon, I feel that it begs the question of how the future will see our society. Specifically, what will they think of certain choices that we made (or didn't make)? OK, so maybe that doesn't really matter. Most of the jokes in this cartoon are the sort of innocuously silly gags that characterized many of the celebrity spoofs seen in Warner Bros. cartoons. Among other things, by the time that this cartoon came out, the Warner Bros. animation department had clearly passed its prime - after "What's Opera, Doc?", they could only go down - to the point that the studio heads closed the animation department in 1963. An OK cartoon.