User Reviews

The Terrytoons are oddly interesting, mainly for anybody wanting to see (generally) older cartoons made by lesser known and lower-budget studios. They are a mixed bag in quality, with some better than others, often with outstanding music and with some mild amusement and charm and variable in animation, characterisation and content.

1934, like all the other years for Terrytoons, saw a hit and miss batch. Of which 'South Pole or Bust' is one of the low middle ones ranking it in correlation with the rest of the Terrytoons. It is an unexceptional, nothing exactly special and somewhat mediocre cartoon and has the same amount of problems as it has the amount of strengths. Completest sake is the main reason to see it.

Best asset is the music, which predictably is incredible. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated and arranged, is great fun to listen to and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action. The ambitious, elaborate detail in the backgrounds is still great to see and some synchronisation is neat.

A little charm here and there and the occasional mildly amusing touch. The walrus is a decent, if typical, antagonist.

Outside of the backgrounds however, the animation is primitive at best with a fair bit of crudeness, over-simplicity and choppiness. Especially in the drawing and designs of the characters.

Likewise, the story is paper thin and formulaic, a familiar story with very over-familiar execution. It's also pretty dull, due to a lot of padding and not enough content. The mouse character is not very memorable, while the dog has the opposite problem of being the hero/protagonist but also managing to be the most unsympathetic and hateable character in the cartoon. The conflict is stale and parts try too hard to be cute.

Gags are scarce, or at least nowhere near enough, and what there is is nothing to write home about, too much of it is very stale. The charm isn't enough either and some of it is structured in a choppy manner, not much here.

In conclusion, mediocre. 4/10 Bethany Cox

A pilot - a white dog with one black ear - takes a trip to the South Pole, which is a physical thing with red stripes, making it resemble a barber pole. He is rude or indifferent to his assistant, a mouse who is forced to make him lunch, carry supplies in a bag several times his size and shovel snow from the top of the plane. Midair refueling is accomplished by flying elephants who pour the fuel from their trunks. Once the pair reaches the antarctic wasteland, they plow into a snow-capped mountain top and end up with a sleeping walrus on their plane. The mouse pushes off the walrus who is still in his bed. Walrus and bed crash through the ice below, infuriating the creature. Later, the penguin Rotarians present the dog with a symbolic key, but the walrus interrupts the ceremony to take his revenge.

I watched the silent Castle Films version, which gives little evidence that "South Pole or Bust" (1934) is any different from the run-of-the-mill Terrytoons of the 1930s or 40s. Sound is unlikely to make the uninspired gags any funnier. Instead, there's evidence throughout that the cartoon is poorly thought out and hastily put together. It's especially odd that the dog (an ancestor of Puddy the Pup?) is allowed to be the hero, and win a happy ending, when his callousness to the mouse makes him unsympathetic. The comic logic is peculiar anyway. There have been cats with mouse-slaves since the silent-era Paul Terry films. But a dog with a mouse-slave? I think by 1934 the Terry crew had used the mouse-slave as a comic device so often that it was now just a blind habit.