Friday, January 2, 2009

Walter Lantz's TAIL OF THE MONKEY (1926)

Many of you are probably familiar with Walter Lantz for having created Woody Woodpecker. Lantz's career dates back to the late 1910s as a teenager and budding professional in the animation industry. His first major and lengthy employment was at the Bray Studios, where he first worked on series like Jerry on the Job and later took over the revived Colonel Heeza Liar series, this time actually acting in live action segments of the films much like Max Fleischer in his Out of the Inkwell films.
By 1924, Col. Heeza Liar would again become defunct so at this point Lantz created his own character, Dinky Doodle who had a canine sidekick named Weakheart. Starting in 1925, he also created the Pete the Pup series, which is less known today and deemed by some as merely being "Dinky Doodle in a dog costume".
Although I have a Dinky Doodle cartoon uploaded on youtube (and probably linked here on the blog, too), The Unnatural History cartoons remain rarely seen and even harder to find if you go looking for them. I've got a handful and of course will eventually have plans to find more and make them available at some point.

So, fans and historians, I welcome you to discuss this forgotten Lantz film from his early and perhaps most autonomous period while at the Bray Studios.

1 comment:

Craig D said...

I had never seen any of the "Unnatural History" shorts before!

I'll have to go back through my Lantz biography because I'm drawing a complete blank on not only the series, by Lantz having worked with David Hand!

The short, itself, was kinda "blah" IMO. I'm willing to bet there are better ones in the series.

Least ways it wasn't a percival pig cartoon!