Hamateur Night (1939) Poster

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6/10
It passes the test... just slightly
matlefebvre2016 August 2006
"Hamateur Night" looks like a talent show presented in front of a live audience. Just like if it was in a Broadway theater.

The show begins with an orchestra and their conductor. But it's the maestro alone who plays all of the instruments, while the supposed musicians conduct him. It's almost if he was a part of the show.

The host is a white dog, but he's far from extravagant or flamboyant. He seems very cold and he doesn't look to have a lot of interest for what he does. In a sense, it makes him a funny character.

The candidates follow one after the another, but they're all pitiful and they all disappear, either behind the curtain or in a cartoon trap which appears everywhere it's needed. First, there's a pianist who plays by putting a nickel in his piano (!) Second, it's an owl whose voice rises at the same time that he lifts in the air. There's a guru who performs the trick of the basket pierced by his sword while there's somebody in it. Unfortunately, his stuff must has been bought in a dollar store. Then, it's a tiny female flea who tells what is supposedly a funny joke, but we can't notice any word because of her high voice. She's followed by a performing dog who, when he's asked to talk, delivers a speech. A fox then tries to deliver the famous first lines of "Hamlet". It ends with two chickens embodying Romeo and Juliet.

The graphics are not terrific and sometimes, the colors don't follow. What saves the show are its funny moments. The silly performers are fairly funny. The different audience reactions are sometimes even funnier, especially with that Tex Avery-voiced hippo.

So, it's not a classic but, because of its age, it deserves to be kept.
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7/10
Egghead hams up
TheLittleSongbird11 November 2017
Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons.

Also have much admiration for Tex Avery, an animation genius whose best cartoons are animated masterpieces and some of the best cartoons ever made by anybody. Having said that, not everything he has done has turned immediately into gold but even his not-so-classic and lesser efforts are still worth seeing and better than most at their worst. This is the case with 'Hamateur Night'. Egghead is not a very compelling or particularly funny character here, not crazy about his design either and a better job could have been done with giving more variety to his role in the cartoon which was more repetitive one-joke than anything else.

Humour-wise, 'Hamateur Night' is amusing, with some entertainingly bad (in an intentional way) acts, and there aren't many misfires, excepting Egghead, but not much is hilarious either. Some parts are better than others, nothing wrong with the acts but it was the audience reaction (especially the hippo) that fares most delightfully.

Egghead's design aside, the animation is vibrant, rich in detail and mostly nicely drawn if lacking at times the fluidity and refinement of Avery's very finest (most of which are from his MGM period). A big star is Carl Stalling's music score and the clever insertions and arrangements of pre-existing music, a Stalling trademark and one of his biggest strengths as a composer. The music here is lush and characterful, with clever orchestration and a mastery of not just adding to the action but enhancing it as well (Stalling was a near-unequalled master at this, though Scott Bradley gave him a run for his money).

Voice acting is very good, if not a tour-De-force like these immensely talented voice actors frequently showed they were more than capable of.

In summary, pretty good but one can't help feeling disappointed. 7/10 Bethany Cox
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7/10
Perhaps Warner Bros.' Animated Shorts Seers . . .
oscaralbert6 April 2017
Warning: Spoilers
. . . (aka, the Looney Tuners) were most famous for their Cassandra-Like prophecies for happenings in America's (Then) Far Future, most of which were IGNORED by their Posterity. These prognostications of America's upcoming Calamities, Catastrophes, Cataclysms, and Apocalypti will strike the discerning viewer up-to-date with the Current Events of 2017 as being eerily spot-on. HAMATEUR NIGHT is no exception to this string of uncannily perfect predictions from Warner's primary Warning Division. The final frames of HAMATEUR NIGHT expose the Beta Version of the U.S. Constitution for what it is: a Suicide Pact written by Deplorable Racists during the 1700s. It was NEVER intended to last for even 20, let alone 250 years. The authors of this lamentable document fully realized their shortcomings, and expected that CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTIONS would be held every decade or two, allowing the Brightest Minds of the day to always keep America in the Forefront of Humanity's Pack. Otherwise, a nation devolves into stale mush as so-called government leaders do the mental gymnastics and adopt the painful pretzel postures necessary to Kow-Tow to the archaic whims of brains that turned to dust centuries before. HAMATEUR NIGHT depicts an America utterly devoid of talent and original thought, in which there's not even a one-eyed man to rule this land of the blind. The final frames of HAMATEUR NIGHT portray a nation which has sunk to a puerile Lowest Common Denominator, in which a voting bloc composed entirely of Eggheads exercise Tunnel-Vision Groupthink to elevate Egghead to the Pinnacle of their esteem, perfectly capturing the Coronation of America's Pathetic 45th so-called President.
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a crowd pleaser at the defunct Rose Bud Movie Palace
georgeeliot5 February 2002
This is not the Tex Avery you know and love from his wild cartoons, but it is still nice. A simple device, Amateur night at a theater, with several interesting acts including the snake charmer "Swami Rivers." If you like this, try and see I Love To Singa. If you like Egghead, watch Johnny Smith and Poker-huntas. If you want to see other rare Tex at Warner Brothers, watch Don't Look Now and A Sunbonnet Blue.
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10/10
My feet are crooked!
lee_eisenberg18 March 2010
While Tex Avery was working for Warner Bros., he directed a series of cartoons centering on spot gags. "Hamateur Night" was a typical example, although the content matter reminded me more of what Friz Freleng's cartoons portrayed. The cartoon depicts a gaggle of second-rate amateur acts in a movie theater, and the audience gets to decide who's the best. As it so happens, Elmer Fudd's prototype Egghead is in the house. Hmmm...

So yes, it's the average silly cartoon from 1930s Warner Bros. - complete with some politically incorrect material - but I was laughing the whole way through. There's never a dull moment in any Tex Avery cartoon. I sure hope that Leon Schlesinger appreciated how much Avery made audiences laugh. Really funny.
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4/10
Fun ending, too mediocre before that
Horst_In_Translation8 February 2018
Warning: Spoilers
"Hamateur Night" is an American 7-minute cartoon from 1939, so this one has its 80th anniversary next year and this little color movie is from the same year WWII began to show you how old it is. It is a Schlesinger Studios production in fact and got directed by Tex Avery and like with many other of his worls, it does not try to make an impact through bringing back beloved characters, but by constantly including new ones. Like here we got open mic night at the local stage theater and the result is a great deal of music coming from these humanized animal cartoon characters. And who's gonna take the prize eventually? I'd say the right guy, even if the audience is clearly biased. But he also brought us my favorite song I guess. Sadly everything before that is very mediocre and the ending alone cannot make up for that I must say, but looking at the rating many may have forgotten that over the quality ending. Animation-wise it is decent like everything from that era, which probably makes the looks the best aspect here. It is a common Avery problem that his film feel always pretty creative, but almost never particularly funny and this one here is another example where the theory applies. I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.
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Misses the Mark
Michael_Elliott29 March 2016
Hamateur Night (1939)

** (out of 4)

The Warner Bros. hit FOUR DAUGHTERS is playing at the local theater and the manager has decided to have an amateur night where local talent can come and show off their talents. The only problem is that the people who have shown up have very little talent.

There are a few funny gags to be had in this animated short but for the most part this one complete misses the mark. The animation itself is quite good and I thought the hippo in the crowd laughing and causing trouble was mildly funny. Everything else was rather dull and didn't contain enough laughs to keep this short entertaining throughout the running time. The film isn't horrible but with so many better films out there there's not a point in watching this one.
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