The Pied Piper of Basin Street

Walter Lantz used jazz music to score quite a few cartoons because the head of his music department liked jazz and knew some musicians personally. Jack Teagarden was one of the musicians who appeared on the soundtracks to at least two of the better musical shorts, the magnificent Sliphorn King of Polaroo and this one, that's almost as good. Here the Pied Piper plays swing on a trombone to rid the town of rats and the mayor sounds like Lou Costello. Wonderful cartoon that should be available. Well worth tracking down and getting. Most highly recommended.

. . . is the part when the title character, having been trumped and swindled out of his contractual fee, retaliates by piping all but one of the town's children into the Rat Cave to which he'd conducted thousands of voracious rodents the previous week. Though a lagging kid on crutches survives to tell the preamble of what happened to all of his faster walking peers, the ravenous rats make short work of the sun-blinded youths who are able to flail around and scream in the total darkness for a relatively brief matter of hours until the last one is consumed. Unfortunately, as the heading THE PIED PIPER OF BASIN STREET implies, this tamer version packs little of a wallop, pulling the original's punches, with the short-changed piper-turned-trombone-tooter simply trucking the rats back to town and throwing a concert for the local teenagers. Universal may fancy itself America's FRANKENSTEIN MUMMY DRACULA House of Horror, but it's a horrible shame how they've corrupted the King of the Rats in this flick.

Before watching, part of me was not sure as to whether it would work. The Swing Symphony series did prove with 'The Hams that Couldn't be Cured' that it could do twists on famous stories and characters remarkably well. What made me unsure at first is that 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is when reading it through adult eyes at the end is surprisingly unsettling, so wasn't sure whether a swing family friendly version would lend itself well.

Of all the Swing Symphony cartoons, 'The Pied Piper of Basin Street' surprised me the most. It actually is not an adaptation, it has elements of it in the first half but the whole second half is as far removed as possible pretty much. The swing music spin is done incredibly well, one doesn't need to worry about any stereotyping and there is more of a discernible story than most Swing Symphony cartoons. As far as the series goes, this is easily one of the best.

Maybe it is a slight slow starter, but really finding any faults with 'The Pied Piper of Basin Street' was not easy at all.

Everything else is never less than excellent. The music is again wonderful. Full of exuberance, lushly orchestrated and harmonised and the arrangements are remarkably creative and a lot of fun to listen to. The use of sound effects were clever too. The animation is fluid and vibrant, the attention to detail meticulous and far from sparse.

All of the gags are cleverly timed and range from very funny to hilarious, was not expecting a spin on this story to be like this. The ending and the Lou Costello impression are priceless. The story is more eventful than most Swing Symphony cartoons, most of them have non existent stories and are basically a series of gags whereas there is a plot here in the first half. Where familiar elements of the original story can be seen. The final third is wonderfully upbeat.

Concluding, excellent. 9/10.