"12. This old Andy Panda cartoon in which Andy makes his dog pose out in the garden for a painting Andy's creating inside the house. The dog keeps getting annoyed by a pesky bee and, in a fury, Andy ties the dog up in an uncomfortable pose with a rope tied to a shotgun aimed at the dog's head. If the dog moves, he'll get his head blown off. Andy Panda goes back inside and sure enough, falls asleep, leaving the dog to be tormented by the bee."
~ "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid", Matt Groening (Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror #1, 1995)
I decided to kick off this "Shit That Scared Matt Groening" series with item no. 12 on Matt's list, in which Matt recalls a traumatic childhood encounter with a relic from the golden age of American animation. Whenever I read Matt's list, this item in particular always jumps out at me, in part due to the intricacy of Matt's description (when compared to the rest of the list), but also the full-blown hellishness of the scenario he describes. I'm reminded of just how amazingly unsettling some of these vintage cartoons can be - by nature, they tend to rely upon warped set-ups, surreal visuals and lashings of sadistic humour, a formula which many a classic from the golden age can certainly swear by. Occasionally, however, they get the balance very wrong, and when that happens you may end up feeling the same levels of stomach-churning discomfort as the young Matt Groening. Worst case scenario, you get a cartoon that perfectly illustrates the dark gulf between what some depraved adult considers knee-slapping hilarity and what to a young, emotionally fragile child is nothing more than an exercise in horror.
First though, some context on what was scaring young Matt. Andy Panda was an anthropomorphic giant panda created by Walter Lantz of Walter Lantz Productions, during his experimental period when he was trying to come up with a new animated lead to follow in the footsteps of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit (the early Walt Disney creation who, due to rights issues, had wound up in the hands of Universal Studios), whose luck was beginning to run dry by the late 1930s. Andy got his first outing in the 1939 short Life Begins for Andy Panda and went onto to feature in a series of shorts released by Universal Pictures (and later United Artists) throughout the 1940s. Before researching for this piece, I have to admit that I was only really vaguely familiar with Andy thanks to his association with Lantz's more infamous creation, Woody Woodpecker (who got his own start as the antagonist of an Andy cartoon, Knock Knock, in 1940, and ultimately wound up replacing Andy as Universal's big animated draw), and so I entered with essentially no prior knowledge of the character and little idea what your typical Andy escapade would entail.
Matt does not actually list the title of the Andy Panda cartoon in question, but after a quick review of Andy Panda titles I deduced that The Painter and The Pointer was likely the short he was referring to. Released in 1944, The Painter and The Pointer opens with Andy attempting to paint a portrait of his dog Butch (who bears a - probably none-too-coincidental - resemblance to Mickey Mouse's more familiar canine cohort, Pluto). Unfortunately, Andy's efforts are hampered by the problem that Butch isn't overly inclined to hold himself in a static pose for long, particularly when there are pesky creepy-crawlies harassing him, and so Andy devises a...shall we say, very draconian solution to keep his dog in place.
Watching The Painter and The Pointer, I noted that Matt had actually misremembered a number of details about the short, although the most disturbing element - Andy tying his dog to a loaded shotgun in the hopes of coercing it to keep still - is pretty much as he describes it. There is, however, no bee in this cartoon. Instead, Butch is initially bothered by a fly, but the main antagonists are a couple of spiders who suppose, somewhat ambitiously, they can wolf down a full-grown pointer, and proceed to attack Butch while he's at his most defenceless. The prospect of being devoured by spiders might strike some viewers as far more hardcore nightmare territory than being pestered by a mere bee, but I'll emphasise that these are very cartoony spiders, with big red noses and fuzzy hairdos. They're actually kind of adorable-looking (although annoyingly they only have six legs - I presume because giving them the fully eight would have made their character designs overly complicated). The smaller of the two spiders, frustrated by his failure to catch the fly from the earlier, spots the tethered Butch down on the ground and immediately thinks that he would make a good meal (possibly because he mistakes the tether for a web and thus takes Butch for spider-food), a scenario that's obviously all kinds of messed up, though the spiders themselves never come off as being much of a direct threat to Butch - rather, the real peril stays firmly with the loaded shotgun pointed at Butch's head, and the possibility that, in manipulating Butch and hoisting him upwards toward their web, the spiders will inadvertently cause it to fire. The showdown between Butch and the spiders plays almost like an inversion on the classic David vs Goliath dynamic, in which the Goliath figure, who under normal circumstances would have no difficulty fending off these pint-sized pests, is here rendered helpless and becomes our underdog.
Andy himself actually has only a minimal presence in this cartoon, the main drama revolving around Butch's struggle with the spiders and the tension as to whether or not the gun will fire. Once Andy has tethered Butch to the gun, he returns to his house to fetch a new canvas, and doesn't reappear until the very end of the short (the detail Groening cites about him falling asleep is another fabrication - we never find out what is keeping Andy so long). Essentially, Andy's only there to provide the set-up for the conflict, after which the short casually brushes him aside. From what brief impressions I'm able to form, however, Andy is an absolute monster. There is something disturbingly incongruous about his entire character - for one thing, he's a giant panda, one of the least threatening-looking members of the animal kingdom, and yet he wears his face in a permanent scowl and pretty much every word of dialogue that spews from his mouth is in aid of brutally hectoring his undeserving dog. What makes things all the more surreal is that Andy sounds like a child; he speaks with a high-pitched, boisterous and distinctly-youthful sounding voice (courtesy of Walter Tetley) that simply doesn't gel with the sheer bitterness he exudes as a character, nor the spine-chilling callousness with which he informs the unfortunate Butch that if he moves, then "BOOM!...no more doggy!" Really, what kind of twisted degenerate willfully risks killing their dog just for the sake of a painting? And then walks away leaving said dog to be hounded by the backyard wildlife? Oh well, Andy's a jerk.
Here's the thing, though. As I was researching for this piece, I discovered that The Painter and The Pointer is actually a real curiosity among Andy Panda's filmography, in that the panda seen in this cartoon isn't even the real Andy. Or, more accurately, he was an attempt by director James "Shamus" Culhane, who also helmed a number of Woody Woodpecker shorts, to reinvent the character and give him a notch more edge. Andy's character design, softer and rounder in previous appearances (in his earliest shorts Andy was depicted as a wide-eyed infant, and humour revolved around the dynamics between himself and his larger, gruffer pop), was here revamped in order to downplay his cuddliness, and his personality was acidified to match. This accounts for why there's something so intrinsically out of whack with Andy's character in The Painter and The Pointer, for he was an amalgamation of elements that simply didn't fit. It's clear that Culhane went a bit too far in his tampering, for the young Matt Groening was far from alone in being weirded out by the results. Michael Samerdyke, writing in his book Cartoon Carnival: A Critical Guide To The Best Cartoons from Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz and DePatie-Freleng, calls the panda seen in The Painter and The Pointer an "evil twin", observing that Culhane "may have given Woody Woodpecker a much needed shot of zaniness but this cartoon suggests that his touch wasn't particularly suited for Andy Panda." In other words, the bamboo-biting bastard from The Painter and The Pointer is best viewed as Andy's malevolent doppelganger, who wandered in from another dimension, intent on stealthily replacing the panda that audiences were familiar with (once again, that old Twilight Zone episode about the woman at the bus station comes to mind), only the change went down about as smoothly as a tack. The Wikipedia page for Andy Panda claims that Lantz himself was unhappy with what Culhane did to his ursine creation in The Painter and The Pointer, although it currently does not cite a source. Still, the fact that Culhane's changes didn't stick is probably telling - in Andy's subsequent cartoons he'd reverted back to his softer design and characterisation, suggesting that Culhane's experimentation was ultimately deemed too far a romp from the beaten track. The world was not ready for an evil Andy Panda.
(Incidentally, Culhane directed another Andy short, Fish Fry, within the same year, in which Andy retained his genial personality but again found himself largely sidelined by a conflict between a predator and their prey - the real stars of the short are a goldfish Andy purchases at a pet shop and an alley cat who schemes to pick off the fish as Andy carries it home. One gets the impression that Culhane struggled to utilise Andy as a character, which is why he preferred to devote more screen time to the side characters.)
I was intrigued enough to check out more Andy shorts for comparison's sake, and stumbled across Apple Andy (Dick Lundy, 1946), which, appropriately, is about Andy having to resist his baser urges and stave off the toxic influences of the "devil in a white nightgown" when he indulges in the evil crime of apple scrumping. Despite featuring a likeably menacing Satanic panda and a surreal dream sequence in which Andy is visited by a line of dancing apple core-us girls (see what they did there?), I couldn't help but ponder just how tame Andy's fall from grace here feels compared to the horrors his character dished out in The Painter and The Pointer. Whereas that was a really bleak glimpse into the darkness of Andy's soul (or at least that of his distorted mirror image), here he eats a few too many ill-gotten apples and decides to walk the path of righteousness after suffering a mildly hallucinogenic stomach upset. This Andy is very much an innocent still learning to forebear the ills of the world. He's a less disagreeable concoction than the evil Andy from The Painter and The Pointer, although I couldn't help but feel that this sweeter Andy has his limitations as a character too. Outside of Old Nick's contribution, Apple Andy is not an amazingly interesting cartoon - essentially, it's a flatter version of the classic Donald Duck short Donald's Better Self (1938), with the added gimmick that it's all set to a customised rendition of "Up Jumped The Devil". Diverting enough, but I'm not overly surprised that Andy ultimately wound up being usurped by his old woodpecker nemesis.
I am pleased to report that The Painter and The Pointer does not end with Butch still tied in an uncomfortable pose and entirely helpless in the face of an impending arachnid attack (one thing which particularly haunted me about Matt Groening's description was the implication that was all there was to the short, the dog's defencelessness against his tiny tormentor's malice being the final punchline - the thought that the dog was stuck there for potentially all eternity was enough to make my stomach churn), but it's still not exactly the most cathartic of endings, for all that Culhane has just subjected us to. In the end, the gun does fire, but it misses Butch and hits the tree branch the spiders have been hoisting him toward, breaking Butch free of their threads but sending the traumatised pointer into an all-out panic. Andy steps outside to find Butch flailing about desperately, still tethered to the gun, which proceeds to go off with every erratic movement the dog makes. Andy gets his canvas wrecked yet again (which if you ask me is way too mild a comeuppance for his brutality) and angrily chases after Butch as the two spiders look on in frustration. It does somewhat haunt me that Butch never gets free of the gun, and that it's still firing at the end of the short - we can only hope that no innocent bystanders wound up being blasted as a result of Andy Panda's ruthlessness.
Does it frighten and disturb ME?
An angry panda who beats, shoots and leaves, and a hapless pooch who's forced to endure his every malevolent whim? It makes for pretty twisted viewing alright, although I will admit that I kind of liked the spiders. I'm left wondering if their shtick of attempting to lasso prey significantly bigger than themselves - while macabre as sin - had any mileage in it for further shorts. That part is just so eye-bogglingly weird that it seems a shame it had to go to waste.
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