“The screen’s first full-length musical comedy cartoon” this Fleischer piece boasted. Hmmmm… wouldn’t that have been Snow White? Anyway, it’s quite good this as Hoppity helps out a colony of creepy crawlies threatened with homelessness by building work. Does he do something desperately anachronistic like try and trek them across the countryside in an ever-more dangerous and increasingly hopeless and pathetic trail for safety only ever postponing the day when the fast pace of human progress overtakes them, like that idiot fox in The Animals Of Farthing Wood? Nope, Hoppity isn’t daft and leads them up to the penthouse of the new block where they may partake of the central heating and eat their fill. On the up-side, Hoppity is voiced by Jack ‘Popeye’ Mercer; on the down-side the songs by Hoagy Carmichael are pretty rubbish. Makes a change from Disney anyway.
Tom Ronson
May 23, 2022 at 11:58 pm
I remember seeing this on BBC1 one afternoon in the early eighties (4th January 1983, according to the Radio Times Genome site), and at one point the telecine machine started playing up and the picture rolled repeatedly. That was the most memorable thing that happened.
Richardpd
May 24, 2022 at 10:05 pm
Fleischer studios tried hard to compete with Disney with this & Gulliver’s Travels but stretched things too thin.
I can remember seeing this sometime in the early 1990s, no telecine problems but it was fairly good from what I remember.