User reviews

It's A Captain and the Kids cartoon. John Silver is floating on a raft after his ship got repossessed by the finance company. The radio announces that Captain and The Kids have the winning lottery ticket. John Silver is besides himself and sets off to steal the ticket by dressing like an old lady. The Kids are not fooled.

This is generally fine as A Captain and The Kids cartoon. John Silver is really the lead in this episode and that's fine, too. He probably has the most charisma in this franchise anyways. It's a series of gags where he gets his comeuppance. He gets what he deserves and that's great.

When Long John Silver learns that the Captain has the winning lottery ticket, he invades the house dressed as a woman to steal it.

It's one of the 15 'The Captain and the Kids' cartoons produced by Fred Quimby's unit at MGM in the last two years of the 1930s. Quimby had gone through the various cartoon factories and stolen as much of their top talent as he could. Unfortunately, it's impossible to be sure who directed this, because only Rudolph Dirks was credit as the writer of the comic strip. Some of the gags indicate that Friz Freleng was in charge, as he was so often.

While Long John is certainly an engaging comic villain in this one, the Captain is largely an inert comic butt for his gags, giving him an Elmer-Fudd-like demeanor. Most of the ultimate destruction is left for the kids. The result is an amusing cartoon.

MGM did a series of shorts based on the comic strip The Captain and the Kids. Though beautifully animated, most of them just plain weren't funny. I suspect that was for two reasons: 1) some comic strips that are funny as comic strips just don't translate well to a new medium (this one doesn't) and 2) the Captain is a black hole of comedy-jokes go in and nothing comes out. When the action centers around him, as it all too often did, it doesn't work. The villains are more interesting and the best short of the series (which isn't this one) doesn't focus on The Captain, but is about Silver, the pirate, a much more engaging character. Worth watching, in any case. Recommended for MGM completeists.

Long John Silver hears a report on his radio that the sweepstakes has been won by "The Captain and the Kids", which means, I guess, that they're the only captain and the only kids in the listening area. This and the fact that the family's very mailbox reads "The Captain and the Kids" are the only real moments of awkwardness in this otherwise engaging cartoon which has plenty of good intentional laughs. No director is credited, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Friz Freleng, who directed other episodes in the series and has always had a tendency to put the prime focus on the aggressor/victim (John Silver in this case, a precursor to Yosemite Sam) Keeps the gags cooking all the way to the end. Naturally, Hans and Fritz are no strangers to fireworks.