Date with Duke

Saw this just resently, was almost as I remembered it from so long ago. George Pal gave us so much imagination over a long time span. Bless these good folk for being there. Hard work, created with love! And to think...if the Nazis had their way... there would have been nothing!

Thank God for America giving these poor souls a safe haven and a new life - so they could produce good things to enrich our lives!

I first saw this George Pal animated short some years ago on American Movie Classics,when that station was worth watching. It incorporates animation with live action (okay,nothing new in itself---but stop motion puppet animation with live action?). Duke Ellington is seated at a piano,when several figures pop out of a series of bottles to interact with Ellington (and perform with him,as well). As musical shorts were the in thing at the time, George Pal's stop motion animation was a major plus on this short, which is sadly missing these days from the airwaves (the Paramont live action shorts,like the animated ones are hard to track down,due to the fact that the original distributors that sold the 16 & 35mm prints to television in the mid 1950's/early to mid 1960's had all gone out of business by the late 1960's,leaving behind some battered & scratchy prints that sometimes turned up on late night television). I'm sure some of the George Pal Puppet Toons can be found on various video compilations on budget video releases (check your local department stores)

At the urging of a bunch of perfume bottles, Duke Ellington plays -- what else? -- his Perfume Suite. A turban-headed grouch objects to music and dancing, until Ellington begins to play.

Do they still have those elaborate blown-glass perfume bottles? They had gone out of style when I was a child more than sixty years ago. My mother kept her perfume -- usually Chanel No. 5 -- in a cut-glass aerosol But the joy of this Puppetoon is, of course, the lovely way that Pal's cameraman, William Snyder, lights Ellington, and the variety of angles he shoots from. Even with what is an elaborate synchronized cartoon like this, you need to keep it visually interesting.