boblipton

Lowell Thomas talks about the planning and eventual building of the Mackinack Straits Bridge. Completed in 1957, it linked lower Michigan to the Upper Peninsula --called locally Yooper.

Thomas spends most of this Jam Handy industrial film praising the engineering work, and it well deserves it. At the time it was the world's longest suspension bridge by several measures. Even today, only 26 are longer.

As for Thomas, he made his bones reporting on Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War. Gifted with a sonorous speaking voice and the ability to write decent prose, he was a popular radio commentator, film narrator, and television correspondent for decades. He largely retired in 1965, and died in 1981 at the age of 89.

Not only do the mice in this particular Arte Moderne neighborhood have dynamite aplenty whenever a cat comes near. They also can push a button and Mighty Mouse will fly down from the Moon to make sure the cats don't do their job and high-priced real estate is infested with vermin. Finally, one enterprising cat come across a book about the Pied Piper. He realizes that mice will follow any swing clarinetist anywhere. And they all do. And no one pushes a button, and yet Mighty Mouse shows up anyway.

I was not enamored of Mighty Mouse as a small child because I knew I would eventually grow up, so I did not identify with mice; certainly, my parents, who despised rats, squirrels, cockroaches and, of course, mice, made me feel loved without the need for some super-powered tyke to appear from nowhere and beat up my enemies. Besides, MM had two plots. One was rescuing Pearl Pureheart from Oilcan Harr, and the other was rescuing large numbers of mice from cats. No matter how you package them and ring changes on a theme, it was one or the other and who cared?

Just like this one.

The lion who's the conductor of an orchestra is having a bad session trying to coach the monkey who plays the tympani to play his one note at the right time. Finally, he succeeds by accident, and off they go to the concert hall, where an elephant sucks the music that is boring the audience out of the air and sprays it onto the tympanist's score in this superior Terrytoon.

The first half is a study in frustration, and adequate if not terribly engrossing. The second half is excellent, and that can be attributed to Paul Terry's musical director, Philip Scheib. What with the major orchestras all being conducted by old men from Europe who lived into their nineties, Hollywood in general and cartoon producers in particular had their pick of musical directors -- except for the Fleischers, who insisted on family. Scheib was fond of opera, and Terry indulged him frequently, and here he really shows the range of the classical music at its stuffiest, and swing at its liveliest.