Neptune Nonsense (1936)
Article 6017 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-10-2021
Directed by Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer
Featuring the voices of Paul Tetley and Gus Wickie
Country: USA
What it is: Felix the Cat talkie

Felix goes fishing to catch a companion for his lonely goldfish, but is pulled underwater and eventually must go on trial before Neptune.

The main trouble with Van Bueren cartoons is that they are singularly short on laughs. This is not to say they don’t try, but the jokes come off as odd and weird rather than funny, and Felix is given very little chance to demonstrate the creative problem-solving skills he showed in the silents. The Felix cartoons are certainly better than the same studio’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, but they’re not any funnier than those, either. This one mostly consists of fish jokes, and if Neptune didn’t show up near the end of the cartoon, I wouldn’t have qualified it for fantastic content.