"The Captain's Pup" (1938) (Patreon)

Here’s a special treat for the public I’ve prepared for the holiday— some of the more hardcore animation buffs might appreciate this.

When MGM severed their contract with producers/directors Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising in 1937, the film studio established their own animation department with Bill Hanna, Friz Freleng and Bob Allen as principal directors. Their first cartoons were a series based on Rudolph Dirks’ comic strip The Captain and the Kids, an offshoot of the long-running Katzenjammer Kids, but featuring the same characters. These would be filmed in black-and-white compared to the Harman-Ising cartoons that were in full color.

In some ways, the cartoons do not reflect the original strip. For instance, the Captain and Mama seem to play the role of husband and wife in this entry, but in the original Captain and the Kids comic strip, der Captain was only a tenant living in Mama’s boarding house.

The probable roster of animators on this cartoon, each of whom signed on at MGM’s new animation department by October 1937: Joe Barbera, Jack Zander, George Gordon, Dick Bickenbach, Ray Abrams, Paul Sommer, Leonard Sebring, Ben Clopton, Sam Stimson, and Emery Hawkins. (With that said, the scenes at the dinner table from 3:12 to 4:15 seem to be animated by Bickenbach—the drawing/posing matches similar scenes of his for Warner Bros in the mid-thirties and forties.)

This is sourced from a screen recording via the WatchTCM app, so the frame rate might not be ideal. However, this is one of a handful of Captain and the Kids cartoons not included as a bonus feature on DVD, which makes this quite a rarity in its decent picture quality.

Released April 30, 1938, the characters models were drawn by Charlie Thorson, and the dog sounds are provided by Pinto Colvig, who left Disney to become a writer/gag-man at MGM just as they opened their animation studio.

Enjoy!