Agriculture for boomer tots

September 23, 2006 10:43 AM

Help me track down images from, or if possible a video link to, a Saturday-morning cartoon-type in heavy rotation in the 50s that I remember zoning to: The growth of farm plant-foods depicted as a kind of underground assembly-line process, maybe assisted by some gnomish creature-lings, shown as lots of happy rhythmic mechanical activity leading to swelling carrots, filled-up pea-pods, etc., all over a classical music track... Ring any bells, boomers?
posted by dpcoffin to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

This question immediately made me think of "To Spring." It's not farm plants, but I was able to initially misremember it as farm plants, so I'll put it out just in case. The key factor in this cartoon was that the gnomes were fighting against Old Man Winter.

This site has it for download/stream, but download at least costs money. It looks like it may stream for free, but I don't have the actual Real player to try that. This site also has it for streaming with (I think free) registration.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:28 AM on September 23, 2006

There's a sign language version of To Spring here which you can stream free from the menu on the left, just to check and see if it's the right cartoon before you register. It looks like it fits the bill to me.
posted by iconomy at 11:44 AM on September 23, 2006

A lucky Google search found the regular version of To Spring for free download.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:57 AM on September 23, 2006

Response by poster: Yeah, kinda like that, only a little more primitive—less shading, just outlines, as I recall, with much simpler characters, in the vein of the endless old farmer chasing mouse type things, and definitely about farming/foods: zippering-up the peapods and inflating the melons like tires I distinctly remember.

Thanks for the links, tho. Amazing sites, WAY too overloaded to even start to browse:) Made me hanker after another Sat-AM treat, the rarely seen but never forgotten spooky cowboy story about our heros climbing up a cliff to a little hole that leads to a secret Indian ceremonial cave and eerie music...then my memory fails. But it was a nice change going from bad guys and gunslingers to spirit-world goose-bumps in a kiddie western.
posted by dpcoffin at 12:04 PM on September 23, 2006

dpcoffin writes "forgotten spooky cowboy story about our heros climbing up a cliff to a little hole that leads to a secret Indian ceremonial cave and eerie music.."


The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain?
posted by orthogonality at 12:19 PM on September 23, 2006

Response by poster: Was that the one with Lash LaRue?
posted by dpcoffin at 1:17 PM on September 23, 2006

Was it a Warner Brothers cartoon with the Goofy Gophers, "I Gopher You"?
posted by Sweetie Darling at 3:56 PM on September 23, 2006

Response by poster: Nope, but I’d like to see it.

This was about as generic a cartoon as could be back then; no logos, branding, recognizable characters, rendered backgrounds, titles, credits, not really even a plot as I recall. I can’t imagine it was in color, tho it might have been; I never saw it that way. (I never laid eyes on color TV until we snuck a peek through the curtains of some rich old folk’s house in 1959 or so.) It was nothing like any cartoons you might have seen in the movies back then. This was the cheap filler kind of simple outlined stuff they played end-to-end between the PopEye and Warner Bros main features. The more I describe it, the less likely it seems that anyone will recall it. But it seemed obvious to me back then that there was an entire genre that this represented, like video wall paper, the most basic sort of boob-toob baby-sitting, the bad stuff... Noetheless, this particular conceit about pumping up the melons and otherwise manufacturing food has stuck in my head from seeing it so many times and I’ve occasionally tried to refer to it as if everyone had seen it, too; I just never found anybody else who actually remembers it!
posted by dpcoffin at 4:39 PM on September 23, 2006

I hereby unilaterally declare that the question has been up long enough we can suggest long-shots without ridicule. So here's mine: The 1934 black and white, no (listed) dialog, animation How's Crops, later re-released as "Brownie Victory Garden", has some parallels to your description, including an original music score by Winston Sharples, who made a career doing such things for 35 years.

Anyway, the primary point of content comparison is the underground growing help from an outside agent with an ugly critter guest star. Quoting the Big Cartoon Database entry, "Cubby and his girlfriend go underground and create a crop of synthetic vegetables in their underground cave-factory, then force them upward through the soil. An evil clothes-wearing opossum conspires to steal the entire load of vegetables..."
posted by mdevore at 1:13 AM on September 24, 2006

Response by poster: I’d like to check that one out, tho it seems too complicated a story...but maybe I just don’t remember what the story was; in my head, this was a simple “here comes Spring!” thing...
Thanks for the link, tho. Iit doesn’t seem to actually have the cartoon to view...right? So, how ‘bout the more ubiquitous theme of farmer chasing mice, which seems to me to be the same genre, maybe the same studio? Anywhere to view?

btw, been really enjoying the various graphics gold mines this quest has led me to, such as this, this, and this!
posted by dpcoffin at 9:12 AM on September 24, 2006

Video or images? Just the one cartoon title image with Cubby for that particular link, although there are other Cubby-related images around the net -- he's described as an early Mickey Mouse cartoon type on one site and "stars" in other cartoons. Here, the idea is that if you score a hit on the actual cartoon title, then you have a decent shot at getting a copy of a video of it, because a number of those old cartoons are sold in large collections which list only the titles or studio for content.

Problem, of course, is making the initial hit because the semi-generic nature of the cartoon makes it hard to narrow down -- man, the animation studios put out a lot of farmer-based cartoons back then. Then there's the secondary problem that not all the old cartoons are available either in collections or as stand-alone films.
posted by mdevore at 5:39 PM on September 24, 2006