Bouncing Benny

One thing you can say for the Paramount cartoons; they were consistent. The gang of old guys that had been around since the Fleischer Brothers were in charge. They worked on a generally better stock of cartoons in those days, and from them brought a thousand ideas with them. In other words, they never gave up any gags as finally worn out. Every toe at the beach gets a crab claw, every ear of corn is eaten like a typewriter carriage, every slammed door leaves someone flattened to the wall...and so on.

Old storylines were inexhaustible, too, and their characters like Casper, Little Audrey, Katnip, etc. Were easy to write for, they artlessly made the same cartoon again and again. But when those characters were bought away from them, they had to do the lackluster one-shot "Modern Madcap" series. Here they stole ideas from cartoons made by the hot, big time leaders of the art, the ones that were being talked about, like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. The look of the Paramount cartoons had already been made over with a UPA style makeover, and as cheap and obvious an effect possible.

One of the milestones of 1950s animation was the UPA "Gerald McBoing Boing" series, a boy that bounces like a freed mainspring, and also could speak only in various sound effects. A big hit in the cinema, but also on TV, getting a Network show in 1956.

"Bouncing Benny" is a baby extremely like McBoing-Boing, he looks and bounces around, doesn't get hurt, just upsets things on daddy, gets him in mild mix-ups with a cop and other people. He doesn't have any kind of a trick voice; he's not that interesting. We finish by showing him now as a football playing teenaged boy. Being able to bounce comes drearily useful in winning the game. Just how the Para guys thought they could avoid the comparison is perhaps not the question, they just never cared about the dreck they churned out; they got the same pay and appreciation they did for Baby Huey. A very strange effect in this cartoon- Perhaps in a move to save money, they have reverted back to WWI era animation, in that instead of cels, everything is composed of cutout pieces of paper-sometimes with rather definite shadows of said pieces seen.