Blue Monday

The Captain, fed up with what he considers slovenly housekeeping on the part of Mama, takes over the housekeeping on a washday, with the usual predictable results.

This is the strongest of the Captain & the Kids Series from MGM that I have seen, and the result can be laid squarely at the feet of its director -- or 'supervisor' as he is titled here, William Hanna. Within a couple of years he and Joseph Barbera would team up to invent Tom and Jerry and you can see what would happen here: bone-breaking slapstick comedy squarely within the bounds of character, here the Captain's mad temper and Billy Bletcher's on-the-spot voice work. But the other characters are also spot on, the Kids -- who make a brief appearance, contemptuously eating pancakes off the Captains head; Mama, losing her temper and stalking out; the voiceless Inspector, silent, cowardly and zany; and a malevolent vacuum cleaner.

This was not an enjoyable series for anyone to work on. It drove Friz Freleng back to the arms of Leon Schlesinger, but you can see it is just Hanna's meat. He would build his entire reputation and Barbera's, too, on this form.