“Yoohoo, Minniehaha!”
Animation by Rollin Hamilton and Max Maxwell. A Merrie Melody released on March 19, 1932.
The natives aren’t happy. Seems there are three crooners around anymore and they’re attracting all of their *ahem* squaws. Oh, why should I feel uncomfortable watching this? Thanks to the lack of spectrum, you can’t prove these are supposed to be redskins. And really, they’re not even going to feature in the picture. Let them complain, the sourpusses. I’m going to follow the first grayskin I come across no matter how boring of a cartoon that turns out.
Target sighted. Mickeyhaha is the star now. And looking at that long moniker I just gave him, I’m already regretting every choice in my life. They all led me here! Takes me back to my first decision I ever made: whether or not to breathe. I chose wrong back then, too. Let me overreact! It’s the closest I’ll ever come to being a VA! Can you tell that this picture isn’t giving me a lot to work with? Light on plot AND humor. At least the title song is catchy enough.
Mick gets his girlfriend/girl friend, who I’ll call Minn for short. Or just Minn, because that’s even shorter. Mick’s got a radio to play which means they can dance to diegetic sound for a change. It just requires a spider to stand on it to power the thing up. Because the web looks like a cord? I won’t dwell on it because I’d rather do what I’m really good at: pointing out animation errors. Look! Disappearing feather!
Everything with a soul loves music, ergo, all the woodland critters that have come to join the fun. Including some kind of bear dog that goes as far as to give a Vallee impression. And I can hear a Crosby impression! Who wants to be Columbo? Anybody? Anybody at all? It’s an unsung honor. Well anyway, we need some sort of antagonist in this cartoon. Let’s think. What’s something everybody knows about, everybody instinctually fears, and if it’s ever represented in an animated work at all, starts out misunderstood by the other protagonists?
It’s fire all right. It’s always fire. The music gets the flames jumping out of their pit and all over the forest. There isn’t any casualties as far as I can tell, but three nestlings are stuck up a tree with no way to get down, sans gravity of course, but that way hurts. Mick gets some assistance from some fire flies, and I don’t mean *Dear future me, don’t forget to actually quote your post of “Joe Glow the Firefly“*. Using a stray spider web, they make a safety net for the birds. Too bad the fire still succeeds in singing their feathers off. Mick takes care of it by spitting on that one flame.
Well, the forest is still ablaze, and all the grayskins are probably going to end up homeless, but Mick feels he won, so the picture ends here. Happ-… Miser-… Ending. It’s an ending for sure.
Favorite Part: Be sure to actually look at the fores animals that gather to enjoy the music. One of them is Foxy! What a fun cameo!
Personal Rating: 1. They don’t do anything creative or fun with their chosen cast, it’s just a standard rubber-hose dance party. And I didn’t want to mention it, but Minn is topless the whole time. Nippleless, but still…