Director: Tex Avery
Producer: Fred Quimby (Uncredited)
Animation: Ray Abrams, Preston Blair, Ed Love
Music: Scott Bradley

Following yesterday’s baseball cartoon, we travel back in time 2 years to 1944. According to Wikipedia this Tex Avery MGM short served as a bit of a blueprint for “Baseball Bugs” in 1946; while there are some clear similarities this cartoon suffers from the lack of a central protagonist and is ultimately less engaging.
It’s essentially a series of surreal and risqué visual and verbal gags, vintage Tex Avery.

The toon stands out for a couple of interesting features. Apparently this is the only time an MGM feature ever started without the lion roar. We see a brief title with the name of the feature and Tex Avery’s name then go straight into a baseball game. One of the baseball players stops in mid air during a home-run to interrupt the narrator “Hey wait a second, didn’t you forget something? Who made this picture? How about the MGM titles, the lion roar and all that kind of stuff?”
The narrator apologises and we see the lion and the full credits. Followed by a declaimer, a shot of the baseball ground bearing the gag-name of “W.C. Field” and a subtitle that claims: “The Guy who thought of this corny gag – isn’t with us anymore.”

As always, there is a rich fluidity in Tex Avery’s animation.

We appear to be in a world inhabited entirely by dogs. The players and the crowd, all sport canine noses and ears.

There is a cracking gag early on
Announcer: Here comes a long one. It’s going… going… going…
[ball hits a billboard of a red-haired woman’s face, with the advertising catch line of “Use Toothodent – with Delirium. The Smile of Glamour” knocking out one of her teeth]
Announcer: …gone!
A much funnier joke than the later Baseball Bugs tobacco ad gag.

One of the few named players, McGrip, reveals that he has a rifle sight built into his shoe, before launching a ball directly between the eyes of his opponent. I love that not only has the animator keenly observed the lifted foot of the pitcher but they have given it a further twist of emphasis by adding the rifle sight for comic effect.

McGrip show us a few of his famous pitches. Such as McGrip’s famous “spit ball”, which really spits! The fast ball which proves so effective it reduces his bruiser of an opponent to a screaming baby and his “beautiful curve” which actually draws a sexy silhouette in the air, at which the male crowd wolf-whistles rapturously.

There is a heckler in the crowd baying for the umpire’s blood, an idea neatly appropriated for the Bugs Bunny character in Baseball Bugs, although this particular heckler actually gets his wish as a gunshot rings out and sends him from bright red to an rueful shade of guilty blue.

There is a lovely bit of animation where one of the pitchers throws an iron ball, we see him convincingly struggle with the heavy weight before hurling it down the field. The aftershock of the hitters contact is contagious and spreads back to the gloating McGrip to great effect.

A couple of dolly girls warm up the new hitter by body heat! Very risqué!

The end of the film is unusually downbeat when a catcher who continually gets in the way of the hitter, finally gets clobbered. He see him forlornly ascending into heaven with a placard that reads “Sad ending isn’t it?”

All in all this cartoon, has some interesting moments, but fails to deliver on storyline. Admittedly it’s a quality series of animated baseball gags, but without a protagonist it lacks the momentum and the narrative drive to make it as entertaining as the Warner Bros. 1946 version, “Baseball Bugs“.