Sorry there’s been no posts here on Junkyard Clubhouse. I can only speak for myself, but I’ve been pretty busy with lots of other things (learning some new 3d tools, posting to my geeky, other blog, working on the Tiki Crawl, twittering geeky stuff, and just so much more exciting things that the ol’ JYC hasn’t been gettin’ the TLC it deserves. I am not sure if this is a temporary trend, or if at some point I’ll start consolidating all my webby goodness over at my other blog (not that I’ve had things to post here at JYC that I didn’t). Anyway, until the next chapter in Junkyard Clubhouse unfolds, here’s another vintage cartoon from my youth.

Kansas City Kitty

This is the other Kansas City Kitty — NOT the Betty Boop one you’ll find all over the internet when you google it. It was difficult to track down. It’s proper name is “We, the Animals-Squeak!”, but when you watch it you’ll see why I could only remember it for a wordless song (well, “na na na na na”) a kidnapping plot involving unintelligible words spoken by mobster mice, and, well, the Kansas City Kitty. It’s a kidnapping cat-mouse story, thinly veiled as a Porky Pig cartoon.

There’s just so many great things in this cartoon I don’t know where to begin. It starts off with a nod to imbibing with a character named Tom Collins — with an actual cocktail in the cartoon, which leads to a birth, slyly implying that her baby was the product of a few too many cocktails. A out-of-wedlock birth follows. Then we’re hit up with a Hitler reference doodled on the blueprint during the kiddnapping scene, and many references to killing, including a hand-across-neck gesture, a mock strangulation scene, and a mouse screaming out “why, that’s MURDER!!” at the top of his lungs. The animation is crude and the lipsync is abysmal, but this actually adds to the charm. Of course the song is cute, but my favorite part is the hushed kidnapping plan made largely out of unintelligible words.

The mice in this cartoon are clearly precursors to the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (watch this scene from the movie to see the similarities) especially the voices, but of course these mice were probably based on cliche mobster types from the Hollywood pictures of the day.

Enjoy the cartoon!