David Hand | Who Killed Cock Robin? / 1935

dan cupid admits to his crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Cottrel, Joe Grant, and Bob Kuwahara (writers), David Hand (director) Who Killed Cock Robin? / 1935

 

In late June of that same year Disney released yet another offering in “The Silly Symphony” series, Who Killed Cock Robin? In this 8-minute work director David Hand, who with William Cottrell and Wilfred Jackson would two years later direct the great classic animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, presents us with possibly two LGBTQ figures, if you count the animator’s Hamilton Luske’s wonderful portrayal of Jenny Wren, imitating with near perfection the top-heavy female impersonator Mae West, as a queer figure, presented in this work as a puffed-up mourning dove.

     In his Screening the Sexes, Parker Tyler deliciously describes Mae West as the drag queen who every gay male who has laid eyes upon her image knows her to have been. Tyler describes West’s perfect timing into a world that needed some heterosexual evidence that they still existed.

 

“What homo society in comic art would seem to need is the perfect assurance of Mae West, its Mother Superior, whose suavity is that of a candid diplomat and whose tacit authority is that of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. One has to admit this is a very difficult assignment, requiring a subtle and powerful grasp of life style. The ease and authority of Miss West as a homosexual camp symbol speaks aloud to her unique privilege: she is, after all, a woman. In many respects she behaves like a homo with a lifelong dedication to putting on the ritz, while undeniably being a good fellow through it all.”

 

     Luske and his fellow animators capture West perfectly as the dolled-up dove enjoying the passionate tweets of Cock Robin (who sings with a mix of voices that sound a bit both like Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier), as she calls down to describe him as a “fas-cin-ating man.” She’s waiting for him to come up and see her sometime soon when he’s shot by an arrow, which arouses the entire avian society who immediately demand a trial to discover who might have accomplished such an atrocious act.

     Disney’s animators show avian justice to not be so very different from the homo sapiens police. Raiding the usual tough night club they come away with a Blackbird (voiced by Nick Stewart) who clearly “Don know nuttin’ ‘bout it” (racism as deemed necessary to accomplish his voice). Despite his claim of no knowledge, the Irish cop keeps bopping him over the head again and again, and even after “telling it to the judge” finds himself continued to be hit and pummeled as they toss him into “Sing Sing.”

      The prosecuting parrot (Pinto Colvig, who also voiced the Gingerbread Man in the previous cartoon) also questions Legs Sparrow (Clarence Nash), an obvious gangster, and the cuckoo bird who probably has been made that way by all the police bashings over his cranium. Judge Oliver Owl (Billy Bletcher) is growing impatient and is ready to string all three up for the crime until Jenny Wren (Martha Wentworth) shows up to describe her rendezvous with Robin. She declares she “wants to see justice done” since (in song):

 

                      Somebody rubbed out by Robin.

                      Somebody sure done him wrong.

                      Why they sneaked behind him and shot him

                      Right at the end of his song. 

 

     Convinced by Jenny’s sweet lament, the judge declares they should “hang them all,” to which the chorus of birdies reply in song, “We’re going to hang them all, we’re going to hang them all. We don’t who is guilty so we’re going to hang them all.”

 

     Suddenly an arrow is shot into the midst of the proceedings with a cry of Stop! The judge demands to know who it is. A small child-like figure appears nearby on a branch giggling in “he-haw” hilarity, answering in a lisp: “Sssay, don’t be sthupid. I’m Dan Cupid.” Quickly admitting to the crime he explains:

 

                   I shot Cock Robin.

                   But Robin isn’t Dead.

                   He fell for Mrs. Jenny Wren

                   And landed on his head.

 

        The twittering, hands on hips, swishing Danny boy is as gay as you can get.

        Jenny walks over to the dead Robin, pulls the arrow out of his heart, and helps him to sit upright as if she were Prince Charming hovering over the body of Snow White. He stands and they kiss, she politely blocking it out with the twirl of her umbrella, although his head appears above it as he remains below obviously focused on the top-heavy part of her renowned anatomy. According to Tyler, Mae once confessed that “she directed her sex appeal toward the male in terms of the contrasting magnetic fields situated in her right and left breasts.”

                    

Los Angeles, April 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).