I stumbled across a wonderful little short when researching my
Monster Movie a Day. Looking through a box of monster movies I picked up
at a flea market a couple years ago, I found a VHS I didn't know I had.
This strange box is both surreal and magnificent, and quite frankly, bought without me even
knowing it was among the lot I purchased.
Bambi
Meets Godzilla & Other Weird Cartoons is a treasure of obscure,
bizarre animation that I feel ashamed of never watching. The tape is 30 minutes of rare, vintage animation
mostly from the animation pioneer Max Fleischer. Aside from the title-piece,
which I will get to soon, the rest of the VHS is just as good. In Betty Boop in
Crazy Town, an insane wonderland of absurdity knocks Bizarro World down a peg.
"You Auto Lay an Egg" is a short showing a bird eat auto
parts as it eventually lays an egg. In "Cobweb Hotel," a spider
invites houseflies in for dinner. Any fan of animation deserves this VHS
(not available on DVD) among his or her collection.
Ok, now to the bizarre title-piece, Bambi Meets Godzilla. The short itself is roughly a minute and a
half and features simple, hand-drawn animation of a cute, Disney-eqsue deer
eating grass. The one joke, hilarious
short is drawn by a young man named Marv Winston – entirely drawn from his
bedroom in 1969.
Bambi meets Godzilla - Marv Newland (1969) from O.C. on Vimeo.
Not surprisingly, this short was included on several VHS releases of Return of Godzilla. Bambi Meets Godzilla was ranked number #34 in the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, a 1994 book by animation historian Jerry Beck.
Feel free to comment below. I would love to read them.
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