Convict Concerto Take

There’s no director credit on the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Convict Concerto” (released 1955) but it’s apparently the last cartoon Don Patterson supervised at the Walter Lantz studio. Patterson, Ray Abrams and Herman Cohen get animation credits. Here’s a realisation take when Woody hears the dumb cop tell him (as if he couldn’t figure it out on his own), the crook inside his piano is a killer.



It’s not as wild as takes in other Patterson cartoons but this one was written by Hugh Harman (misspelled in the credits) who wasn’t exactly enamoured of wild takes. I suspect the story behind Harman’s hiring at the Lantz studio for this one cartoon (Lantz displaced Harman and Rudy Ising on the Oswald series more than 25 years earlier) is far more interesting than anything in this cartoon.