by Douglas
Messerli
Jack King and
Frank Tashlin (animators), Earl Duvall (director) Buddy's
Beer Garden / 1933 [animated cartoon]
Bearing a great
deal of structural resemblance to Dave Fleischer’s 1930 Betty Boop cartoon, Dizzy
Dishes—including a female singer, an overworked waiter, and a fat brute
of a customer—this cheerful toon takes us into Buddy’s beer garden which
appears to be influenced by the Munich October Fest beer halls, with legions of
drinkers sitting in rows gulping down lagers of beer, skillfully delivered up
by the bartender and Buddy, along with servings of pretzels stacked up on the
tail of Buddy’s pet dachshund. A German brass band, made up of elderly fat men,
oom-pah’s out ditties, featuring a diminutive member who occasionally leaps out
of the Tuba’s players horn to add in jazzier renditions of their songs and
accompaniments of trumpet, maracas, piano, and bass drum solos. Free tongue
sandwiches lap up the nearby bowls of mustard.
The customers and staff themselves join
the performances, one patron turning his spaghetti into the strings of a harp,
and at another moment Buddy playing a tune on the beer steins. The cigarette girl,
Cookie, sells her cigars and cigarettes to the brute, who tries to get fresh,
before performing a hot Latin number which gets everyone excited.
To end the evening, Buddy announces a
special guest appearance, with, soon after, a look-alike
Mae West slowly sashaying
into the performing circle to sing "I Love my Big Time, Slow Time Baseball
Man.”
The Brute gets aroused and drunkenly
stumbles over to kiss her, the goat in a poster advertising Bock Beer coming
alive to butt the fat boy’s ass, sending him flying, and in the process sending
Mae up a tree, the wig, dress, and other accoutrements slowly falling away to
reveal that this Mae West is actually Buddy in drag.
As many a gay man, and notably critic
Parker Tyler have long argued West is the consummate drag performer, so in this
little cartoon offering we almost suffer a moment of stereoscopic vision observing
a drag performance of the noted drag queen.
Buddy’s
voluptuously bustled behind, we discover, was actually a large parrot in a
cage, whose nose quickly mutates into a lookalike Jimmy Durante, parroting that
performer’s declaration: “Am I mortified!”
In their study of the Looney Tunes and
Merrie Melodies Warner Brothers Cartoons, Jerry Beck and Will Friedland declare
that “Buddy is not only Warner’s greatest pre-Bugs Bunny authority on
cross-dressing, [but] in this particular film he’s the closest thing the ‘30s
have to Pee-Wee Herman.”
Los Angeles,
November 20, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).
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