Cubby's Stratosphere Flight
About Cubby's Stratosphere Flight
Cubby the Bear takes a Rube Goldberg flying machine to the North Pole. A polar bear working as a traffic cop chases him into an igloo that turns out to be a speakeasy. Inside, a floor show is going, with a walrus quartet among the acts.
Cast & crew
More about Cubby's Stratosphere Flight
Vernon Stallings directed, billed on IMDbPro as George Stallings. Amadee J. Van Beuren produced, and RKO released the short on April 20, 1934. It is number 17 in the Internet Archive’s Cubby Bear set.
Themes
Background
Speakeasies were already finished as real rooms by April 1934. Repeal had passed in December 1933. The igloo club is a cartoon leftover of that setup.
Making
Sharples was scoring Van Beuren shorts by this point in the Cubby series, after Gene Rodemich’s name on the 1933 titles. The plot is a string of machines and a nightclub gag rather than a rescue.
Reviews
Cox’s IMDb review says the score is the part that carries the short, with orchestration doing the work the drawing does not.
Music
Winston Sharples composed the music. Cox credits the orchestration with the energy in the speakeasy half.
Preservation
The short is in the Internet Archive collection Van Beuren's Cubby Bear - The Complete Collection, under a public-domain mark.
Notes
- IMDb lists a television showing as early as June 21, 1945, on WNBT, Channel 1, in New York.
- Bethany Cox, writing on IMDb as TheLittleSongbird, picks the traffic cop and the walrus quartet as the characters that work, and says the cop still has little to do.
- The same note calls the igloo speakeasy the liveliest setting in the second half.
Scenes
- The contraption lifts Cubby toward the Pole.
- The polar-bear cop runs him into the igloo.
- The speakeasy floor show, walrus quartet included.
Also available
- Internet Archive (van-beurens-cubby-bear-the-complete-collection)
