Goo Goo Goliath (1954)

Too much of everything

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

. . . than the thought of having their babies swapped at birth with those of Random Strangers, Warner Bros. decided in the 1900s. Many of Warner's live-action features and animated shorts proved a barrel of laughs circling around this jocular theme. GOO GOO GOLIATH is just one of the Looney Tunes designed to instruct U.S. Citizens that Life is just a craps shoot, anyway; a dice game in which the odds of getting a particular outcome are about 100 million to one (the typical ratio of tadpoles to eggs when folks make Whoopee). Since those odds roughly covered the entire population as the Baby Boom got into full swing, it was logical to think that anyone's grandchild could be a Barack Obama just as easily as a Donald Trump. GOO GOO GOLIATH suggests that American procreation is akin to playing the slots (some sort of song might be associated with all of this, which goes "Put another nickel in, in the Nickelodeon . . . "). The moral of this story is that having U.S. babies is just like buying a box of chocolates: You just need to grin and bear it, rather than complaining about what the stork dragged in at the drop of a diaper.

Not one of my favourite cartoons ever, but good fun nonetheless. It does get predictable by the end despite a very interesting concept, a couple of the gags not featuring the stork are on the dry side and the pacing in the middle could have been crisper. However, the animation is colourful and cleanly detailed, the sight of the giant toys is an incredible sight to behold visually. The music is lively, lushly orchestrated and characterful with clever arrangements of pre-existing tunes. The narration is sharply satirical, and the subtext with the father's terror at having a new baby in his life is one that anybody would identify with. Most of the gags are very amusing, though not much is hilarious. The best moments come from the stork, though the moment with the giant father using a jeweller's eye(manacle?) to change nappies is also memorable. The characters are good enough, only the stork has staying star power though nobody is useless to the story which is a good thing. The voice acting from Mel Blanc, Bea Beanderet(who does a fine job with the least to do of the three) and Norman Nesbitt is terrific. All in all, good fun. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Friz Freleng's domestic comedy 'Goo Goo Goliath' takes as its starting point the idea of babies delivered to the wrong parents. Although this idea had been touched on before in cartoons such as Bob Clampett's 'Baby Bottleneck', 'Goo Goo Goliath' adds the amusing touch that the mix up is due to the drunkenness of a stork who is perpetually toasted by new parents. This concept is the best thing about this rather weak cartoon and Freleng would reprise it in the Bugs Bunny cartoon 'Apes of Wrath'. 'Goo Goo Goliath' is also similar to Chuck Jones's equally odd and misfiring 'Rocket-Bye Baby' which emerged two years after 'Goo Goo Goliath'. The idea of a giant baby delivered to a normal sized couple has very limited comic potential and 'Goo Goo Goliath' struggles to make the concept work. It's not helped by the unattractive, angular style in which the cartoon is presented. Ultimately, the jokes run dry almost immediately and there is little to recommend this unusual but unappealing cartoon.

While the drunken stork is an amusing thread running through this story of baby-swapping, there are many other memorable moments: the giant baby playing with life-size trucks, or the satire of those 1950's cautionary films with the scene of an empty yard and the narrator saying "a gatedoor carelessly left ajar, and an innocent baby wanders away..." (obviously a closed gate wouldn't have impeded the giant baby), or the giant father using a jeweler's eyepiece to see as he changes the diapers on his extremely tiny baby. Perhaps not as inventive as the classic Mars/Earth baby-swap, "Rocket-bye Baby" but still worthy.