columbia-pictures 89 years ago
film production studio #Cartoon Cocktail

The First Color Columbia Cartoon | Holiday Land (1934)

Scrappy does not want to get up and go to school. As the days peel off his calendar, the dates representing holidays come to life. Father time, in particular, takes Scrappy on a tour of the other holidays, stopping at dioramas representing Christmas, New Year's, Easter, and taking some eggs from Easter over to the feasts of Thanksgiving. Then he wakes up, and has to hurry to get to school on time.

This "Scrappy" cartoon from the Mintz factory is the first they produced in color. It's two-color Technicolor, since Disney had a monopoly on the three-color variety. It looks a little off, since the design was not changed. The line drawing of Scrappy with splashes of color looks weird -- but then he always did. Certainly the background work benefits from from the color and emphasizes the size of a couple of shots.


As for the story, Scrappy doesn't want to get up to go to school and dreams of going to a banquet with tiny avatars of holidays. Like many of the Scrappies, it's an exercise in childhood weirdness and enjoyable. My interest in how they handled the color kept it from being too long.


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