Automobubbling, You and I
March 5, 2017 10:52 PM   Subscribe

Follow the bouncing ball, kids, and sing along with 1905's most risqué tune, set to animation in a (pre-Hays-Code-enforcement) 1932 short intended for movie palace singalongs in the earliest days of the talkie: In My Merry Oldsmobile.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (12 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was kind-of working on a Great American Songbook-related post and stumbled across this and found it both amusing and eyebrow-raising -- my favorite bit is the live-action slap. Also the ultra-early animation techniques before Disney's 12 Basic Principles is always really interesting to see.

(My first car was an Oldsmobile, obviously named Lucille, so I've always had a soft spot for this song.)

Also, guys, 1932 was so sexist.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:59 PM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Billy Murray, 1905. Best version, as is often true of Murray's work.

Lyrics.

In my enthusiasm for and interest in YT vids of cylinders and 78s I have come to realize that many of the as-released lyrics for songs we may have vague memories of as anodyne nostalgia were deliberately written as densely encoded vehicles for sexual double entendre.
posted by mwhybark at 11:19 PM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Billy Murray, "Oh!", UCSB says 1920.

Lyrics, significantly bowdlerized, if I recall correctly, versus recording for publication in a family-friendly songbook. Original sheet music. I have not yet compared the sheet music lyrics to the recorded performance.
posted by mwhybark at 11:32 PM on March 5, 2017


"Many people thought the automobile would never replace the horse....Those old cars sure looked funny but they struggled along in spite of the horse slabs."

I feel the same way about electric cars today.

Though they've always been around. The very first speeding infraction was against someone driving an electric car.
posted by eye of newt at 12:07 AM on March 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Also the ultra-early animation techniques before Disney's 12 Basic Principles is always really interesting to see.

Yeah, for all the amazing advances Disney made to animation, there were some other animators who took the field in different directions that could also be pretty great.

This 1927 Felix the Cat cartoon is one of my favorites for how plastic their approach was, looking at it both as a vignette and as animation for its own sake.

Another nifty, even earlier cartoon from 1918, sort of follows the more famous Koko Out of the Inkwell series, by showing the animator initiating the animation and plays with the, um, line between its drawings and our expectations of reality. It also has a nifty title: Bobby Bumps Puts a Beanery on the Bum

Oh, and if you're not familiar with Koko, here he is in a late cartoon with Betty Boop that also mixes a little live action with its animation. Not that one really needs much of an excuse to watch some of the good pre-code Betty Boop cartoons.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:00 AM on March 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


Pretty cool. I'd never seen this particular Fleischer toon.

It's pretty typical for a Fleischer cartoon, really. They weren't particularly known for their subtlety or wholesomeness. I mean, c'mon...the bit with the striped candy? Of course, even early Popeye toons were chock full of innuendo, especially in the mumbled voice tracks.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:38 AM on March 6, 2017


Actually, those automobubblers did like kind of ridiculous. Like a Segway. Roads are for farm animals!
posted by amanda at 6:45 AM on March 6, 2017


Also, guys, 1932 was so sexist.

A friend of mine enjoys comparing pre- and post-Hayes code-enforced versions of movies, and she said that some of the pre-code films were pretty shocking in comparison.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:11 AM on March 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Actually, those automobubblers did like kind of ridiculous. Like a Segway.

Or like a kit car that kids could build to understand the basics of automobiles.

Roads are for farm animals!

Roads are for everyone! Or, they were.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:14 AM on March 6, 2017


In my enthusiasm for and interest in YT vids of cylinders and 78s I have come to realize that many of the as-released lyrics for songs we may have vague memories of as anodyne nostalgia were deliberately written as densely encoded vehicles for sexual double entendre.

Sometimes a bit more explicit than that.
posted by delfin at 7:19 AM on March 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


A friend of mine enjoys comparing pre- and post-Hayes code-enforced versions of movies, and she said that some of the pre-code films were pretty shocking in comparison.

Pre-code films are often astonishing, even compared to films of today in what they address, both for good and bad. The Bette Davis film Ex-Lady for example, has Davis playing a successful commercial artist who doesn't believe in marriage, believing it takes the pleasure of of life, but gives in to a man she cares deeply for with the proviso that she maintain her work and social life as before. His career founders while her's flourishes, so he finds consolation with another woman. Davis takes this in stride and takes a lover herself, her husband's competitor, causing her husband to reconsider what he had. While the film offers the couple a chance at redeeming the marriage in the end, the movie also shows Davis' character as being the one with a much better understanding of the world and places our sympathies more decidedly with her.

It isn't just the sanctioning of her career, pre-marital sex or even adultery that gives the movie its edge over even most recent films, it's the directness of its view and openness towards other possibilities that stand out in an era awash with movies simply feeding the audience's already held expectations. There is quite likely more adherence to conventional morality and more storybook happy endings today in Hollywood then in those few years between the dawn of talking pictures and the imposition of the Hays Code.

There were also, of course, stories that couldn't conceivably be filmed today for other reasons too, like how they handled race and the manner or milieu in which character acted. Even those less savory films could pack a wallop just in the sheer boldness of their take no prisoners approach. There are a number of those kinds of films I'm absolutely fascinated by, but can't in good conscience recommend due to their choice of subject matter and method.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:38 AM on March 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


Wow, turns out I've given a lot of thought to the word "automobubble" over the years.

My memory is fuzzy here, but I distinctly recall a character of Germanic heritage mentioning an "automobubble" in what I believe was a 1940s-era Looney Tunes cartoon. Said character was a psychoanalyst type, I believe. "Let's take a ride in ze aau-to-mo-booble for a ride," or some such. It this a Yiddish word?

It's always been one of my favorite ways of referring to a car, and I'd love to show my daughter how I first heard it, but I can't remember any more details about the cartoon. Anybody?
posted by the matching mole at 8:44 AM on March 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


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