3 Ring Wing-Ding is a 1968 Looney Tunes short directed by Alex Lovy.
Plot[]
The circus is offering one thousand dollars for a live tiger. Colonel Rimfire decides to kill two birds with one stone. He orders Cool Cat to go with him at gunpoint. The hep tiger flees and runs straight into the circus. He sneaks past a bouncer, but the Colonel is not so lucky. Rimfire has to buy a ticket to get into the big top. He chases the tiger past the Indian Snake Charmer and a trained seal, but Cool Cat uses an acrobat's catapult to launch him out of the circus. The bouncer catches him trying to sneak in again and he has to buy another ticket.
Cool Cat leads him into the human cannonball's cannon and fires him across the tent into a lion's mouth, but he bounces back out. Cool Cat impersonates the fire-eater but Rimfire sees through the disguise and chases him across the high wire. Cool Cat cuts the wire, sending Rimfire plummeting onto the pipe organ. They then swing on trapezes, but the colonel falls in the elephant's water trough and the elephant uses his trunk to fling him through the air again. The Ringmaster says it's the greatest act he's ever seen and offers them five hundred dollars a week to perform. Cool Cat decides to split the money, but does it unfairly, as Rimfire gets a dollar for each time Cool Cat gets one more than what he had before.
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Notes[]
- Starting with this cartoon and the next Merrie Melodies short, VITAPHONE and VITAGRAPH are flipped on the end titles, so every Merrie Melodies short would now have "A VITAGRAPH RELEASE" and every Looney Tunes short would now have "A VITAPHONE RELEASE" (although this also happened three shorts before, in "Hippydrome Tiger").
- The melody of the calliope music that plays when Cool Cat enters the circus would later be used for the opening of The Merrie Melodies Show.
- The gag of Cool Cat cheating Rimfire out of his fair share was also done in "Racketeer Rabbit" from 1946.
- This is the final appearance of Colonel Rimfire in the theatrical shorts, as well as the final Cool Cat short to feature him. His next appearance would be in an episode of The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries.
- The cartoon is themed from a pitch from Alex Lovy for a circus-themed series of shorts from the Seven Arts cartoon studio called "The Big Top".[1] The aforementioned series would likely take place in the same circus that this short takes place in, and would've featured the ringmaster as the main antagonist. Due to the shutdown of the cartoon studio the following year, the aforementioned series never came to fruition.
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