Mr. Bug Goes to Town

Mr. Bug Goes to Town
Mr. Bug Goes to Town original one-sheet poster.
Directed by	Dave Fleischer Animation directors Willard Bowsky Shamus Culhane H.C. Ellison Thomas Johnson Graham Place Stanley Quackenbush David Tendlar Myron Waldman
Written by	Dave Fleischer Dan Gordon Tedd Pierce Isadore Sparber Graham Place Bob Wickersham Bill Turner Cal Howard
Produced by	Max Fleischer
Starring	Kenny Gardner Gwen Williams Jack Mercer Tedd Pierce Carl Meyer Stan Freed Pauline Loth Pinto Colvig (uncredited) Margie Hines (uncredited) The Four Marshalls The Royal Guards
Music by	Leigh Harline (score) Frank Loesser (words-songs) Hoagy Carmichael (music-songs)
Production company	Fleischer Studios
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	December 5, 1941 (1941-12-05) (U.S.)
Running time	78 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$713,511
Box office	$241,000

Mr. Bug Goes to Town, also known as Hoppity Goes to Town and Bugville, is an animated feature produced by Fleischer Studios and released to theaters by Paramount Pictures on December 5, 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 directed by Dave Fleischer. The animation was directed by Willard Bowsky, Shamus Culhane, H.C. Ellison, Thomas Johnson, Graham Place, Stanley Quackenbush, David Tendlar and Myron Waldman. It featured four songs: We're the Couple in the Castle, Katy Did, Katy Didn't, and I'll Dance at Your Wedding (Honey Dear) by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, and Boy Oh Boy by Sammy Timberg and Loesser.

Plot

Hoppity the Grasshopper, after a period spent away, returns to an American city (Manhattan, New York) 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.

But Hoppity discovers that the Songwriter and his wife (whose favorite hobby was gardening) was waiting for a check from the Famous Music publishing company for the songwriter's composition "Castle In The Air" but C. Bagley Beetle and his henchmen "steals" the letter containing check and kidnapping Hoppity as well and sealing him in the envelope after realizing that Hoppity was going to expose C. Bagley Beetle's nefarious plan to the Lowlanders.

As the planned wedding was going on Smack and Swat discovered that the survey crew for a construction company erecting a skyscraper was on the property of the former home of the Songwriter (now foreclosed by the property owners) and C. Bagley Beetle's property where the Lowlanders moved in.

As both Swat and Smack tried unsuccessfully to stop the wedding a weight from a surveyor's builder level rips through the chapel causing the Lowlanders to flee in terror back to the Lowlands not realizing that the Lowlands was endangered by the construction crew.

During the chaos C. Bagley Beetle and his Henchmen try to kidnap Honey but were thwarted by Hoppity who escapes after the construction crew "liberated" him and still in the envelope fought (with a little help from Mr. Bumble) and defeated C.Bagley Beetle and his henchmen.

Afterwards Hoppity told the citizens of C. Bagley Beetle's nefarious plan on stealing the check and hiding it realized that they were still endangered and overhearing the songwriter and his wife about still hoping that the publishers bought his song and hoping to build a penthouse in the new skyscraper.

Hoppity dragging the letter containing the check took cover hiding under a mailbox and seeing someone picking up the letter and taking it realizing to his relief that it was the mailman who took the letter containing the check.

The check finally arrived to the songwriter's home and his song Castle In The Air became a successful hit during the time Hoppity lead an exodus from the Lowlands with the Lowlanders to the top of the skyscraper but discovered that it was barren, as Hoppity was ridiculed by Mr Creeper, Buzz and Mrs Ladybug's twin sons Anthros and Mugatroyd discovered the "Garden of Paradise" and the new penthouse suite of the songwriter and his wife and Hoppity, Honey and the rest of the Lowlanders lived there happily ever after in their new home.

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. 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. Paramount kept the Fleischers in production, but they were required to deliver signed letters of resignation to Paramount, to be used at the studio's discretion, as the brothers were growing apart.

The voices for the characters were mostly provided by people working at Fleischer Studios during that period. Jack Mercer, who was the voice of Swat the Fly and Mr. Bumble, was a story man at the studio and more known as the voice of Popeye the Sailor. Tedd Pierce, a story man who came from Leon Schlesinger's studio to work for Fleischer, was the nasty C. Bagley Beetle. Carl Meyer, the voice of Smack the Mosquito, was also a story man and animator. Meyer and Jack Mercer would go on to collaborate on many cartoon stories for Popeye and a host of other cartoons for Paramount's animation department. Small time actor Stan Freed gave an "aw-schucks" quality to Hoppity's voice, while Pauline Loth lent her beautiful voice to Honey. Gwen Williams and Kenny Gardner portrayed the humans whose garden the bugs inhabit. Rounding out the voice cast were Pinto Colvig as Mr. Creeper the grouchy pessimist apocalyptic snail, and Margie Hines as Mrs. Ladybug and Buzz the Beescout.

Book and other merchandise

The film received a book adaptation which was released around the same time - it features new characters along the ones from the film and goes further on key plots: such as Honey been aware of Beetle's romantic interest, expressing dislike to him but willing to do the sacrifice if it meant everyone could live safely in his property. Hoppity gets aware of this fact from the Bee Scout, making Beetle's conflict with Hoppity more apparent from the start. Whether this was part of the script is unknown. The film also inspired a "Mr. Bug goes to Town" board game and a series of trading cards.

Release

Mr. Bug Goes to Town had a preview on 3 December 1941, but was not released in the United States until 13 February 1942 (20 February in New York City. Paramount took over the Fleischer Studios, before this film was ever released to the general public. In the UK, it opened during January 1942 under the name Hoppity Goes to Town.

Mr. Bug was originally going to be released in November 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 before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Bug was a financial disaster, despite earning generally positive reviews, and led to the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer from the studio they had established in 1919. Paramount reorganized the company as Famous Studios. Max and Dave had not spoken to each other since early in 1940 due to personal and professional disputes. Apart from this, before Mr. Bug 's release, Walter Lantz, Paul Terry and Leon Schlesinger were considering producing animated feature films, but after seeing the disappointing box-office of this film and the initial failures of Walt Disney's new films Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), their potential projects were canceled.

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. The film cost $713,511 to make, and had only made $241,000 back by 1946, the year it was withdrawn from circulation. Under the reissue title, Hoppity has had multiple re-releases on home video (with inferior image quality) throughout the 1970s to its DVD release by Legend Films, in which the studio re-titled the film again to Bugville.

The film was acquired in the 1950s, by National Telefilm Associates (which became Republic). The film (as Hoppity Goes to Town) was officially released by Republic Pictures on VHS and laserdisc in May 1989. While NTA failed to renew copyrights to many of the films they acquired, Mr. Bug Goes to Town was one of the few films that did get its copyright renewed. Despite the fact that the film is still copyrighted (by Republic successor Melange Pictures, managed by parent company Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures), public domain companies have released the film on VHS and DVD.

In Japan, the movie was released on December 19, 2009 as part of Studio Ghibli's Ghibli Museum Library. A DVD was released on April 2010 by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment in Japan, and it has been reported to be a restoration of an NTA re-release print. Recently, Mr. Bug, along with many other Fleischer-produced cartoons (including the Fleischers' previous film, Gulliver's Travels), was restored from the original three-strip negatives by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Though a few art-house theaters have recently screened the restoration which features the original titles, there are currently no plans to release it on DVD or Blu-ray.

On October 21, 2012, the Turner Classic Movies channel debuted the film, transferred from an original 35mm Technicolor release print owned by the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, for the first time on television in a special hosted by Robert Osborne and Jerry Beck dedicated to rare animated films, including Gulliver's Travels, Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the UPA cartoons and the silent cartoons of 1907 to 1932 of the New York Studios.

External links

• Mr. Bug Goes to Town at IMDb
• Hoppity Goes to Town at Rotten Tomatoes
• Mr. Bug Goes to Town (aka Hoppity Goes to Town, aka Bugville at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on February 5, 2016.