I was gobsmacked last night when I went to put this post together and discovered that I never featured Scrappy Ghost Story here on TB Thursday’s cartoon corner. So, here it is, borrowed from a pretty decent print that Tommy Stathes was nice enough to lend me.

First, in some mini-Thunderbean news:

We didn’t get the Halloween set out this year, so earlier this week we sent a tide-me-over disc to all the people in the states that ordered it, featuring 18 Halloween and ghost-themed cartoons, including ‘Bold King Cole’ newly restored from the negative.

At the Thunderbean Shop we’ve put up a pre-order for a new 3-disc special set called ‘Save the Scanner’. We’re working to help avert a crisis at the scanning place we get a lot of our stuff done at in New York. We’ve opened the vault of old special sets as well for about another week to help them as well, with 10% off everything.

Now — onto today’s cartoon: Scappy’s Ghost Story!

If you look at the credits on this Scrappy, you’ll notice the credits list Ben Harrison and Manny Gould, the usual team behind the Krazy Kat series rather than the Scrappys. There’s only one other Scrappy by this team, Graduation Exercises, and both are pretty fun little films.

As in a lot of the Harrison/Gould Krazy Kat films,a music and dancing sequence takes up a nice chunk of footage. The animation throughout is delightful. I especially love the timing of a scene where Scrappy threatens to hit Oopy, who then averts the hit and steps hard on Scrappys foot, leaving him screaming and flailing his arms in a crazy rubbery way. Background layout and lighting design works very well throughout, with shadows in the opening and closing that are especially nice. We run into a few stereotypes along the way on this one as well.

I especially like the score on this cartoon, and frequently think of the themes here, even though some are repeat offerings. All in all you can’t go wrong with this one.

So, enjoy Scrappy’s Ghost Story — and hope that someday, maybe, we’ll get to see these from the preserved master materials!