I Haven't Got a Hat
Encyclopedia
I Haven't Got a Hat is a 1935 animated short film, directed by Isadore Freleng for Leon Schlesinger Productions
Warner Bros. Cartoons
Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc. was the in-house division of Warner Bros. Pictures during the Golden Age of American animation. One of the most successful animation studios in American media history, Warner Bros. Cartoons was primarily responsible for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical...

 as part of Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

' Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969.Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944,...

series. Released by Warner Bros. on March 9, 1935, the short is notable for featuring the first appearance of several Warner Bros. cartoon characters, most notably future cartoon star Porky Pig
Porky Pig
Porky Pig is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators created many critically acclaimed shorts using the fat little pig...

. I Haven't Got a Hat was one of the earliest Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 Merrie Melodies, and (because of Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...

's exclusive deal with Technicolor at the time) was produced using Technicolor's two-strip process
RG color space
The RG or red-green color space is a color space that uses only two colors, red and green. It is an additive format, similar to the RGB color model but without a blue channel. Thus, blue is said to be out of gamut...

 (red and green) instead of its more lucrative three-strip process. This is the 100th Looney Tunes Short.

Background

This Merrie Melodies cartoon, explicitly modeled after Hal Roach
Hal Roach
Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. was an American film and television producer and director, and from the 1910s to the 1990s.- Early life and career :Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York...

's Our Gang
Our Gang
Our Gang, also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals, was a series of American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood children and the adventures they had together. Created by comedy producer Hal Roach, the series is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively...

live-action shorts, introduces several new characters as grade school students in the hope that some would catch on. At the time, the only star for the more character-driven Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...

series was Buddy
Buddy (Looney Tunes)
Buddy is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series of cartoons.-Looney Tunes:Buddy has his origins in the chaos that followed the severing of relations between animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising from producer Leon Schlesinger...

, a meager replacement for the feistier Bosko
Bosko
Bosko is an animated cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. Bosko is the first recurring character in Leon Schlesinger's cartoon series, and is the star of over three dozen Looney Tunes shorts released by Warner Bros...

 who left Schlesinger's studio with his creators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising.

The short introduces the following characters:
  • Beans the Cat, a mischievous young cat voiced by Billy Bletcher
    Billy Bletcher
    William "Billy" Bletcher was an American actor, comedian, and voice artist, a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.-Career:...

  • Little Kitty, a nervous girl cat, voiced by Bernice Hansen
    Bernice Hansen
    Bernice Hansen was a voice artist who did a number of female character voices for Warner Bros. cartoons in the 1930s and early-1940s...

     in falsetto.
  • Porky Pig
    Porky Pig
    Porky Pig is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators created many critically acclaimed shorts using the fat little pig...

    , a stuttering pig voiced by Joe Dougherty
    Joe Dougherty
    Joseph "Joe" Tapley Dougherty was an American voice actor who provided the original voice of the Warner Brothers animation character, Porky Pig, starting with the character's debut in I Haven't Got a Hat in 1935 until Porky's Romance in 1937. After that, Mel Blanc took over the role and voiced...

  • Oliver Owl, a haughty owlet who taunts Beans. (His look is similar to the "Owl Jolson" character from I Love to Singa
    I Love to Singa
    I Love to Singa is a Merrie Melodies animated cartoon directed by Tex Avery, produced by Leon Schlesinger, and released to theatres on July 18, 1936 by Warner Bros. and Vitaphone. I Love to Singa depicts the story of a young owlet who wants to sing jazz, instead of the classical music that his...

    )
  • Ham and Ex, (Hansen and Bletcher) twin singing puppies


Though the gags in this short are still fairly indicative of early thirties cartoons, this short is significant for launching the career of Porky Pig. In addition, the short bears the faintest hint of the developing comic style that was to come in later Warner Bros. cartoons (Porky's and Kitty's recitals).

Plot summary

The short opens with introductions of Miss Cud (the school teacher), Beans (who is eating from a jar of jam), Porky, Oliver Owl (who are both shown at once), and Ham and Ex (twin puppies). Little Kitty is absent from this sequence. A poster is shown explaining that the school children are sponsoring a musical
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 and recital
Recital
A recital is a musical performance. It can highlight a single performer, sometimes accompanied by piano, or a performance of the works of a single composer.The invention of the solo piano recital has been attributed to Franz Liszt....

 for the benefit of teachers and parents.

The school talent show first features Porky Pig reciting The Ride of Paul Revere, but due to his excessive stutter (causing him to recite his part with incredible strain and sweat on some moments). A small gag involves Porky pointing to offstage students to provide sound effects for his poem (the underside of a turtle's shell for a drum, and falling light bulbs for gunfire). However, he points to the wrong student, but the intended student takes his cue, and Porky points to the correct one. The class children whistle and cat-call which makes several stray dogs burst into the schoolhouse and chase poor Porky out.

Next up, Little Kitty attempts to recite "Mary Had a Little Lamb". She is so nervous that she forgets a couple lines (even confusing snow for corn flakes) and then proceeds with the rhyme but gradually speeds up her voice to a high pitch. Throughout her performance she is fidgeting and crossing her legs in a way to suggest she urgently needs the toilet
Toilet
A toilet is a sanitation fixture used primarily for the disposal of human excrement, often found in a small room referred to as a toilet/bathroom/lavatory...

. She reaches the end of the rhyme as she makes a hasty exit, to a building that may be the school outhouse.

Third, Ham and Ex sing the song "I Haven't Got a Hat", written by Buddy Bernier and Bob Emmerich. During this performance, Oliver Owl refuses to share some candy
Candy
Candy, specifically sugar candy, is a confection made from a concentrated solution of sugar in water, to which flavorings and colorants are added...

 with Beans.

When Oliver goes up for his piano recital, Beans decides it is time for payback and sneaks a stray cat and dog into the piano. Their commotion creates a virtuoso performance of Franz von Suppé
Franz von Suppé
Franz von Suppé or Francesco Suppé Demelli was an Austrian composer of light operas who was born in what is now Croatia during the time his father was working in this outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

s Poet and Peasant overture to riotous applause. When the animals jump out of the piano (with the cat chasing the dog rather than vice versa) the ruse is revealed to the audience's disapproval and Oliver, humbled and vengeful, covers Beans in green ink from his pen, causing Beans to fall off his ladder and launch a pail of red paint onto Oliver. Caught in the same predicament, they shake hands as the cartoon ends. This end scene emphasizes the fact that this was a two-strip Technicolor cartoon, with only red and green hues. At the time (as stated before), the three-strip process (with blue hues added) was exclusive to Disney for use in cartoons. This contract ran out in the fall of 1935, and WB released their first three-strip Technicolor cartoon, Flowers for Madame, in November of that year.

Trivia

  • Robert Mckimson, a young, talented animator at the Warner Bros.cartoon studio, animated the scene where Porky struggles to control his stutter while hilariously reciting excerpts of such well-known poems as "Paul Revere's Ride" and "Mary Had A Little Lamb".

External links

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