This one’s Sunday Clothes, and it’s the third Scrappy film, released on September 15th, 1931. Like the first two, it’s a stream-of-consciousness assemblage of gags about a given topic, and simply ends rather than reaching any sort of crescendo. But some of the drawings are funny: Scrappy gamboling along in his fancy duds remains amusing in exactly the way it must have been eighty-one years ago.
Here’s Uncle John’s perceptive writeup of the short.
I’m blessed to own a nice animation drawing from this cartoon. Actually, it’s the only Scrappy animation drawing I’ve ever seen. (But oh, how I hope that there’s a large supply of them safely stashed somewhere.) Here’s mine…
That was a pretty nifty cartoon, Harry. It had a lot of gags I’d never seen before and didn’t seem to be copied afterwards. Those twin dirt streaks from behind his ears were nasty!
Scrappy wears gloves in bed!
I left this comment on Uncle John’s blog but will repeat it here.
That world of mud with its strange pop up inhabitants reminded me of Samuel Beckett. He had characters, like Nagg and Nell in Endgame, that also lived in the equivalent of a manhole, and in How It Is the narrator spends his life in a world of mud. There are lots of other similar Beckett characters and locales. I don’t know if Beckett actually saw Sunday Clothes, but I think it’s possible and the strange effect it still has today may have made an even deeper impression then.
I might as well admit that I also believe Osamu Tezuka used Scrappy as a model for Astro Boy. Scrappy was more suited to a Japanese sensibility than to ours, as we preferred funny animals to cute little kids (and robots). I’ll bet Tezuka really appreciated Scrappy’s head being such a clean, strong design with that great hairdo, and those eyes that are huge and mostly pupils with small nose and mouth. Stretch out his limbs and put a pair of rocket boots in the place of Scrappy’s big feet, and it’s done.
So maybe Scrappy lives on even if indirectly.
Beckett/Scrappy sounds like a great combination.