Easy Does It

This here is a 60 year old Cartoon short that ran for 25 minutes. It's about a teen named Joe who's a grocery store employee working at a store that's not doing well because of the products aren't any good to buy. Mostly it's UK cans of beans and peas.

The owner of the store is so unhappy that he'll soon be out of business for good. Ann, the store owner's daughter drops by to see how Joe is doing, after she hears what's news she got an idea to settle the store's debt problem. She goes to the UK Food Prod. Boss who would help Ann's Father if she will go out with him and marry him.

Joe feels like he's out of luck till Easy a little helper boy appears out of no where who knows how to solve the problem. If the products aren't good, then get better products to sell! I enjoyed watching it, even if it's a banned toon. It got banned due to the bad guy acting like a pervert and spanking a girl's but.

It's interesting to watch, just don't show this to a little kid.

This may look like a cartoon because it's animated and starts off with a story, but it quickly reveals itself for what it is: a sales pitch for retailers to stock up on Stokely/Van Camp Foods.

The story involves an old small-grocery store owner, "Mr. Fuddle," who is an unhappy man. The "unknown" brands of products he's trying to sell at his store provide a bigger profit margin but no one buys them and he's in trouble with the bank. "Mr. Squeeze," the bank owner who looks like "Oil Can Harry" in the silent era with the long mustache, also wants Fuddle's daughter Anne for himself. If I get your daughter, your finance problem is solved, he tells the old man. The innocent sweet Anne is a woman in a predicament, and wants to help her father but she's in love with Joe, the good guy clerk of the store.

This is a half-hour "cartoon." The next 20 minutes is the sales pitch as "Easy Does It," a leprechaun-type little guys pops up out of nowhere, takes Joe on a time-travel back to the beginning of the Stokley/Van Camp company and how they became famous. We then how and why the company has the best products and why it pays retailers to stock name brands over unknown brands, blah, blah, blah.

The story finishes up back with the romance you know all will work out in the end thanks to those wonderful products of Stokley/Van Camp.

So - you've been warned: watching this is a total waste of a half-hour viewing time and why this is included in some of these DVDs (at least two I know of) as great unknown or banned cartoon is a mystery. The only thing it should be "banned" for is boredom.

I only give it points for the artwork, which is above-average for something like this, and the only reason I stuck with it all the way through.

As a history teacher and lover of films, I occasionally like watching cartoons that have been banned, as they tell us a lot about our society and how far we have come over the years. What was perfectly acceptable decades ago is now, in some cases, seen as gross and inappropriate. Occasionally, these cartoons which have been removed from screening aren't particularly offensive but often, as in the case of this cartoon, they are so god-awful it's hard to imagine that people would have laughed at and enjoyed these films! Thirteen of these cartoons have been packaged together on a DVD entitled "Cartoon Crazys: Banned and Censored" and while the print quality of many of the cartoons is less than stellar, it's a great chance to see how sensibilities have changed.

When I saw this cartoon, I thought that it probably was never intended to be shown to the general public but was perhaps made by Stokely Foods to be shown to the stockholders. That's because the public never would have stood still for such a blatant infomercial AND because the film had a lot of inappropriate sexual content for a cartoon. Additionally, due to the ravages of time, the print was terrible and looked like it had been dyed orange--with some of the orange color being very, very intense and garish.

Overall, this was a nightmare of dullness. Sitting and listening to a longer than usual length cartoon on the joys of buying Stokely vegetables is about as interesting watching orange paint dry.