Gold Diggers of '49 (1935)

Simply Perfect

Just perfect...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Blistering performances.

Gold Diggers of '49 (1935) *** (out of 4) Beans is out digging for gold and hits the big one. He rushes into town and soon everyone is out there digging. Porky Pig is helping Beans when their bag of gold is stolen so Beans must go after it.GOLD DIGGERS OF '49 is a fairly entertaining short from Tex Avery and it features that wonderful animation that he is known for. There are a lot of good gags scattered throughout the running time but for me the highlight is simply the animation. This is especially true during a sequence where Beans feeds his car some extra fast gas. Just look at the detail as they go zipping by various things including picking up Porky. Speaking of Porky, this here was his second short and he's bigger than he's ever been, weight wise, and makes for an interesting father.

. . . Warner Bros.' Looney Tuners always have been "unstuck in time." GOLD DIGGERS OF '49 probably gave FIVE author Kurt Vonnegut himself fits when he first viewed this as a youngster. (Of course, the World appreciates that the adult Mr. Vonnegut was able to harvest the seeds sown in his Imagination by '49 in order to chronicle Billy's amazing travels.) The opening sequence of '49 implies that it might be based upon some small incident of the California Gold Rush (which U.S. schools USED to teach began at Sutter's Mill in 1849; now that Politically Correct Trivia has replaced a Common Core of Facts for America's kiddies, no one under Age 50 knows WHY San Francisco's NFL team is called the 49'Ers). However, Porky Pig is soon seen tooling around in a 60-years-premature Model T, and later Beans pilots a Bonneville Salt Flats speedster post-dating this cartoon by decades. Furthermore, '49 champions Interspecies Marriage with the Union of Beans and Porky's daughter, and it shows that racial identity is as fluid as all of Today's genetic testing TV ads would seem to suggest, as this animated short transforms two Asian Men into a pair of Black Males.

A mildly amusing 1935 cartoon that was replayed yesterday on Turner Classic Movies.Beans was briefly (very briefly) the leading figure in Merrie Melodies, before his lack of any humorous comic personality suggested that he really did not deserve such an exalted position. He is one of the gold miners in Red Gulch, California in 1849 (hence the title - a joke supposedly on the popular Warner "Gold Digger" Musicals). His girlfriend is the daughter of Porky Pig. At this time Porky's size and personality were still up in the air. He is taller and fatter (and quite honestly gluttonous) in this cartoon. Beans brings back gold to the town and a rush starts. The town empties out. One racist joke in the film: a Chinese pair are riding a rickshaw (one is pulling it) when auto fumes (this cartoon has several anachronisms in it) turn them Black, and one starts talking like Amos and one like Andy.When a villain lassos Porky's tied bag, the latter says Beans can marry his daughter if he gets the bag back. He eventually does, in the course of changing his his old Model T into a streamlined racing car to catch the villain.As I said mildly amusing. The future touches of genius that Avery brought to his cartoon work in the 1940s are not found here. But he had to start somewhere, I guess.

'Beans' is a golddigger in '49 and to many surprise he actually finds something, just as the sleepy town he's living in had no high hopes anymore (as we see in the introduction).Beans instead of keeping the gold (that comes in coins, very handy indeed) for himself is telling everybody in town, including Porky Pig whose daughter he wants to marry. I love it when they find a book called 'how to find gold', it says 'Start to Dig!'.Then enter a villain who steals what appears to be a sack of gold (but really was only Porky's lunch) but Beans gets it back in his supercar.Not a lot going on in this cartoon, a bit racist at times but nothing to get too excited about on all accounts. 5/10.