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 9, 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 of the film were directed by Al Eugster, Reuben Grossman, Abner Kneitel, Hal Seeger, Nick Tafuri, Dave Tendlar, John Walworth, Bob Wickersham, and Shamus Culhane.
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 of 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 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Bug was a financial disaster and led to the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer, from the studio they had established in 1919, and reorganized the company as Famous Studios. [3]. Max and Dave Fleischer had already not been on speaking terms for some time due to personal and professional disputes. [4] By the time Mr. Bug was released, Dave Fleischer had left Miami to run Columbia's Screen Gems cartoon studio in California, though still maintaining his position as the co-head of Fleischer Studios.
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.[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. There are still bootleg DVD copies and used VHS of the "Hoppity" version available online, though the current copyright holders, Republic Pictures (which is owned by Paramount), have yet to give this film a proper DVD release. The film has now became a cult favorite with a younger generation of animators and animation buffs.
This film is one of the few U.M.&M. T.V. Corp. acquisitions to remain under copyright to this day, most of what was acquired by the company ended up going into the public domain as successor company National Telefilm Associates (which became Republic) failed to renew copyrights in time.
References
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