Lights Fantastic (1942)

Wonderful character development!

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

. . . and on to "Darnation Milk" ("from cheerful cows") as well as hieroglyphics extolling Egyptian cigarettes, LIGHTS FANTASTIC thoroughly explicates the mindset of American advertisers--then and now. Like all the movie studios at the time, Warner Bros. had its share of run-ins with U.S. censors. For example, the first talkie version of THE MALTESE FALCON (1931) features a topless bathtub scene for the actress in the role famously inherited by Mary Astor in the second remake a decade later. But what a difference those ten years made! Well before the 1940s, America had adopted its puritanical sharia law that persists in many sectors of Society through today's 21st Century. Warner Bros. lampoons this pointless prudery by self-"censoring" this cartoon's can-can dance--performed by four dancing cans in skimpy skirts! Whenever these food tins face backstage and bend over for the "big reveal," the animators insert a black screen! That is, until the final "bottoms up" for "Face and Sunburn" Coffee (then known as Chase and Sanborn in the Live Action World) shows this message above the cans' finally revealed cans: "It's dated!" with the can bottoms all reading "Jan. 5, 1942." That coffee may be somewhat stale by today, but the idea that censorship has outlived its expiration date couldn't be fresher!

A weirdie. There are no characters in this cartoon, neither "humans" or funny animals. Its all sight gags and bad puns based on the Times Square billboards known as "spectaculars". The cartoon begins and ends with a "real life" shot of Times Square, red neon predominant. As another comment points out this was not an original idea in as much as it had been recycled from an earlier cartoon. However there might have been a powerful feeling of nostalgia behind this particular cartoon. The WW2 blackout turned off the juice to the Times Square spectaculars (the glow from the lights of big east coast cities was the perfect background for u boats to use to sunk allied shipping). Times Square was "dark". Seeing Times square as it once was and, it was hoped, would be after the war was won, was uppermost in movie audiences minds.

I was extremely amused by Lights Fantastic. Some of the plays on words were quite hilarious, like the Face and Sunburn Coffee (with the coffee cans doing the can-can), take-off on Chase and Sanborn. So was the typewriter sign used to advertise an upcoming movie, called Understood Typewriters (play on Underwood), which typed first "It's Sensational", then "it's Colossal", then trying to type "It's Stupendous" but first typing "It's Stupa", crossing out the typo, trying again with "It's Stoop", crossing that off also. (I thought it was going to be "It's Stoopid"! THAT makes little sense as how can a movie that is sensational and colossal also be DUMB?). The last line was "It's Swell!" The cartoon ended with a Win-a-Car conga line, opened up with tapping of Stucco House Coffee (Play on Maxwell House), shaking by peanut and jangling of cow bell for Darnation Milk, and the boy-and-whale "Oliver Oil". The other signs were funny, too; though I have not seen this cartoon in years, I remember it ever so well.

A mix of real-life footage of New York and cartoon footage of the typical 1940s advertising signs coming to life, Lights Fantastic is a classic cartoon.From such great gags such as the free eye test ("if you can read this, you are Chinese"), to the Chinatown bus carried by rickshaw boys, to the Egyptian Cigarettes picture of one Egyptian giving another a hotfoot, this is pure fun. Plus, it's classic Freling.