The Rocky Road to Ruin

...AKA 'A Slice of Life."

The hero, Handsome Harry, is poor, honest, hard-working and pure as the driven snow. The villain, first cousin to Sniveley Whiplash, is deceitful, mean, contrary, selfish and a down-right ornery cuss who would steal and hock his mother's false teeth. The pretty heroine is, at best, fickle and a front-running gold-digger but Harry is smitten with her and yearns for her hand in holy matrimony, but she opts to marry the villain and his money-bags. Years go by and Hero continues to study and work hard in the hopes his fair lady will become his. More years go by, and all concerned are aged with gray, and the heroine decides Handsome Harry is her man. The villain, Whiplash's cousin, takes up with young chorus girls for consolation.

Lesson No. 1: Be honest and work hard...and get the left-overs.

Lesson No. 2: Trade in the old model while it still has value to someone.

During Dave Fleischer's brief period running Columbia's cartoon department, he set a high standard. He liked his cartoons with a constant stream of jokes and this one, clearly modeled on Chuck Jones THE DOVER BOYS, based on bad children's books from the Mauve Decade, has them in goodly number. The villain looks like he is modeled on the villain from Jones' cartoon.

Most interesting, though, are the visuals. They are angular and highly stylized, a good deal like the rough, impressionist style that UPA would adopt in the coming decade, but clearly more intended for humorous effect than for artistry. In fact, it has the look of bad woodblock work, the sort of thing that might be seen in a poor Stratmeyer Syndicate volume.

The point of these effects is to amuse. If your memories of those cheap series books is less than pleasurable, this one should offer you plenty of chuckles.