Mr. Bug Goes to Town

I watched a little gem of an animated feature-length movie on TCM the other night titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Never heard of it? I hadn't either, and as it turns out, very few people have any inkling the film ever existed. Why is that, you say? The film was plagued with production problems from the outset, but the real problem was that it was released on December 5, 1941 - two days before Pearl Harbor.

After untold hours of painstaking animation (this was way back before computers, remember), and all the loving touches that are so evident in the film, it's a little heartbreaking to think that it became another casualty, of sorts, of World War II. It was re-released in 1946 as Hoppity Goes to Town by Paramount, but was deemed a box-office failure and relegated to deep in the film archives.

The heart of the story has a little bit of crime in it, with a happy and innocent band of insects living in the "lowlands" of a garden near Broadway in NYC until a broken fence leads to The Humans tromping on their territory and disrupting their community. Our plucky protagonist, Hoppity (a grasshopper, natch), is in love with the beautiful Honey (Bee), but he's not the only resident of Buggsville who has his eyes on Honey - so does the rich and evil C. Bagley Beetle.

The plot piles layer after layer of trouble and mayhem onto the Buggsville residents that Mr. Beetle happily fosters (with the help of his hapless henchmen Swat and Smack) because it all ties into his plot to make Honey's father Mr. Bumble so destitute that he's forced to have Honey marry the rich shyster to save both their home and their little "town."

Fleischer Studios is the creative force behind Mr. Bug Goes to Town, headed by the often-quarreling brothers Dave and Max. (The Fleischers were forced to sell their studio to Paramount mid-way through production on Mr. Bug due to financial problems). Max Fleischer was one of the pioneers of animation, creating Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, with the Fleischer studio also behind the popular Popeye cartoons in the 1930s and the better-known animated feature film Gulliver's Travels.

Under the reissue title, Hoppity had multiple re-releases on home video with inferior quality throughout the 1970s and had a more recent DVD release by Legend Films, re-titled as Bugville. The film has now become a cult favorite with a younger generation of animation buffs and was transferred from an original 35mm Technicolor release print owned by the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film. That version was shown in 2012 for the first time on television in a special hosted by Robert Osborne and Jerry Beck dedicated to rare animated films, including Gulliver's Travels.

Todd Mason has a regular Tuesday "Forgotten Films" feature on his blog, and you can check out more neglected masterpieces via this link.

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

Would love to find this one for my grandson.

[Deb]

I just happened upon this the other night while I was channel-surfing and my thought was, why isn't this better known? I had missed the TCM introduction, so was unaware of the bad-timing with the release date. Truly (to me at least) an unknown movie.

[BV Lawson]

It has some really incredible sequences in it for its time, like the opening shot (unfortunately covered over with credits) and the frenetic ending with the skyscraper, plus a kind of neon-like dance sequence in the middle. All very tricky for their day and very well done. It's a shame it's not better known, Deb!

[BV Lawson]

Patti, it's really hard to find in hard copy - I checked and didn't see any available. Hopefully, the TCM airplay will spur Paramount to put out a new version!

[Todd Mason]

Or TCM will do one of their quartet packages. Harlan Ellison saw it as a child and fell in love with it, and wrote about it on several occasions...I think I saw one of those washed out dupes you mention sometime in the 1980s.

thanks for the write-up...and, fwiw, Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V...which is always careful to include a weekly dose of Media Murder...

[BV Lawson]

I think that's interesting about Harlan Ellison, Todd. I'll have to look up those references.

And thanks very much for including Media Murder in your weekly lineup!

[Elgin Bleecker]

This is a special film. I first saw it as a little kid at a rec center one summer. When it rained, they brought everyone inside and threaded up movies on a projector. – The director Richard Fleischer wrote an interesting book about his father, Max, and his uncle, Dave, called, Out of the Inkwell. – EB

[BV Lawson]

What a wonderful story and memory to have, Elgin! I've heard of OUT OF THE INKWELL but haven't read it yet - something else to add to the TBR pile.