Blogs in Focus: Editors Blog

W.C. Fields, who we saw bemoaning his lack of golfing prowess yesterday, here is featured in caricature form playing Humpty Dumpty in the vintage Silly Symphony cartoon Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

This Oscar-nominated short provides a fascinating insight into both the best and worst aspects of the classic Hollywood era. On the positive side, this cartoon is funny and knowing, lampooning some of the biggest movie stars of the era by re-imagining them in the roles of nursery rhyme favorites: there's a spot-on Katherine Hepburn who, as Little Bo Peep, crops up from time to time saying "I've lost my sheep – I can't find them anywhere, really I can't"; the Marx Brothers play Old King Cole's fiddlers; Laurel and Hardy are Simple Simon and the Pieman; Charles Laughton (as Captain Bligh) and Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew (via Captains Courageous) appear as the Three Men in a Tub; Greta Garbo is See-Saw Margery Daw (with Edward G. Robinson as her ballast); and there are also appearances by animated incarnations of Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and Cab Calloway.

It's all unadulterated fun watching these silver screen luminaries being playfully treated as figures of fun, but things take a drastic turn for the worse when a pie hits Hepburn's Bo-Peep, turning her face a dark color, and she suddenly starts talking like Hattie McDaniel. The racism that was inherent in Hollywood at that time is also very evident in the film's climactic song and dance routine. From a musical point of view, the jazzy number is great but that positive response is strongly tempered by the crude depiction of the African American singers and musicians. I think what's most disturbing is the realization that in 1938 this was a silly, fun cartoon and not in the least bit edgy; watching it today makes us cringe, but at the time this was a vision of normality being fed to kids. On the flipside, one can at least see from this that significant progress has been made in the past 70 years...