Everybody "into the pool" for today's installment of Separated at Mirth, as we take our "cue" from LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES # 136 (Dell Comics, Cover Date: February, 1953) and WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES # 339 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: December, 1968).
Things to note:
The cover of LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES # 136 was drawn by Ralph Heimdahl, who had a long association with the character of Bugs Bunny, while the cover of WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES # 339 was drawn by Tony Strobl who had a similarly long association with the character of Donald Duck, but who also had a notable run with Bugs Bunny - as seen below!
The positions of the victims of the pool-shooting practical joke are REVERSED, with Elmer Fudd on the RIGHT of the cover image and Donald Duck on the LEFT.
A corresponding reversal applies to the perpetrators and, in the case of WDC&S # 339, any additional puzzled onlookers.
While there is NO DOUBT that Bugs has ensured that "the yolk's on Elmer", there might be a few shades of gray (...or red, green, and blue) in the case of Donald's nephews...
Huey (in RED) is clearly transfixed on the shattered shell of the egg (...giving new meaning to the pool term "break"?). ...Oh, and let's not even consider what a broken egg, with its spilled, oozing whites and yolks might mean to a DUCK... existentially, that is!
Louie (in GREEN) would appear to be ashamed or remorseful over any role he may, or may not, have played in the proceedings - and is looking to GOOFY (of all folks) for guidance. I'd say "looking to GOOFY to take his CUE", but I already did that joke to open the post!
Dewey (in BLUE) is clearly the most guilty of the three, or certainly the least remorseful, as he is trying with all his might to suppress his laughter. In contrast, Bugs, being more of a master at deviltry, simply sports a sly smile.
Goofy, as one would expect, is uncertain of what's just happened! ...He's like that a lot!
Donald seems to be experiencing an instant of uncertainty as well, as his mouth doesn't even open part way, much less react with his more typical emotions.
LOOK CLOSELY FOR THESE REMAINING ITEMS...
Unless Donald's sleeve is completely blocking it from view, this pool table does not have a corner pocket! ...What's an Eight-Ball to do without a corner pocket? Just bounce or carom until inertia intervenes, I guess...
I haven't played pool in decades, but I'm quite sure that the "11 ball" would be a "stripe" and not a "solid"! Much less not be blue.
And, finally, a possibly gruesome note... Unless Goofy is wearing LIGHT BLUE SLACKS that are exactly the same color as the BACKGROUND OF THE COVER... he has NO LOWER HALF!
Look between Louie (in GREEN) and Dewey (in BLUE) for proof of this horrific halving!
Goofy may not be wondering about the egg after all, but how he manages to "leglessly levitate" his way through the proceedings!
And so, as we leave our various characters to sort out who's going clean the mess on their pool tables, we also leave LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES # 136 (1953) and WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES # 339 (1968) now and forever... Separated at Mirth!
BUT WAIT... Before closing the "Egg-on-the-Pool-Table" affair, one late entrant into this Mirth-Separation has revealed itself... The cover of Charlton's THE FLINTSTONES # 16 (Cover Date: August, 1972).
Fred occupies the same space and position as does Donald. And so, 2 out of 3 times, the gag "moves" from left to right!
Barney seems to find this gag funnier than Bugs, HD&L, and Goofy... not to mention us!
Neither the pool table, pool cues, or pool balls look in any way "prehistoric"... and isn't that the WHOLE POINT of The Flintstones?
The pool table could have looked a tad more ragged. The balls should not be as nicely rounded. And, the pool cues could look more like "wooden sticks", with some slightly jagged surfaces to them.
And, as usual, even when a gag was "okay", Charlton and artist Ray Dirgo somehow managed to "get it wrong"!
Recall what I said above, about what a "broken egg" might mean to a duck? Well, the placement of a "very disapproving and angry bird", where such a thing does not really NEED to be, emphasizes that unintentionally unsavory aspect of the gag to a greater degree than was ever necessary!
Oh, Charlton... In SO MANY WAYS, they just "DIDN'T GET IT", and they never would!
"(The) Egghead and I" would like to know what you all think!
Oh, and couldn't you just see The Joker playing this gag on Egghead, in the Rec-Room at Arkham Asylum!
Oh, and couldn't you just see The Joker playing this gag on Egghead, in the Rec-Room at Arkham Asylum!
16 comments:
The WDCS colorist's erasure of Goofy's lower half is pretty funny. While Strobl got a couple of things wrong, he did include that "thing on the wall with the little thingies on it" (you can tell who has never played pool!), which fills what would otherwise be Empty Blank Space!
The basic joke is not a great one, since it's hard to imagine anyone actually mistaking an egg for a pool ball. But it's better than the myriad of visual jokes involving people breaking decorated Easter eggs and having the insides spill out. Every decorated Easter egg I've ever encountered has been hard-boiled! Even when I was a wee child those jokes didn't work for me! (I know, this should also rule out the jokes with Easter eggs hatching, and generally it does, though that chick who was sawing its way out of Bugs' Easter egg was such a cute idea I'll let it go.)
Hmm, I don't pick up any remorse in Dewey's expression--just checking out Goofy's response. I'd assume that they're all three equally responsible/guilty...since the three of them essentially ACT AS ONE.
Can I say that that Egghead cover is also very… distracting, inasmuch as it implies poor Vincent Price's skull got violently shattered? It's sort of unnerving to see him smiling peacefully with his forehead cracked open like that.
Concerning Goofy's ludicrous leglessness, the most likely hypothesis is that he's wearing a pair of unusually-light pants that happen to match the color of the wall. Here he is wearing a shade only slightly darker than the one here: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/paperpedia/images/e/ed/PIPPO.jpg Although your suggestion of levitation does remind me that Goofy did master the art of cross-legged levitation back in A Kidnapping in Yubet, Chapter II of the McGreals' Millenium Orbs saga.
Elaine:
You write: “I'd assume that they're all three equally responsible/guilty...since the three of them essentially ACT AS ONE.”
Yes, you’re absolutely right about that! THEY ACT AS ONE! THEY ACT AS ONE! THEY ACT AS ONE! …Take that, “New DuckTales”! …Nyaaah!
Strobl also took care to fill the empty space (a topic of some note around here lately – as seen HERE and HERE) by not only adding the "thing on the wall with the little thingies on it" (I dunno what they call it either!) – but adding GOOFY as well!
Most WDC&S gag covers consisted of just Donald and the Boys – but Goofy’s inclusion here nicely filled some otherwise potentially empty space… even if he appears sans his lower half! I’m guessing he’ll never again let amateur magician “Fethry the Great” saw him in half!
Also agreed on the Easter Eggs, but that Bugs Bunny cover may be an exception, due to the use of a saw! HERE is the BUGS BUNNY cover for your viewing pleasure!
Achille:
I’d call the Egghead cover more of a FIGURATIVE one, rather than a LITERAL one – where a figure may LOOM LARGE over the proceedings – rather consider any horrific damage inflicted upon poor Vincent Price’s skull!
“Figurative Covers” seem to be far less an integral part of the “Humor or Funny Animal” genre than in the so-called “mainstream”, so I certainly “get” the reaction, even if it did not initially occur to me.
HERE and HERE would be two good examples, from two different eras of Batman!
I have the second one… wish I could afford the first!
And HERE is your Goofy link! I still say he should avoid Fethry’s magic act in the future… while there’s still any parts of him left!
Speaking of "unintentionally unsavory," this gag reminds me of the cover of a recent edition of a supermarket chain's coupon magazine: https://www.howtoshopforfree.net/stop-shops-savory-magazine-march-2018-coupon-list/
Psst... Don't see what's so (all together now) "unintentionally unsavory?" Look to the far right of the cover. Kind of creepy, no? I mean, it's cute on one level, but when you remember that that egg could have developed into a real chick... well, you just can't look at the cover the same way again, can you? And to think the name of the magazine is "Savory!"
Personally, I like the "very disapproving and angry bird" in the Flintstones cover. It's a unique innovation vis-à-vis said cover's "Looney Tunes" and "WDC&S" precursors, and it makes the gag a lot funnier than it would otherwise be. But that's really the only positive aspect of Ray Dirgo's cover, in my opinion. I agree that Dirgo should have made the balls and the sticks look more prehistoric. And even the bird is questionable, as much as I like the idea. Wouldn't a baby pterodactyl have made more sense?
Based on the covers you've featured here alone, I can see why you hate the Charlton Hanna-Barbera comics so much. Again, based on the cover (the only part of them I'm familiar with), they appear to have been made with only one consideration in mind: how quickly the dreck could be churned out. Little to no imagination in, at least, the covers.
While I'm not as familiar with Dell comics as I would like to be, I do have one favorite gag involving an egg in an animated cartoon. In "Pink Breakfast" (1979), the Pink Panther is trying to crack an egg, but, no matter what he does, the egg just will not break! Eventually, in frustration, the Panther forcefully throws the egg across the room. This time, it breaks, revealing a duck, which flies out the window. I love the astonished look on the Panther's face at that point.
Sergio:
I think that one of the dilemmas of “funny animal comics” (…or, perhaps, those of us that take them a tad too seriously – me included) is that we actually think of an egg hatching into a bird – and the existential implications implied – when the gag writers, most likely in each case, just churned-out a gag.
We may wonder why Mickey Mouse has Goofy as a best friend and Pluto as a pet, or how Huckleberry Hound can be a dogcatcher, but I seriously doubt “they” did. …Perhaps they’re better adjusted? :-)
But, then again, if I didn’t feel that way, would all of you keep on coming here? …Probably not! So, let’s just keep enjoying this stuff for both its oddities and its glories! There are plenty of BOTH to go around!
It was indeed a traumatic day in August, 1970, when, without warning, Charlton Hanna-Barbera comic books supplanted the Gold Key (and formerly Dell) comics I’d enjoyed quite literally all my life!
They looked inferior to their Gold Key counterparts, and they read inferior to their Gold Key counterparts! And, to this day, they stand as a prime example of “How NOT to do Funny Animal/ Humor Comics”!
Oddly, with today’s trend in animation of distorting the look of classicly-designed characters from Mickey Mouse, to Bugs Bunny, to even Scooby-Doo, the dreadful Charlton art could be viewed as having some sort of bizarre retro charm to it. But, that doesn’t help the wretched stories. Stories that made the very worst of Vic Lockman read like Shakespeare!
There are two interior illustrations from their first issue of Huckleberry Hound in This Post! Look them up, if you dare – and think of how great Harvey Eisenberg was with these characters previously HERE.
Oddly, the COVER of this Charlton issue really isn’t all that bad, but subsequent covers like This One were more the norm.
We’ll do something with Charlton from time to time, so you’ll see more.
And here is Your Link for some “eggs-tra savory” viewing pleasure.
Finally, both the Pink Panther cartoons – and the Gold Key Comics – were some of the best things to appear in their era. They were funny and innovative (both cartoons and comics) at a time so much else was in decline!
Hey, Sergio! No need for distress! The store-bought eggs most of us Americans eat could *not* have developed into chicks; they are unfertilized. The hens are laying eggs because that's what hens do; there is no rooster in sight.
Walter Melon had his own version of the "unbreakable egg" gag, with two full pages of increasingly-desperate and increasingly-outlandish attempts to crack open a very stubborn egg (to give you an idea, "hammer and anvil" isn't the most ludicrous method he tries). Unfortunately, the punchline relies on an untranslatable pun… see, poached egg in French is "œuf poché", which also means pocketed eggs, so what happens is that after giving up Walter puts the egg in his side pocket, the next time he sits down CRACK, and he forlornly comments: "Ah… guess it was one of those œufs pochés".
Achille:
So, I’m guessing that one won’t be published at this Blog.
Hey, anyone out there have a suitable punchline that might work in American English?
Don’t look now, but I think I’ve just issued a challenge…
Elaine:
Of course, no one ever said the eggs in question were “store-bought”.
In cartoons and comics, isn’t a henhouse almost always just a few steps away?
Ah, but Sergio was talking about one of the eggs pictured on a supermarket's coupon magazine, not the eggs in a cartoon. *That* egg could not have developed into a chick, so there's nothing unsavory about presenting it as a cute (edible) chick.
Joe/Achille:
How about a little wordplay, like this: "Ugh... There's othing like a pouched egg..." (as opposed to "a poached egg).
Elaine:
Good point. Very good point.
Elaine:
You're quite right about the supermarket egg! Those are strictly for throwing, breaking, and comically splattering all over the place!
Sergio and Achille:
Good try, Sergio!
...Or, maybe: After all the Wyle E. Coyote-esque attempts to crack the egg, Walter puts it in his pants pocket, sits down and it breaks.
He says: "Who knew it was susceptible to wool/polyester blends!"
OOOH! Or better yet... "Who knew that a wool/polyester blend would be its Achilles Heel!"
"Who knew that a wool/polyester blend would be its Achilles Heel!"
I like it!
Thank you, Sergio! I like it all the more knowing what “Achilles Heel” translates to in French!
…But, that’s for our friend “Achille Talon” to explain!
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