Stage Fright

The "Merrie Melody" cartoon shows two dogs playing and running into a theater where there appears to be circus equipment. They see a bone and go after it, but push it onto a teeter- totter. From there, the bone goes flying up to a high wire, then back down to a tub of water where a seal resides. They also encounter a hostile little bird who, for some reason, is protecting the bone. The dogs are tormented trying to catch that elusive bone.

How this won an award (some "blue ribbon") is mystifying. It was not funny and the last few minutes were especially non-eventful and weak. This was really lame.

I have no idea if these two dog characters appeared in other shorts from Looney Tunes apart from "The Curious Puppy", but they are certainly the same pair seen in the later short, "Stage Fright". This time, unlike the previous appearance, they are friends and spend the cartoon wandering about together...whereas in the first film, the bigger dog was a guard dog who chased the smaller one incessantly.

In this film, the pair are wandering about a theater at night...when everyone is asleep. There, they encounter a seal, a bird that looks a lot like the Chickenhawk from much later cartoons, a magician's rabbit and more.

While I certainly wouldn't consider this a very good Looney Tunes cartoon, at least it didn't suffer from an overdose of cuteness...a problem with quite a few of their shorts in the pre-war era. On the other hand, there also aren't a lot of laughs and the two characters are far from memorable or endearing. Overall, watchable but a far cry from the funny and wacky later films from Looney Tunes. The animation quality, on the other hand, is terrific.