Ub Iwerks | The Bully / 1932 [animated cartoon]

the comeuppance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hardaway, Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick (screenplay), Ub Iwerks (director) The Bully / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

Flip the Frog and a froglet with a balloon on a string are studying a poster for the upcoming boxing night on a fence. Next to them stands “the Bully,” who for absolutely no reason, puts his lit cigar to the balloon, popping it, the little one beginning to cry.

    Flip turns and goes up to offender, calling him a “big bully” to his face. Before he can even finish his challenge, however, the hairy brute has knocked him into a spin, although Flip does step on his toe. The fight promoter, who’s been watching the two in battle, steps in to stop their fighting, declaring that tomorrow night’s bout will feature the two of them.

     The Bully quickly agrees, while Flip, suddenly realizing what he’s up against, attempts to creep off, the promoter and the froglet hurrying him off to the Gymnasium for training where he basically boxes his shadow with even it tricking him into a knockout.

     The Bully, meanwhile, has an entire retinue of sparing partners who, one by one, he sends off through the air into the arms of canvas stretchers were ambulances wait nearby. He even knocks down a nearby tree which falls back into a pile of carefully stacked fireplace logs.

     Flip is now in the ring, with his “boy” as his corner man. The crowd cheers the Bully as he enters, with someone in the crowd giving him a raspberry. Hearing it, the Bully turns ready to knock the tall-hatted boxer-fan out of the room until the man stands, so much larger than the burly Bully that even the brute has to cringe. The giant throws the contender into the ring.

      The froglet, fearing the worse, carefully lays out a barbed horseshoe, a bomb, and a bat just in case.

     Quite inexplicably (the usual way that panze’s appear, from out of nowhere for no reason, in films of the period) a sissy with rouged cheeks and outrageously outsized flapping arm gestures, a hanky dangling from his right hand and with a left hand attached to his swishing hips, announces the bout in a high, slightly aspirated voice, for the first time naming our contenders, Pickled Pete and Flip the Frog. It now seems the sentiment of the crowd has shifted, most booing and shouting “throw him out” for Pete and generally applauding Flip.

     As one might expect in the earliest rounds Flip takes a beating when the Bully isn’t knocking out the referee—completely out of the ring, in fact, so that he can take care business without having to even play fair.

     Flip’s slugs are not even felt by the brute until Flip finally hits the tattoo of a gunboat on Pete’s chest, the entire ship calling out S.O.S. with, momentarily, the villain sinking into the ocean.

     But that is only temporary, as Pete soon after nearly knocks out Flip for good, the frog almost stumbling out of the stadium as a ghost of himself. Coming to at the very last moment, Flip puts up a good front until finally the Bully, treating him like a punching bag, knocks him down with Flip bouncing up over and over again, the radio commentator reporting, minute-by-minute, the ups and downs.

 

     Finally, the goon hits poor Flip with a punch so fearsome that the frog goes flying through the roof, circling the planet several times before falling back into the ring at the very moment that the referee is about to award Pete the win. The frog’s falling body knocks the Bully out as Flip is finally deigned as champion.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).