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Monkeys! And cartoons! Monkey cartoons!

Heads up, animation fans! Thunderbean is back with another impressive release of the most obscure and head-scratchingly bizarre cartoons to ever be produced. Cultoons! Volume 3: Monkeys, Monsters & More! offers us exactly what the title says. There’s some pretty strange and fun stuff to found on this disc.

Monkeys are the predominant theme of this collection of twelve animated shorts. We get three of Ub Iwerks’ Gran’ Pop Monkey cartoons, three of Boyd La Vero’s Marty the Monk shorts and a half-dozen other oddball productions.

The three Gran’ Pop films are pretty fun stuff, especially “Beauty Shoppe” in which Gran’ Pop is convinced into turning his rundown barber shop into a beauty parlor to compete in the market. Things turn ugly when a thuggish gorilla brings his hippo girlfriend in to get the works. Gran’ Pop, of course, is completely winging it on the whole “beauty” thing and hi-jinks are had by all. Marty the Monk, while not as fun, is interesting stuff to watch, as he was a competing character against early Mickey Mouse and Bosko, but they’re mostly exercises in characters dancing and singing as was par for the course at the time.

The other six shorts consist mostly of educational shorts, but that doesn’t stop them from containing the prerequisite “wtf?” factor. In an eleven (!) minute silent short from 1928, painters Turp and Tine discuss the history and production of turpentine in what is essentially a really long commercial for Hercules Turpentine. “The Enemy Bacteria” is pretty much what the title suggests – an educational cartoon about the dangers of bacteria. The Czech cartoon industry (yeah, I didn’t realize there was one, either) gets represented with “Up and Atom” in which a mad scientist tries to blow up the world.

The best segment on the disc, though, isn’t even a cartoon – it’s stop-motion test footage by Len Lye showcasing the creepiest monkey ever designed. Watch in horror as the demon primate sings and scares the bejeezus out of audiences everywhere. I’m not joking, this thing will be a long-term recurring character in my nightmares. The scariest part is that is was meant to be funny and entertaining. Instead, I think it may just summon Beelzebub every time I play it.

A handful of the ‘toons get commentaries as special features. The two best are the ones for “Mere Maids” (one of the Marty shorts) and “Mr. E From Tow City” (a bizarre Russian mish-mash of sci-fi themes), as they include a roundtable of animation experts discussing the shorts and having a good bit of fun at their expense. The previously mentioned Len Lye test footage, unofficially known as “The Peanut Vendor” gets two commentaries, one traditional and one recorded at a screening and contains the audience screaming in horror at the devil monkey.

The monkeys may outnumber the monsters greatly on the disc (though a good argument could be made for that Peanut Vendor either way), but this collection is another home run for Thunderbean. With some really decent prints of very off-the-wall and obscure cartoons, they continue to produce some of the most interesting animation DVDs around. Thunderbean can be found at www.thunderbeananimation.com

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