Flowers for Madame

During the 1930s, most cartoons were black & white. When Technicolor brought out its three-color system, Disney singed a contract to use them exclusively for several years...so other studios stuck with black & white or tried Cinecolor and other two-color systems...film stock which had a very limited range of colors...mostly orangey-red and greenish-blue.

Because of this exclusive agreement, I was shocked when I saw "Flowers for Madame", as it was full color....with colors simply not possible with Cinecolor, such as purple and yellow. IMDB doesn't say what type of film stock was used....and I thought in 1935 Disney still had an exclusive contract. Could this be some other company's film stock? All I know is that it is unexpectedly vivid.

Because I was confused about the color spectrum in the cartoon, I did a bit of research and found that Disney's exclusive deal with Technicolor expired in mid to late 1935 and this cartoon is indeed in three-color Technicolor...and the first by Looney Tunes. And, because it was the first, it appeared as if the studio deliberately made the cartoon more colorful than usual...to the point of almost being garish at times.

The cartoon features lots of singing and dancing flowers (sort of like Disney's "The Flowers and the Trees") and there apparently is some sort of flower pageant. Like many Looney Tunes cartoons of this era, a baddie arrives and tries to spoil the day (in this case, some fire) and a cactus tries to save the day.

Cute characters, singing and dancing....yick! But despite hating the insipid plot, I must at least commend the cartoon for its great animation. As for the full color it was nice but a bit of restraint might have made it better.

In one of Friz Freleng's early cartoons, a bunch of flowers have a big parade, complete with floats. I of course was half expecting there to be an "Animal House"-style finale, but something uglier happened. As this was in the early days of Warner Bros. animation, we needn't expect any of the full-scale wackiness that characterized their work in the '40s and '50s. But either way, it's a worthy look into the beginning of what would soon be one of the most popular cartoon series of all time. It's available on YouTube, but has probably been altered a little: the YouTube version starts with the zooming WB shield, whereas the 1935 cartoons began with the credits against a plain background (and ended with a court jester saying "That's all, folks!").