Chili Weather

Well, I was up late the other night looking through the archives of the Looney Toons website, and I came across this little show piece from 1963. I'm not going to go hard on something of the same year as my mother, but I found this short to be a dare I say 'Recycled' version of Freling's "I Gopher you" from 9 years earlier. But instead of Mac and Tosh the gophers attempting to rescue a stolen crop of vegetables, it featured Speedy Gonzales and Sylvester in the situation they pioneered years earlier.

The hungry mice of Mexico crave the delicious products of a Mexican food processing plant, alas, Sylvester the cat is guarding the doors. Then, Speedy Gonzales shows up to help the mice out. He infiltrates the plant, and leads Sylvester through a number of machines and devices featured in "I gopher you", such as the bottling system, the automated cleavers, that crushing machine, and the dehydrator.

This cartoon uses exact reanimated duplicates of scenes featured in "I gopher you", such as the Orange Juicer, and Sylvester's decent into the Dehydrator. I have to give praise to a few new gags, such as Sylvester landing in a vat of Tobasco sauce. All in all, I have to recommend "I gopher you" in Lou of "Chili Weather" as the animation is much better, and I prefer a score by Carl Stalling over Bill Lava. However, if you cannot find "I gopher you", you should watch this. 6 out of 10.

While sometimes, I've worried that the Termite Terrace crowd might have been running short of ideas in the '60s, they certainly had a good idea with "Chili Weather". I pretty much always like seeing Speedy Gonzales making mincemeat out of predators, especially since he does so for a good cause*. And here, as The Fastest Mouse In Me-hi-co escapes - and before too long tortures - Sylvester to steal cheese for his friends, it's all good. I understand that these cartoons may be stereotyping Mexicans as sombrero-clad wackos, but as long as we understand that, we can enjoy the cartoons for what they were intended to be. Andale!

*According to the viewer and the mice, this is a good cause. In most cases, we probably wouldn't condone stealing things. But these guys had a good reason in that they were hungry.

With this Speedy cartoon, almost everything just clicks. This is one of the better ones made in the 1960s. Sylvester is an excellent choice as a foil for Speedy and Speedy, who is really kind of bland when you think about it a bit, actually is kind of interesting in this one. Though the best Speedys have an ancillary character that makes the cartoon special (like Slowpoke Rodriguez, for example) this one is good enough without one to be memorable. But if Daffy were the adversary, it would have died of boredom inside of the first three minutes, tops. Worth the time to track down. Recommended.

Chilli Weather has a great idea and title, and is reasonably entertaining, if you get across the bland art work, standard story line and uneven pacing. I am not a huge Speedy fan, but I can tolerate him, and he is tolerable here, while Sylvester serves well as the butt of the joke and has a lot of pain inflicted on him by the end. The dialogue is amusing, and I liked the sight gags they were at least clever and fun. And while the music score is not the best or most creative, it is listenable. I may sound like a broken record praising Mel Blanc and his vocal characterisations, but they do deserve a mention as they are consistently great. Overall, not bad an attempt, not quite as good as it could have been, but hey this was entertaining that's all that matters. 7/10 Bethany Cox