Charley on the Farm

Just before he hit it big with Felix the Cat, Pat Sullivan did a handful of Charley Chaplin cartoons for Universal Pictures. In this one, as you might guess, the Tramp gets a job on a farm.

Many of the gags are lifted from Chaplin's THE TRAMP, four years old at the time Sullivan and Otto Messmer were working on this one. It's interesting that they borrowed some of their techniques from this series for Felix, or perhaps they were standard in the still young animation field. When Chaplin laughs at his own antics, his shoulders shake in a high-speed shrug, as Felix's would later. Characters speak in word balloons, as they did in the comic strips, not in intertitles like other films.

Chaplin spent much of 1919 working on THE KID and suing several of his more blatant imitators. Perhaps this was why Sullivan shifted to cartoons about Felix, who spent the next decade as the most popular animated cartoon series.

This cartoon was very hard to find for many years. Ben Model has put one of his typically humorous piano scores to it and made it available on his ACCIDENTALLY PRESERVED DVD series and Youtube.

Charlie Chaplin was so popular that even though he made a ton of comedy shorts, the public wanted more. Some studios tried using Chaplin look-a-likes such as Billy West to try to meet that need. But Sullivan and Mesmer came up with a novel idea....put Chaplin's Little Tramp character in cartoons. The best part about this was that they wouldn't have to pay Chaplin a dime and they'd capitalize on his reputation. Unscrupulous, of course and not particularly funny as you can see in "Charley on the Farm".

The film begins with the Tramp being tossed off a train. He soon sees a help wanted sign at a nearby farm and takes the job. Again and again, he makes a mess of things and ultimately decides being a tramp is much more fun!

While I was not impressed in the least by this cartoon, that same year the studio came up with a wonderful original character which made them a fortune...Felix the Cat. My advice is to find one of these early Felix cartoons instead!