The City Slicker

Charles Mintz brought the world Scrappy, a rather unusual little cartoon boy. In the beginning of the Scrappy shorts, he was rather violent and mean...which made him also quite funny. However, over time Scrappy's antics were toned down a bit...and the shorts became more boring. Eventually, by the time of "The City Slicker", the character became a bit hard to take.

When the story begins, Scrappy gets off a train in the country to see his cousin Elmer. However, instead of being nice to Elmer, Scrappy plays all sorts of nasty tricks on him and you are not at all surprised when Elmer eventually turns the tables on him.

The biggest problem in this is while Scrappy is a jerk (something I like in the older films), here' he's an UNLIKABLE jerk....and it makes him tiresome and annoying. You can see why cartoons like this helped to kill off the character. Not especially fun to watch and the animation is not quite up to the standards of rival studios like Disney, Looney Tunes and the Fleischer Brothers.

Scrappy takes the train to rural Squeedonk to visit his cousin Elmer down on the farm. Armed with a joy-buzzer, he and Elmer torment each other in this unappealing cartoon.

While Scrappy, under originator Dick Huemer, often had the problem of a strong start and not enough material to fill out a cartoon, by this point Scrappy had become a generic kid's cartoon, filled with whatever material would fill in six minutes. Scrappy is not appealing, nor is his adenoidal rube cousin, and their series of practical jokes has no structure other than the length of the cartoon.

In addition, the technical issues are annoyingly at odds, with some beautifully detailed and three-dimension background work pointing out the unfinished, flat design of the characters. Under Huemer, Scrappy had been about the bizarre imagination of kids. Now it was about.... well, I don't know what it was supposed to be about, other than filling in a schedule.