What makes it different from others?

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a one shot cartoon produced by Columbia. There will be spoilers ahead: Frank Tashlin wrote the story and directed this one, which is probably why it looks, sounds and feels like a Warner Brothers cartoon. This is the same type of short as Hollywood Steps Out-stuffed with caricatures from almost the start to almost the finish. Even the title card has caricatures surrounding the title.This opens with a slow pan across a map of the US from Florida to California, a setup for a very old gag. There's almost no dialog in this. A narrator guides the viewer along. The first caricature we see is W.C. Fields. From then on, they come pretty rapidly. Most of the jokes are very familiar to you if you watch many of these cartoon, though there are a few surprises (I'll never see Edna Mae Oliver in the same way after seeing this).There's an interesting gag surrounding animators and a rather subtle joke at the Lantz studio written on the side of a building. Look sharp, as it passes fairly swiftly. There's also a running gag involving John Barrymore and autograph hounds.Some of the better bits involving caricatures are the bits with the Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges and the one featuring Oliver. There's a reused gag involving the "Thin Man" (William Powell). A pretty fun cartoon.This deserves to be more widely known. Recommended.

Frank Tashlin's time as head of Columbia's cartoon division did not last long, but he directed some fine cartoons while he was there. This rarely seen example is a typical genre of cartoons in this period, with caricatures of Hollywood stars offered in a blackout gag structure. The stars shown are most those seen since the early 1930s, although such Columbia talent as Rita Hayworth, cast members of the BLONDIE series and the Three Stooges get their time on screen. We also get to hear Paul Frees as the narrator in his first credited screen appearance.The pictures look like Tashlin's work at Schlesinger's unit, although the lush color is unusual for him. When he returned to Schlesinger, he worked on the unit's last black and white efforts. However, there are a couple of the extreme point-of-view shots he was fond of; his framing was the most realistic of cartoon directors, just as when he directed live-action movies, his players acted in a very cartoony fashion.