As the Fly Flies

The plummy-voiced narrator of this late Columbia black and white cartoon interviews Professor Igor Puzzlewitz and quizzes him on his newest Rube-Goldbergesque invention to swat flies. Chaos ensues.

Rube Goldberg was an American engineer, inventor and cartoonist, so beloved that the cartoonists' society named their award after him. He is best remembered for his cartoon inventions which involved ornate and ridiculous series of conveyor belts, heating tubes, alarm clocks, hens in cages and electric doorbells to accomplish simple, everyday tasks. That's what we have here, and full advantage is taken of the black and white illustrations to emphasize the way things move. This was a rough period for Columbia cartoons, but this is one of the better ones from the period.

The funniest thing about this cartoon is how the director, Howard Swift, initially disliked the story and gags he was given to this but was practically forced to use them anyway, because rejecting a story at the identity crisis Screen Gems studio would mean you'd be behind schedule, goes to show how low the budgets were at the time.

Short has nothing going with it with lethargically slow pacing. It basically involves a soy boy Luigi esq professor hiding and whining as Columbia (gee get it?) interviewers and paparazzis want to know what machine he's making. It takes about two minutes to even get to that as we get tiredly unfunny gags inbetween like the professor riding a unicycle, wearing a Napoleon hat, and looking through a pipe like a submarine periscope.

Eventually the professor explains what his machine is, a FLY machine, which for some reason is this humongous large contraption that has a whole room and everything on the inside, but all we see of how it works is a very small portion outside at the side of the machine, both literally and metaphorically. We see a phoney female fly of a small little house luring its victim through a door, as the professor lights a match with a wheel of fireworks, setting off a gun with a bullet that's shot inside a french horn as it lands on a button, activating a conveyer belt that moves the small house into the swatter. This is all we see of how this machine works and it appears to be a small portion of the actual thing.

With about 2 minutes and 30 seconds left, we enter into the machine itself, the professor's "laboratory", but all he does is explain a brief historical explanation of killing flies before, unsurprisingly, an actual fly (is it female?) comes into the laboratory and starts pesting the professor which angers the guy and spends the rest of cartoon trying to a shoot a fly with his gun, but keeps destroying his machinery despite the rest pleading not to. Predictability doesn't listen, destroys the machine, thinks he killed the fly but the fly turns out to be alive as we go back outside of where the cartoon starts. Oh yeah since this was made around the height of WW2, gotta force in that V for Victory stuff as the fly hums Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

Voice actor Harry Lang does a fine job with what he's given for the dunded professor, however John McLeish feels unneccesarily over the top with his deliveries as the interviewers, which he fared better before with Jack Kinney and Chuck Jones. There is some nice animation provided by Grant Simmons and I think an uncredited Volus Jones in certain scenes, however they cannot save such first draft material.

3/10.