It’s taken me a long, long time, but I finally got my hands on a good, excellent actually, copy of Rhythm In The Ranks, a George Pal Puppetoon I remember from early childhood, mostly for how scary the villains of the story are.

When George Pal, a Hungarian, came to the States to escape the Nazi takeover of most of western europe, he brought with him a very unique method of stop motion animation. Rather than using clay figures, or ones with armature skeletons you could reposition between each exposure of a frame of film, Pal used a “replacement” method wherein many individually carved wooden figures were used to represent motion. A scene with a figure walking across the frame might use several dozen carved figures, each in different stages of walking, replaced one after the other as each frame of film is shot.

It gave the figures in the cartoon shorts an amazing degree of apparent flexibility, and yet they looked solid. You could tell they were wooden figures, and yet they not only walked and talked, they breathed, their faces stretched as the painted on mouths and eyes moved. Their legs and feet extended out as they walked. It made wooden figures seem as if the very wood they were carved from had come to life, and it made the Puppetoons fun to watch.

Pal made many of these while Europe was burning under the Nazi onslaught, and some of this cartoons spoke directly to that, employing a creepy stand-in for actual Nazi soldiers in the cartoons: The Screwball Army.

The Screwball Army was literally just that…an army of cannonballs with legs and arms that had screws stuck in them with nuts on top that spun while they marched across the screen, destroying everything in their path. Seems weird, but it was an effective stand-in for the real thing in a cartoon mostly aimed at children, but enjoyable by adults too. Added to the effect was they usually marched across the screen to the tune Powerhouse which anyone who ever watched the old Warner Brothers cartoons would recognise. They really creeped out six year old me.

The Screwball Army’s most well known appearance is in the Puppetoon Tulips Shall Grow, but Rhythm In The Ranks is the one I remembered most from way back when, and the hardest to find a copy of.

When I finally got to see Rhythm In The Ranks again after so many years had passed, I saw I’d correctly remembered much of it, including the hilarious singing telegram declaration of war, and the Screwballs marching across the hills. But dig it…I remembered everything reversed left from right. It’s a trick my memory plays on me over and over again to this day. I have no trouble reading, it’s not any sort of dyslexia. I have no trouble telling left from right. It’s just in my memory, and more pronounced the further back the memory is. There’s probably a name for it somewhere. This image of the Screwballs I got from a website article on Rhythm In The Ranks (go read it…there’s another shot in there of the hilarious singing telegram) is a good example. 

I remembered this scene perfectly all these years in every detail, but as a mirror image of what it actually is.