Freddy the Freshman is a 1932 Merrie Melodies short directed by Rudolf Ising.
Title[]
The cartoon is built around "Freddy the Freshman, The Freshest Kid in Town", a song written by Cliff Friend and Dave Oppenheim and part of the Warner Bros. publishing library.
Plot[]
Freddy the Freshman, "the freshest kid in town" and a canine "big man on campus", crashes a college pep rally, and becomes the star of the big campus football game.
Availability[]
Censorship[]
- When this cartoon aired in the late 1990s on Cartoon Network's show Late Night Black and White (an installment show featuring black and white shorts from Warner Bros. and Fleischer Studios), the brief shot of the cheerleaders (three stereotypically Jewish birds - with beak noses and pennants written in Hebrew - and a rooster in a tuxedo who acts stereotypically homosexual) during the game was cut.[1] The removed scene was used in the unaired ToonHeads special The Twelve Missing Hares as examples of negative and hurtful stereotypes that were prevalent in animated shorts from the 1930s to the 1950s, despite that this cartoon was produced and released before Bugs Bunny was created.[2]
Notes[]
- This is the first cartoon where the title card starts on a special background, other than starting on a black background.
- Following the debut of the titular song in this cartoon, "Freddy The Freshman, The Freshest Kid in Town" would turn up as an incidental score cue (usually relating to football in some way) in many later Warner Bros. cartoons, often in gags involving sports (mostly football and basketball).
- The song would be sung again in full in both "Sweet Sioux" and "Raw! Raw! Rooster!".
- This short entered the public domain in 1961 as United Artists did not renew the copyright in time.
- Some animation from this cartoon would be reused in "Bosko the Drawback".
Gallery[]
References[]