Tramping Tramps

In this cartoon, Oswald and Pete are two hobos traveling across the country during the Depression. They stop at a farmhouse after spotting some pie cooling on a windowsill and approach it. One gag in this cartoon that I enjoy is when the lady of the house uses Oswald's ear to cut a slice of pie for him. Another gag I enjoy is that of Oswald creating a saxophone out of a log. He then uses it to play various tunes. One of which has a scarecrow dancing like a Hasidic Jew. Like many cartoons of the early sound era, an outhouse gag is shown with someone stepping out. This cartoon, produced at the Walter Lantz studios could very well be a remake of an earlier Disney Oswald titled HUNGRY HOBOES.

Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.

Not all the Walter Lantz cartoons are bad, 'Permanent Wave' and 'The Hash Shop' for examples are perfect proof of that, but some of them are not good representations of Oswald or Lantz and for historical interest only. There have been worse cartoons of theirs before and since 'Tramping Tramps', but almost all the Disney and Winkler era Oswald cartoons are much better and 'Tramping Tramps' is not a patch on the best of those two eras.

'Tramping Tramps' sound quality for a cartoon so old and techniques still in its early days is not as primitive as it could have been. Some of the gags do work, especially the ear and the saxophone gags.

The music is as energetic as ever too, and Oswald, while having much better material and deserving of it, is still pretty endearing. Pete is a great partner.

On the other hand, even for an Oswald cartoon (which are not exactly to be seen for their stories), to say that the story is flimsy is an understatement, it's barely there that it's easy to say that there isn't one. Some of the pacing lacks sharpness and a couple of the gags suffer from over-predictability and less than crisp timing.

Unusually, the animation is not great when most of the time in Oswald cartoons it's good. It's crudely drawn, the transitions has a tendency to look choppy and incomplete and the backgrounds lack detail and yes primitive. Only in Oswald's remarkably natural and very imaginative movements, expressions and gestures does it shine in a good way.

On the whole, average Oswald. 5/10 Bethany Cox