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00:00Ah, All's Fair at the Fair, audio track commentary.
00:23This is Jerry Beck, assisted by Mike Kozala.
00:27Hello there.
00:29And this is a great cartoon that they produced in 1938, excuse me, August 26, 1938 is when
00:41it was released.
00:44It's pretty obvious this is a tie-in to the 1939 World's Fair, which was being built,
00:49I guess, in 38.
00:51And what's interesting is that, and it's interesting that in Flushing Meadows, I grew
00:56up in Flushing, and it was an ash dump.
00:59It was a dump, and they built the World's Fair over this dump, and that's exactly what
01:03you sort of see here.
01:04And then it turned into a dump again.
01:06And it's, they try to, there's a variant here of the Trillon and the Perisphere, I believe,
01:13which was the symbol of the fair, but they're trying not to be the New York World's Fair,
01:18they're just trying to be a World's Fair in general.
01:20Which gives them an excuse to show off a lot of modern inventions.
01:23They did a lot of cartoons like that at the Fleischer Studios, particularly with Grampy
01:28and Betty Boop showing off new inventions, crazy, wacky, they love doing that.
01:33It's definitely a Fleischer trait, possibly inspired by Max Fleischer, who invented a
01:38lot of things in the teens and twenties.
01:43And as usual for these cartoons, there's a great little song about all's fair at the
01:46fair.
01:47And very futuristic, gives us that, what is that, Art Deco, or Art Moderne, or what is
01:55that?
01:56It's a kind of an Art Deco style that was prevalent just before the war.
02:01Now this, here's our lead character, some hayseeds, coming to the big city to go to
02:09the fair.
02:10Bearing in mind that the hayseeds weren't driving sport utility vehicles yet.
02:15That long way we've come.
02:18If only these people could see into the future and know that.
02:26Now this is sort of one of the earliest ones where some of the animators coming back
02:32to Fleischer from the Disney Studios, or...
02:35Fleischer, this is one of the Waldmans.
02:38Oh, now we're going to scratch with that comment I just made.
02:46But it does have a real flair, I mean, excuse me, this cartoon really has a real slick polish
02:52to it.
02:53That's what I like about it.
02:55I'm wondering, I guess this also may have been one of the first cartoons done in Florida,
02:59although I've never actually taken account of where the Florida cartoons start.
03:05The general cleanliness to the cartoons that were done in the Florida, Miami studio.
03:12The Fleischers moved to Miami around 19, I think in late 37 or early 38 to start working
03:19on Gulliver's Travels, their feature film.
03:24And the films take on a slicker look.
03:29Now mind you, due to the nature of this cartoon, they would have wanted it to look slick in
03:34any case.
03:35Right.
03:36It was supposed to be modern and futuristic.
03:39Now there were other World's Fair cartoons that I can think of, maybe I'm wrong, but
03:47remind me Mike, there's Modern Inventions with Donald Duck.
03:51Yeah, and there's Post-War Inventions with Gandhi and Sour Puss.
03:55And there's also one called Dog Gone Modern, which was a Chuck Jones Too Curious Dog cartoon,
04:00which I think takes place in a house of tomorrow at a World's Fair, I believe.
04:06It's like the other Fleischer cartoon, Little Lambie or Little Lambkins.
04:11One of those.
04:12One of them.
04:13Don't get them confused, folks.
04:22This cartoon makes me thirsty.
04:23Yeah, even in black and white, it had that effect.
04:29They're getting a haircut and a shave.
04:31This is sort of reminiscent of the scene in The Wizard of Oz, which came out a year
04:37later where Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the other characters are getting spruced up
04:44before they see the wizard.
04:51Yeah, it's interesting the contrast between these kind of old-style characters and this
05:02really modern-looking scenery, but that's part of the point of the cartoon because they're
05:08trying to show it to you from the perspective of these country folks.
05:22A mud pack.
05:28Waldman.
05:29I think Waldman may have animated this scene.
05:31I'm saying that because one of the traits that I believe Waldman did was what I call
05:35the vertical eye, the vertical eyes for expressing some motion or shock or whatever.
05:44The eyes get very thin and tall.
05:47I just noticed it before on this woman.
05:52Oh, if it were only that simple.
05:59The educational features they did, they did one based on Einstein's theory of relativity
06:04and another one based on Darwin's theory of evolution.
06:08Mainly, they were live-action films, but they had animated inserts in them.
06:13They were probably the first people to put animation in features.
06:19They also experimented with Dr. Lee DeForest and made a few of his phono films, which was
06:25the early version of sound on film, and that was done in 1924.
06:37Another thing I really like in Fleischer cartoons, particularly in the late 30s through the 40s,
06:43is the lettering.
06:46I know it's a strange thing to mention, but...
06:48No, it's not a strange thing to mention.
06:50They always had very classy-looking lettering in their pictures.
06:53The calligraphy of the titles is very cool, and I've tried throughout the years to figure out
06:58who did it exactly, and I don't have any definitive answer.
07:03A lot of answers I'd gotten from veterans who I'd talked to, I'd ask.
07:07They just said the background department or whoever was doing the backgrounds,
07:11but I think there must have been one person, actually, or maybe two,
07:16that had this particular style that the Fleischer's favored.
07:20It's in their opening titles, the credits, and whenever lettering was needed in the backdrops.
07:28It's very distinctive, very cool.
07:35Fleischer's used dancing a lot in their films.
07:39I don't know who their dance specialist was, because you'd think it would be a particular animator or two.
07:44I bet, no, not really.
07:47Most of the units did that.
07:52Well, this is before the Internet. Today you can buy a car through the Internet.
07:55Back then it was through a vending machine.
07:58I think the Japanese actually invented a car like this, where you can put it together.
08:09Il y a cette ligne de vitesse.
08:12Oui, c'est toujours un effet qui a l'air sympa.