Education Fish is a 1937 short film (eight minutes) by Max and Dave Fleischer.
Tommy Cod is a rebellious young fish who doesn't like going to school. The teacher at the fish school (school of fish!) presents a lesson on the dangers of "playing hooky"—that is, getting too close to a fisherman's hook—but Tommy plays pinball in his desk rather than pay attention. When he escalates from goofing off to disrupting the class, the teacher locks him in a side closet for detention. Unfortunately there's a window, which Tommy swims right out of. He then encounters a worm on a hook.
Part of the Color Classics series.
Tropes:
- Brats with Slingshots: Playing pinball is one thing, but when Tommy starts shooting at the teacher with a slingshot, he gets chucked in the detention closet.
- Foreshadowing: It is not hard to guess, when bratty Tommy doesn't pay attention to the rhyme the teacher is teaching about staying away from hooks, that he'll encounter a hook.
- Furry Reminder: The fish teacher is teaching her class. A student gives her an apple. She looks at the apple, sees a worm, extracts the worm—then eats the worm and throws the apple away, because she's a fish.
- Honey Pot: The worm on a hook, drawn about as "sexy" as one can draw a worm, who lures Tommy in before whacking him on the head and tying him to the hook. (It's an odd moment, as Tommy is drawn to be a small child.)
- Humans Are Cthulhu: Stay away from their hooks!
- Incredibly Lame Pun: There's "playing hooky", and there's the name of the school—the A.B. Sea School For Fish.
- Squirrels in My Pants: Briefly, as Tommy escapes the fisherman's boat by flopping up into his pants and through his shirt before diving out to the ocean through a sleeve.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The worm is a worm, but we know it's a girl worm because it has long eyelashes and it wears lipstick and it puts on makeup from a compact.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: Even worms have them, as the worm on the hook extracts a compact from one of her bands.
- Visual Pun: An octopus serves as a maypole for the kids.
