Two years after the release of Gulliver's Travels, the Fleischer brothers produced Hoppity Goes to Town, their second feature-length cartoon. The film is based in Bugtown, an insect community, and the insects that populate the picture are a sort of melting pot of the bug world. There is Hoppity the grasshopper, who is the dreamer of the bunch; Mr. Bumble the bee, who operates the honey shop, and his daughter Honey Bee, who loves Hoppity; C. Bagley Beetle, the ruthless businessman who plots against his own community for his personal greed; Smack the mosquito and Swat the fly, Mr. Beetle's comic-relief henchmen; and little Buzz, a young bee and a member of the Bee Scouts. The insects live in their isolated world, forever in dread of the increasing encroachment of the humans, but their world is shattered when their protective fence is knocked down and the humans begin making more and more excursions into their area and destroying their homes. Mr. Beetle sees this as his opportunity. He lives in what he believes to be a safe zone and wants Honey for his wife, so he continually pressures Mr. Bumble to let him marry Honey in exchange for moving Bumble into the safer area. But Hoppity has his own plans. Convinced that there are greener pastures elsewhere, he embarks on a journey with Bumble to the big house on the hill, the home of a struggling young songwriter named Dick Dickens and his wife, Mary. Hoppity and Bumble decide that the Dickens' garden is an insect utopia, and try to convince their community to abandon their homes and start fresh. Ultimately, Hoppity and Mr. Beetle must battle not only for control of Bugtown, but also for Honey's heart, and there are some songs by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser along the way. Hoppity Goes to Town was originally released under the title Mr. Bug Goes to Town. ~ Bob Mastrangelo, All Movie Guide
Review
More than 50 years before either Antz or A Bug's Life, the Fleischer brothers made Hoppity Goes to Town, an animated feature that imagines a sophisticated community of insects. A significant improvement over the Fleischer's first feature, Gulliver's Travels, Hoppity Goes to Town still falls short of its potential, but largely succeeds because it tosses aside the literary pretensions of its predecessor and goes for laughs. Hoppity Goes to Town covers the sort of ground that one would expect from its premise, re-creating the human world on a smaller scale, with the bugs improvising in ingenious ways. The film's low-budget is obvious at times, and the sloppy writing does not help matters. But Hoppity Goes to Town shows that the studio learned from the mistakes it made on Gulliver's Travels. The animation is much more consistent, there is more comedy and fewer songs, the characters are more interesting, and there is less of a feeling of trying to mimic Disney and more of a sense of creating an animated feature in the Fleischer mold. While not as creative as it should have been, the film stays true to its central theme: the devastating impact of human expansion on the insect world (and, by inference, on the animal kingdom and nature). To top things off, there are also two stirring sequences: the disruption of Honey and Mr. Beetle's wedding by the arrival of the construction crew, and the insects' scaling of the skyscraper, avoiding death at the hands of the oblivious construction crew all along the way. Hoppity Goes to Town illustrates that a little studio without the resources or, frankly, the extensive talent of the Disney studio, was still able to turn out a cartoon feature that succeeds on its own terms. ~ Bob Mastrangelo, All Movie Guide
Cast
Gwen Williams - Mary
Jack Mercer - Mr. Bumble, Swat the Fly
Pinto Colvig - Mr. Creeper; Carl Meyer - Smack the Mosquito; Kenny Gardner - Dick; Mike Meyer; Stan Freed - Hoppity; Ted Pierce
Credit
Dave Fleischer - Director, Hoagy Carmichael - Composer (Music Score), Leigh Harline - Composer (Music Score), Sammy Timberg - Composer (Music Score), Leigh Harline - Musical Direction/Supervision, Charles Schettler - Cinematographer, Max Fleischer - Producer, Maria T. Mason - Producer, Carl Meyer - Screenwriter, Dave Fleischer - Screenwriter, Don Gordon - Screenwriter, Mike Meyer - Screenwriter, Ted Pierce - Screenwriter, Izzy Sparber - Screenwriter, Graham Place - Screenwriter, Bill Turner - Screenwriter
Mr. Bug Goes to Town, also known as Hoppity Goes to Town and Bugville,[1] is an animated feature produced by Fleischer Studios and released to theaters by Paramount Pictures on December 9, 1941. It was originally meant to be an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee, but the Fleischers were unable to get the rights to the book, and the studio came up with its own story inspired by The Life of the Bee instead. The film was produced by Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer, who was credited as director. The sequences for the film were supervised by Willard Bowsky, Shamus Culhane, H.C. Ellison, Thomas Johnson, Graham Place, Stanley Quackenbush, David Tendlar, and Myron Waldman.
The plot describes the return of Hoppity the Grasshopper, after a period spent away, to an American city. He finds that all is not as he left it, and his good insect friends (who live in the "lowlands" just outside the garden which belongs to a songwriter and his wife) are now under threat from the 'human ones', who are trampling through the broken down fence which prefaces the property, using it as a shortcut.
Insect houses are being flattened by their feet, and are also often burned by cast away cigar butts and matches. Old Mr Bumble and his beautiful daughter Honey (Hoppity's childhood sweetheart) are in grave danger of losing their Honey Shop to this threat.
To compound their problems, devious insect "property magnate" C. Bagley Beetle has romantic designs on Honey Bee himself, and hopes, with the help of his henchmen Swat the Fly and Smack the Mosquito, to force Bumble to give him her hand in marriage.
Production
Mr. Bug Goes to Town was beset by problems early on. To produce their first animated feature, Gulliver's Travels, the Fleischers had moved their studio from New York City to Miami, Florida, and expanded their staff, at great expense.[2] Immediately after Gulliver was completed and released, the studio began development on a second feature, eventually going into production on Mr. Bug. The studio was already deeply in debt from the expense of "Mr. Bug" and the expensive costs of the Superman shorts which were in production around the same time. The Fleischers were forced to sell their studio to Paramount mid-way through production on Mr. Bug, on May 24, 1941.[3] Paramount kept the Fleischers in production, but they were required to deliver unsigned letters of resignation to Paramount, to be used at the studio's discretion, as the brothers were growing apart.[3]
Release
Mr. Bug was originally going to be released in November 1941, but since the Fleischers' rival, Walt Disney Productions, had its film Dumbo released weeks earlier in October and was already a success, Paramount changed the date to December. Having the misfortune of opening two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Bug was a financial and critical disaster and led to the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer, from the studio they had established in 1919. Paramount reorganized the company as Famous Studios. [3]. Max and Dave had not spoken to each other since early in 1940 due to personal and professional disputes. [4]
Paramount later re-released Mr. Bug as Hoppity Goes to Town; the original title is a parody of the title of the 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.[3] The film cost $713,511 to make, and had only made $241,000 back by 1946, the year it was withdrawn from circulation.[3] Under the reissue title, Hoppity has had multiple re-releases on home video (with inferior image quality) throughout the 1970s to its recent DVD release by Legend Films, in which the studio re-titled the film again to Bugville. The film has now become a cult favorite with a younger generation of animators and animation buffs.
The film was acquired by U.M.&M. T.V. Corp. in 1955, which was later bought out by National Telefilm Associates (which became Republic). While NTA failed to renew copyrights to many of the films they acquired, Mr. Bug Goes to Towndid get its copyright renewed. Despite the fact that the film is still copyrighted, many public domain companies have released the film on VHS and DVD. To this day there has been no official home video release of this film.
