Nursery Crimes

The narrator tries out a decent Lionel Barrymore voice impersonation to narrate an explanation of several nursery rhymes in this uninteresting Columbia cartoon directed by Al Geiss.

The principal issue I have with this cartoon is the slow set-up and mediocre gags. Each nursery rhyme gets one joke at the conclusion of the song, and that means that audience expectation is set pretty high.... for a well-animated but poor payoff.

It is one of the poorest cartoons produced during Dave Fleischer tenure as the head of cartoon production at Columbia. At Fleischer -- the cartoon factory he co-owned with his brother Max -- Dave would try to cram as many jokes into each cartoon as he could. The slow pace imposed by the structure of this cartoon is annoying.