Among my favorites of the Warner Brothers Merry Melodies shorts is the one with Michigan J Frog (which, like "the Man with No Name" in Leone films, is a marketing gimmick). It's basically a silent film only with a singing, dancing frog, right from the swamp into vaudeville as it were (ho-ho). His owner decides to make it rich with what is, well, a singing and dancing frog in such a reality-driven world as a cartoon. No one notices the frog's talents as it stops just as people are put in front of it; this even extends to an audience promised free beer. In the end, it's fairly tragic, however just in the sense of a Merry Melodies cartoon. This is one of those shorts, like Duck Amuck (my favorite), that brilliantly winks to the audience 'hey, we know this is all so irreverent and absurd, we'll play with it till it drops to the floor'. This time instead of the characters actively talking to the audience, we get the interplay between reality and fantasy played out between a man and an animal. It's funny, of course, because of the owner's attempts to get it to dance in front of others. And its timeless because it has this message of not being able to cross fantasy into reality, which is why all the Merry Melodies shorts, even the lessor ones, have this cool little quality to them. In short, one of Jones/Matleses' triumphs.
Review of One Froggy Evening
