Shock of the Seven Chickens

Animated cartoon characters in the silent days sprouted question marks and exclamation marks on appropriate occasion, just like their counterparts in the newspapers. The practice died out on all but rare occasions in the sound era.

A really neat exception is in a very unexpected place—a Jay Ward cartoon. In the Fractured Fairy Tale “The Seven Chickens,” the narrator’s words “The prince was shocked at what he saw” are followed by the prince showing it on the screen by turning into punctuation. You can see the third and fourth drawings have question and exclamation marks in different thicknesses. They’re shot in a little cycle so the punctuation appears to be vibrating.



I wonder if Gerard Baldwin animated this cartoon. The mouth movements remind me of the work he did at Hanna-Barbera prior to coming to the Ward studio.