Tangled Travels

I've never seen a cartoon from the 40's as bad as this one. Usually, cartoons from that era had a high standard of quality, but it's as if the artists who made this cartoon didn't even bother to try.

A parody of travelogues, it is filled with nothing but bad puns one can see coming a mile away. (Travels? Mile? There's a bad pun there somewhere. If I could figure it out, I could write for Columbia.) The pacing is slow and dull, and there is actually very little in the way of character animation. Most of the cartoon consists of some object animated over live action photographs for backgrounds, to illustrate yet another excruciating pun. One starts to feel that the people responsible for this cartoon were somnambulists or at least addicted to morphine at the time.

Columbia/ Screen Gems had a poor track record in terms of producing good cartoons, and this is their worst effort by far. In fact, it's the worst cartoon from that era, period.

Watch it only if you are interested in the history of Hollywood cartoons from the golden age, and how some animators could go so very far astray. Otherwise, avoid.

Dave Barry does a fractured Greek accent as he recounts how he made a travelogue, filled with visual puns. Across a photographed landscape, the artists add drawn representations, so that Palm Springs becomes scrubland with metal springs with palm leaves on top. And so on. For almost seven minutes.

It grows tiresome before it's done.

This was a spoof of travelogue shorts shown in theatres in the '30s and '40s as filler before the double feature. You hear some stereotypical Swedish voice narrating while we're looking at some animated figures moving over some live-action backgrounds. There are mostly literal jokes (babbling brook with a bunch of dismembered mouths moving loudly, weeping willows with many of them crying, etc.) that are very lamely depicted here (they lack the pacing of a Tex Avery cartoon that might have done wonders). Dave Fleischer is the credited producer here and, compared to the shorts he collaborated with his brother Max, is not well served. The fault of this cartoon's lameness goes to writer/director Alec Geiss. Nothing here is funny except the ending since it reflects my feelings exactly. So unless you're an animation buff who's curious about this, I wouldn't recommend Tangled Travels.