Mr. Bug Goes to Town

Mr. Bug Goes to Town (a.k.a. "Hoppity Goes to Town")
Mister Bug Goes to Town original one-sheet poster.
Directed by	Dave Fleischer
Produced by	Max Fleischer
Written by	Dave Fleischer Dan Gordon Tedd Pierce Isadore Sparber Graham Place Bob Wickersham Bill Turner Cal Howard
Starring	Kenny Gardner Gwen Williams Jack Mercer Tedd Pierce Carl Meyer Stan Freed Pauline Loth
Music by	Leigh Harline Frank Loesser
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	December 5, 1941 (USA)
Running time	78 minutes
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$713,511
Box office	$241,000

Mr. Bug Goes to Town, also known as Hoppity Goes to Town and Bugville,^[1] is an animated feature produced by Fleischer Studios and released to theaters by Paramount Pictures on December 5, 1941. It was originally meant to be an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee, but the Fleischers were unable to get the rights to the book, and the studio came up with its own story inspired by The Life of the Bee instead. The film was produced by Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer, who was credited as director. The sequences for the film were supervised by Willard Bowsky, Shamus Culhane, H.C. Ellison, Thomas Johnson, Graham Place, Stanley Quackenbush, David Tendlar and Myron Waldman.

Plot outline

The plot describes the return of Hoppity the Grasshopper, after a period spent away, to an American city. He finds that all is not as he left it, and his good insect friends (who live in the "lowlands" just outside the garden which belongs to a songwriter and his wife) are now under threat from the 'human ones', who are trampling through the broken down fence which prefaces the property, using it as a shortcut.

Insect houses are being flattened by their feet, and are also often burned by cast away cigar butts and matches. Old Mr Bumble and his beautiful daughter Honey (Hoppity's childhood sweetheart) are in grave danger of losing their Honey Shop to this threat.

To compound their problems, devious insect "property magnate" C. Bagley Beetle has romantic designs on Honey Bee himself, and hopes, with the help of his henchmen Swat the Fly and Smack the Mosquito, to force Bumble to give him her hand in marriage.

Production

Mr. Bug Goes to Town was beset by problems early on. To produce their first animated feature, Gulliver's Travels, the Fleischers had moved their studio from New York City to Miami, Florida, and expanded their staff, at great expense.^[2] Immediately after Gulliver was completed and released, the studio began development on a second feature, eventually going into production on Mr. Bug. The studio was already deeply in debt from the expense of "Mr. Bug" and the expensive costs of the Superman shorts which were in production around the same time. The Fleischers were forced to sell their studio to Paramount mid-way through production on Mr. Bug, on May 24, 1941.^[3] Paramount kept the Fleischers in production, but they were required to deliver unsigned letters of resignation to Paramount, to be used at the studio's discretion, as the brothers were growing apart.^[3]

Release

Mr. Bug was originally going to be released in November 1941, but since the Fleischers' rival, Walt Disney Productions, had its film Dumbo released weeks earlier in October and was already a success, Paramount changed the date to December. Having the misfortune of opening two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Bug was a financial disaster (although having sightly positive reviews) and led to the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer, from the studio they had established in 1919. Paramount reorganized the company as Famous Studios.^[3] Max and Dave had not spoken to each other since early in 1940 due to personal and professional disputes.^[4] Apart from this, before Mr. Bug 's release, Walter Lantz, Paul Terry and Leon Schlesinger were considering producing animated feature films, but after responding to the disappointing results of this film and the initial failures of Walt Disney's other own two films Pinocchio and Fantasia, the projects were later eventually canceled.

Paramount later re-released Mr. Bug as Hoppity Goes to Town; the original title is a parody of the title of the 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.^[3] The film cost $713,511 to make, and had only made $241,000 back by 1946, the year it was withdrawn from circulation. The film had apparently failed the box office. ^[3] Under the reissue title, Hoppity has had multiple re-releases on home video (with inferior image quality) throughout the 1970s to its recent DVD release by Legend Films, in which the studio re-titled the film again to Bugville. The film has now become a cult favorite with a younger generation of animators and animation buffs.

The film was acquired by U.M.&M. T.V. Corp. in 1955, which was later bought out by National Telefilm Associates (which became Republic). The film (as Hoppity Goes to Town) was officially released by Republic Pictures on VHS and laserdisc in May 1989.[1] While NTA failed to renew copyrights to many of the films they acquired, Mr. Bug Goes to Town was one of the only few films that did get its copyright renewed. Despite the fact that the film is still copyrighted (by Paramount), many public domain companies have released the film on VHS and DVD.

In Japan, the movie was released on December 19, 2009 as part of Studio Ghibli's Ghibli Museum Library. A DVD was released on April 2010 by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment in Japan, and it has been reported to be a restoration of an NTA re-release print. ^[5] Recently, Mr. Bug, along with many other Fleischer-produced cartoons, was restored from the original three-strip negatives by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, though a few art-house theaters have recently screened the restoration, there are currently no plans to release it on DVD or Blu-Ray.

References

1. ^ Released as Bugville, Region 1 DVD, 2008: AllMovies.com website. Retrieved on February 15, 2008.
2. ^ Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press. Pgs. 292-293. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press. Pgs. 303-305. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
4. ^ Dispute between the Fleischers: from an article at the Washington Post website.
5. ^ Cartoon Brew: Disney releases Mr. Bug in Japan

External links

• Mr. Bug Goes to Town at the Internet Movie Database
• Hoppity Goes to Town at Rotten Tomatoes