YMMV / Puppetoons

• Adaptation Displacement: Tubby The Tuba is perhaps better remembered for the Puppetoon short than for the Danny Kaye children's record from which he originated.
• Award Snub: Despite receiving several nominations and an Honorary Oscar for George Pal for creating them, none of the individual Puppetoons won an Academy Award. And to add insult to injury, despite being very important films in the history of stop-motion animation, none of the Puppetoons made onto The 50 Greatest Cartoons list, not even in the "Runners Up" section, due to the list's requirement that only hand-drawn / cel animated films were allowed to be included on it.
• Awesome Music: "Philips Cavalcade" is a true music showcase of the day, with a very memorable lineup of songs, and the same goes for its followup "Philips Broadcast of 1938".
  • "Mr. Strauss Takes A Walk" features the classic waltz "Tales of The Vienna Woods", and it is used to wonderful effect.
  • "Jasper In A Jam" is a jaw dropping jazz showcase, and even features the singing voice of Peggy Lee early on, singing "Old Man Mose Is Dead".
  • "A Date With Duke" has a spellbinding soundtrack, thanks in part to that it was composed by none other than the Beethoven of Jazz himself, Duke Ellington, using his classic "Perfume Suite" number!
  • The theme of John Henry, from "John Henry and the Inky-Poo".
  • The gypsy swing arrangement of "Hungarian Rhapsody" from The Little Broadcast.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Bugs Bunny's abrupt cameo appearance in "Jasper Goes Hunting". It comes completely out of the blue, he's hand-drawn in contrast to the stop-motion Puppetoons, and has no bearing on the rest of the picture, other than being a quick gag justified solely by taking place during the short's Dream Sequence.
• Breakout Character: Tubby the Tuba, who appeared in the very last Puppetoons short, surprisingly took off in popularity long after his debut, starring in comics, toys, and even had a CGI revival film made!
• Fair for Its Day: Jasper and most other African-American characters in Puppetoons have appearances and mannerisms based on most of the unflattering racial stereotypes of the time. Such depictions don't fly in today's society even though the shorts are celebrating black music, not mocking it. "John Henry and the Inky-Poo" fares a little better in this regard as a straightforward retelling of the folktale.
• Scenery Porn: "Mr. Strauss Takes A Walk" features a very beautiful depiction of a European forest.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Bugs Bunny's cameo in "Jasper Goes Hunting" uses an ersatz version of the Merrie Melodies theme "Merrily We Roll Along".
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Tulips Shall Grow" was made as an Anti-Nazi allegory film by Pal, who was obviously very pissed off at them for ravaging his native country of Holland—the entire land is ruthlessly destroyed by the Screwballs in the short, and before things turn out for the better, we see the protagonist lonely and praying in a bombed out chapel, hoping his lover is still alive... she is.
  • The titular "Tubby the Tuba" is brought to a single tear when the entire orchestra bullies him for merely asking if he could play the melody instead of the bass.
  • The ending of "John Henry", who literally gave his life to prove how much a man can do.
• Ugly Cute: The Scarecrow as a baby. Also, Jasper himself is rather moe for a racist caricature.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Some of the shorts are heavily rooted in 30's and 40's pop culture, especially in regards to shorts like "Philips Cavalcade", which is very much a time capsule of 30's Radio Culture.
• Values Dissonance: A big reason the Puppetoons have seen limited re-releases in recent years, as many of them contain a lot of unfortunate racial caricaturing. The most egregious of these are the Jasper cartoons, which draw upon pretty much every known black stereotype — poverty, watermelon, Ebonics, and blackface just to name a few. Tellingly, The Puppetoon Movie was released in 1987, shortly before political correctness became more widely accepted and even the tamest of racial stereotypes were edited out of reruns of older cartoons.^note It's worth mentioning that George Pal (a Hungarian immigrant) had very little knowledge of American culture and racism at first after emigrating to the United States. When he started depicting African Americans in his shorts, he simply saw how everyone else was depicting them in cartoons and went off of that, completely unaware of the racist meaning behind Blackface. Once he did find out, he stopped using black characters altogether and only made an exception for John Henry and the Inky Poo, which depicted African Americans in a much more politically correct manner.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Exaggerated Cartoon principles applied to stop motion, all pulled off with thousands of puppets carved out of wood and animated straight ahead! Shorts like "Mr. Strauss Takes A Walk" really get to show off the series technical prowess. The Puppetoons are considered by many animators to be a true Tour De Force of what stop motion animation can do.
  • "John Henry" gives our hero one hell of an entrance when he's born, due to the very dynamic lighting and cinematography. Even his walk suggests his powerful stature.

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