Flying Circus

← Previous	Next →
3 Ring Wing-Ding	Chimp & Zee

Airdate:
14 September 1968

Series:

Looney Tunes

MPAA Number:
21924

Copyright Renewed:

14 May 1996

Crew

Flying Circus is a 1968 Looney Tunes short directed by Alex Lovy.

Plot[]

World War I aviator Ace Dee Patrol lands at a military base. He walks out and slaps at an army officer and says that it has been a long day and that he got behind "that old Fritz" and simulates shooting until he realizes that the army officer is not an ally. Rather, it is the enemy German army officer Fritz Von Cluckner, who has posed as Ace's superior. Fritz calls upon his troops to capture Ace, but the troops fail to stop him. Ace runs back to his plane, but as he tries to spin the propeller, it rips in half. Ace kicks the propeller, and it spins fast enough to still take off and run over Fritz.

Fritz gets back into his plane and dogfights against Ace. He first throws a bomb at the enemy, but the bomb is blown back and he accidentally swallows it. Next, he attempts to blast Ace with a machine gun, and Ace counters by shooting a bullet at the plane's wheel, sustaining a flat tire and descending it down an air balloon.

After Fritz recovers, Ace retaliates by directly whacking Fritz with a wrench, breaking him from below the plane and sending him falling. Fritz lands on Ace's plane and covers Ace's eyes, spiraling the plane out of control into a farm until he, Ace, and a cow fall off the plane. Ace whistles at his plane to retrieve it. Fritz finds that this is a good idea and does the same, but his plane misses him and he only recovers by bouncing on another air balloon. Fritz, having enough, goes all in with the machine gun, leaving Ace to trail off to avoid being blasted. The tail of Ace's plane gets shot off, causing Ace to fall, but he grips onto the base of Fritz's plane, ripping the skin off and sending the enemy descending to a crash landing.

Fritz goes back to Ace and slaps at him, as Ace did at Fritz. However, he realizes that he landed at an American airbase. "My mama told me there'd be days like this," he curses in German.

Notes[]

This cartoon is very limited in its main sound effects, unlike the other cartoons made at this time.
This is one of two Seven Arts-era cartoons to feature live-action stock footage in the ending, the other being "Feud with a Dude". The stock footage is taken from the 1961 documentary A Force in Readiness, which, like this short, was produced by William L. Hendricks.
Movies! aired a previously unreleased restored print of the cartoon before an airing of Dog Tales Classics. It was one of the shorts that was also restored in 2020.
Ace and Fritz were planned to star in their own series of shorts.^[1] A pitch cel for the series named the unnamed American ace as Captain Dee Patrol and Fritz as Count Von Cluckner. The closure of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts cartoon studio prevented this from coming into fruition.