Hamateur Night

Hamateur Night
Merrie Melodies (Elmer Fudd) series
Title card
Directed by Supervision:
Tex Avery (credited as Fred Avery)
Produced by Leon Schlesinger
Story by Jack Miller
Voices by Uncredited:
Mel Blanc
Sara Berner
Tex Avery
Phil Kramer
Danny Webb
Music by Musical direction:
Carl W. Stalling
Orchestra:
Milt Franklyn (uncredited)
Animation by Character animation:
Paul J. Smith (solely credited as Paul Smith)
Virgil Ross
Rod Scribner
(both uncredited)
Effects animation:
A.C. Gamer (solely uncredited)
Studio Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
The Vitaphone Corporation
Release date(s) January 28, 1939
Color process Technicolor
Running time 7 minutes 42 seconds
Language English

Hamateur Night is a 1938 seven-minute animated short film released to theaters by Warner Bros. on January 28, 1939. Supervised by Tex Avery and written by Jack Miller, the film was a part of the Merrie Melodies series produced by Leon Schlesinger and distributed by The Vitaphone Corporation.[1]

History

The premise of the film is rather simple; it features a vaudeville-style amateur talent night (see, for example, the contemporary and still-ongoing "Amateur Night" competitions at the Apollo Theater) with a format that resembles the much later television program The Gong Show in that it features a judge who strikes a gong to stop the performance of any entertainer whom he deems bad. The primary character of this short is Egghead, a prototype of Elmer Fudd who lacks the speech impediment of the character he evolved into.

The cartoon entered the public domain in 1967 when its last rightsholder, United Artists Television (successor-in-interest to Associated Artists Productions), failed to renew the original copyright within the required 28-year period.[2]

Plot

During an amateur talent night at a vaudeville theater, performers put on a series of strange acts. These include:

  • A musician who puts a coin into a player piano, which plays "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down"
  • An opera tenor who rises off the stage as he sings higher notes
  • A swami who attempts to perform the Indian basket trick with help from Egghead, only to have it go wrong when Egghead fails to emerge from the basket after it has been pierced with a sword
  • A flea who recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
  • A trained dog that performs tricks and gives a speech at its owner's command
  • An actor who keeps getting pelted with tomatoes as he tries to deliver the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet
  • A presentation of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, during which the actor playing Romeo stops to beat up a boisterously laughing hippopotamus in the audience, then finds that the actress playing Juliet laughs in the same way and beats her up as well

With the exception of the swami and the balcony scene, every act is rejected by a backstage judge, who rings a bell and pulls a lever to open a trapdoor under the performers and drop them out of sight.

The acts are broken up by assorted comical interludes, which include:

  • The theater orchestra's lead-in, which consists of the conductor playing all the instruments himself as the musicians conduct him
  • Egghead repeatedly barging onto the stage and singing "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain," only to be yanked away by a shepherd's crook
  • A spectator getting his toes bent to a 90-degree angle in the seat ahead of him and tiptoeing painfully away
  • The aforementioned hippopotamus, who inadvertently smacks a spectator hard enough to squash his entire upper body into his hat, then later shoves an entire row hard enough to push them out through the theater wall
  • The stage curtains behaving in unexpected ways, such as falling down (rod and all) or being opened like a door by the MC

At the end of the night, the audience boos every act but cheers wildly for Egghead. The MC is shocked to see that the theater is now filled with other Eggheads.

Availability

  • VHS - The Golden Age of Looney Tunes Vol. 3: Tex Avery
  • DVD - The Golden Age of Looney Tunes Vol. 1, Side 3

References

  1. ↑ http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/index.php/title/av68064 "Hamateur Night" on BUFVC Index
  2. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2015-04-18. Retrieved 2011-04-13. "Looney Tunes in the Public Domain"
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