Flop House

The Columbia Scrappy series was about a small boy and his brother (usually called "Oopie") and various goings on about him. Some of them tended to be pretty weird, but usually they had a good start, even if they ran out of steam halfway through.

This one doesn't. Scrappy is running a flop house and almost all of his guests are animals -- no skunks allowed. Oopie shows up and makes a lot of fuss before getting into bed, where he finds fleas.

It sounds like a pretty grim cartoon for the kids, but it was actually a fairly standard scenario for silent short subjects; even Chaplin tried his hands at one, an aborted projected with a different character called "The Professor." The gags are well executed, they don't sag in the second half and if it's not not deemed suitable for small children nowadays, well, the past is a different country where they do things differently.

The premise for this cartoon short is odd to say the least. Scrappy (a boy) decides to open a flophouse. In the 1930s, this was a super-cheap place for drunks and the very poor to have a bed for the night...with no other niceties. They usually were housed in a very large room and privacy was lacking...which isn't surprising considering how little they charged.

Scrappy is doing great business after fumigating his flop house and setting up shop. However, when Oopy arrives and wants to stay, he is a pest and ends up waking up all the animal residents again and again. Later, Oopy discovers bedbugs...and you'll have to see what's next.

This one has quite a few decent laughs as well as violence (such as Scrappy kicking Oopy many times). This is what made many of the earlier Scrappy films fun...something decidedly lacking in later cartoons from the series.