Cartoons What Freaked Me Out A Bit

 

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I have to admit, when I was a young kid, maybe nine or younger, the MGM Harman-Ising cartoons had a way of kind of freaking me out. They tended to be highly dramatic, over-emotional, and starkly moral. Most of the other cartoons I watched were moral as well, but they tended to be simple-minded mayhem between good guys and bad guys. The Harman-Ising cartoons tended to be fever dreams, where the protagonists were put through a nightmarish ringer if they put a toe over the line in a dangerous world, trying to scare 'the kiddies' away from temptation. I think I've posted before about the trauma of watching 'To Spring' or 'The Field Mouse' or 'The Little Skunk.' 

Anyway, they also had a series about the 'Good Little Monkeys', based on the See-No-Evil, Speak-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil  Buddhist knickknack. A series of three cartoons, where the Monkeys were basically in a library, then in what amounts to a tobacconist's, and finally in an art museum. This allows for all the usual cartoon hijinks of the items around them coming alive. What really freaked me out was the appearance of the Devil in the first one (emerging from Dante's Inferno); we had basically been told that if he was coming for you there was little you could do, because it must be because you had sinned and put yourself in his power (thank you, JW's!).

How they actually looked in the first cartoon, somewhat 'cutened' in the other two.

Anyway, here they are. I leave it to you to form your own opinions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0SrXhSF8cw Good Little Monkeys (3 Monkeys) #1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkratG8O968 Pipe Dreams (3 Monkeys) #2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKHBFJFNYYk Art Gallery (3 Monkeys) #3

Anyway, for completeness sake, I include 'Tale of the Vienna Woods.' Being the priggish little Puritan I was at the time, I had no conception of the difference between a faun and the Devil. I saw them as being the same kind of thing, or at least dangerously close. If I had someone to explain them to me, would I have listened? I don't think Mom and Pop were much up on Greek mythology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCWCTmdCaxQ Tale of the Vienna Woods (The Fawn and the Faun)