Yeah, this doesn't even really deserve mention for the historicity of sync sound. It was obviously dubbed in post, they only bothered foleying like 1/4 of the actions, and most of the sounds present were just whistles or distant barking. It's more like…first cartoon with sounds added in post, and replayed at approximately the same time? So yeah, it's honestly fine that Disney "snuck" theirs into release ahead of this. The music was pretty decent.

The cartoon itself was actually…

Well…any documentary about animation is a godsend. But unlike the Ub Iwerks and Tex Avery documentaries I watched this week, I have a hard time saying if this really taught me anything.

Starts off in that standard way with an opening segment that's almost like a trailer, with the usual suspects of animation commentary make dramatic statments about Fleischers' awesomeness, while jaunty big-band music plays…but then it just keeps going like that, for almost 50 minutes. It's like a long…

Just a note about the [formerly] most popular review, which begins: "This movie opens with a 15 minute set up of watching a guy leave his house in real time, walk to a boat, wait for a girl to arrive and then exchange pleasantries. That’s it."

That review has no relation to reality—as in, it is factually false, and extremely misleading. The allegedly interminable walking scene is under 1 minute long (rather than 15), and includes a faux-blind person stalking…

My favorite safety PSA film. This is staged on a minimal, dramatically-colored and -lit soundstage, and even in 1971 would have been stylishly retro. Love the cool jazz with spasms of exotica bongo, when we're setting up the hapless bejumpsuited dope to fall in a particularly terrible way (the drums of doom). Love when he bumps the desk at slow speed and goes sprawling. Love how this builds expectation and tension, with the same comic inevitability and voyeuristic slavering as…