Hollywood Capers is a 1935 Looney Tunes short directed by Jack King.
Plot[]
It is morning outside of a Hollywood studio, and W.C. Fields and a security guard greet each other—and Fields does a billiards gag involving a walking cane and the end of a cigar.
Beans drives up in a small, oft-backfiring car. The guard does not recognize him ("Who do you think YOU are?" "Beans is the name. One of the Boston Beans."), and shoves the car backwards so hard that it runs up a tree and explodes.
Charlie Chaplin drives in on a walking car, and the security guard gives him a friendly salute, Beans comes along, disguised as Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy fame, and lets the disguise fly up on a balloon after he gets in. He then sneaks into a studio shortly before director Oliver Owl starts a take.
The take opens with Little Kitty, three actors playing bar staff, and a tortoise pianist singing two stanzas from Elsie Carlisle's song "Sweet Flossie Farmer (the Lovely Snake Charmer)", followed by a cashier playing "Chopsticks" on the cash register. As the tortoise plays a solo, a man pours beer into mugs. An actor comes up to Little Kitty, offering a kiss; her character repulses his with a slap.
Meanwhile, Beans is watching from a balcony, but a stagehand carrying a long wooden board accidentally knocks Beans (whom he does not see) off. In desperation Beans tries to climb up a rope, but he only succeeds in pulling the whole rope down, and he ends up falling right into the arms of the actor playing the cad.
Not only Oliver Owl, but also the director's chair, and the megaphone are surprised. Beans introduces himself, but an unamused Oliver Owl grabs him and yeets him out. Beans flies through a door into the next room, where he sees something in a bed beneath a sheet, with cables going up into it. Beans lifts the sheet to reveal a mechanical version of Frankenstein's monster. Frightened, Beans staggers back into a switch, which activates the thing.
The mechanical monster starts to go on a rampage, and eats the camera. It then spits out a bunch of nuts and bolts and the film—including one of the bolts for its jaw. It puts that back in place and continues the rampage, stopping to silently taunt its reflection in the mirror, only for its reflection to punch it into a bucket of water.
Beans tries to stop the monster with an iron bar that wraps around the mechanical monster, but the monster only breaks the bar and goes after Beans, flinging him through several doors, landing under a wind machine. That gives Beans an idea. As the mechanical monster advances on him, he turns the wind machine on and pushes it towards the monster, which gets broken up into spare parts, with the head becoming a target for a punching machine.
Caricatures[]
Availability[]
Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3, Disc Two, with commentary by Jerry Beck and Martha Sigall
Streaming[]
Notes[]
- This short reuses animation from "Buddy's Beer Garden", specifically the man pouring beer into the mugs.
- A poster at the bar reads "Hurricane Hardaway", a reference to director Ben Hardaway.
- This cartoon entered the public domain in 1964 as Seven Arts Productions did not renew the copyright in time.
Gallery[]
References[]