The Loose Nut

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The Loose Nut
Loosenut-title.png
Directed byJames Culhane
Story byBen Hardaway
Milt Schaffer
Produced byWalter Lantz
StarringBen Hardaway
Will Wright[1]
Music byDarrell Calker
Animation byLaVerne Harding
Emery Hawkins
Pat Matthews
Grim Natwick
Les Kline
Paul Smith
Backgrounds by
Color processTechnicolor
Production
company
Distributed byUniversal Pictures
Release date
December 17, 1945
Running time
6:53
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

The Loose Nut is the 16th animated cartoon short subject in the Woody Woodpecker series. Released theatrically on December 17, 1945, the film was produced by Walter Lantz Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures.[2]

Plot[]

A man named Bull Dozer is cementing a sidewalk and is pretty proud of himself. Meanwhile, Woody is playing golf in a tree. He putters the ball which lands in the wet cement. The man, furious, gives Woody his golf ball back. It turns out, that Woody made foot tracks in the cement, the man forcing the bird to smooth them out. He takes two of the spreaders and put on his feet like ice skates. Woody skates out the tracks he made. The man soon makes a ball of wet cement and throws it at Woody, causing him to crash. Woody then emerges from the ball, takes a mallet and putters the ball of cement into the man's face. The man is now trapped in the wet cement. Woody then skates back over to the man and hits repeatedly hits him with a shovel.

Woody then tries to run the man over with a steamroller. The man runs in fear from the crazy woodpecker and is chased out of the cement. He is chased into the construction office and hides, only to open the door and get run down. The man is completely flat and Woody rolls him up. He then takes him over to an advertisement for the gym with a picture of a fat woman on a billboard and pastes him on there like sticker, making fun of his weight. The man emerges from the billboard, but with the backside of the fat woman.

The man tries to grab Woody's golf club, only to be accidentally knocked underground. Woody discovers the ball in the man's mouth. He putters it anyway and sends the man's dentures flying. The man chases Woody up a ladder, but is hit in the head by Woody with a mallet. The guy falls down and Woody drops a barrel on the man. He replaces Woody's golf ball with a bomb that looks the same as one and blows up both of the characters. Woody is now featherless, yet he still holds a high spirit.

Voice cast[]

Production notes[]

The Loose Nut is notable for its climatic sequence in which Woody runs over Bull Dozer with a steam roller, complete with haphazard camera angles, jump cutting and stylistic explosion effects, which were depicted as red, blue and yellow paint strokes. Loyola Marymount University professor and Animation program Chair Tom Klein noted that scene and the explosion in the end of the cartoon, as early representations of modern art in American animation, and called the sequences "the convergence of animation and Soviet montage."[3][4] James Culhane had already been experimenting with techniques used by Russian filmmakers since The Barber of Seville (1944), and was able to amplify the execution up to that point. Klein adds that The resulting animated mayhem is a metaphor for Shamus Culhane directed The Loose Nut with "a bit of modernist mischief."[3]

Beginning with The Loose Nut, the "00's" in Woody's name in the opening log sequence have been changed to nut screws.

References[]

  1. ^ ""GUESS WHO??" Voice Artists in the Woody Woodpecker Cartoons |".
  2. ^ Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 157–158. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7.
  3. ^ a b Klein, Tom (July 23, 2016). "Woody Woodpecker and the Avant-Garde". cartoonresearch.com. Retrieved 25 November 2021.
  4. ^ Cieply, Michael (2011-04-10). "That Noisy Woodpecker Had an Animated Secret (Published 2011)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
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