Amoozin' But Confoozin'

I had heard the short lived "Li'l Abner" theatrical cartoon series was bad - in fact, I heard the series was shelved for a year before actually being screened - but I was absolutely FLOORED by how unbelievably awful they were upon actually seeing them. Each subsequent entry actually was something of an improvement on what came before, but when you consider the unbelievable bad quality of this first entry, that's not saying much! The story (hah!) is garbled and quickly crumbles away to a series of slapstick events. The design and animation quality resembles that of porn animation in the 1970s.

Actually... I have heard suggestions that the animation quality was a lot better. The facts indicate that while the series was originally in color, Columbia Pictures lost the color negatives and only had B&W negatives. So they shipped them off to Korea for people there to trace the negatives and color them. Considering that the quality of this cartoon (and others in the series) matches those of B&W animated shorts by Warner Brothers that went through the same process, I am willing to give producer Dave Fleischer and his crew the benefit of the doubt for the quality of the animation. Though even towards the end of the series, the stories were still extremely weak.

As a LiL Abner fan (of sorts) from the papers, I found this pretty good! Someone "restored" this and posted it on Youtube using black and white version parts to fill in for (I guess) missing color parts, if that was the case they did a good job. Its posted as the title "Amoozin' But Confoozin', if you are looking for it. I had never noticed "A Columbia Favorite" brand of cartoons before so that was a nice discovery for me, maybe the title cards were changed if they were shown later on TV. Grannie is like Popeye here which Columbia was also making cartoons of, so I guess they have privilege to use his mannerisms here. The artwork is a nice 1940s quality. All in all, it seems it's not getting a lot of love from cartoon enthusiasts but I thought it was interesting and funny at times. I enjoyed it better then the live action musical, I'll look for the others they made now! 7 of 10, especially if you are a LA fan.