Cliff Edwards and His Buckaroos (1941) User Reviews

Rhyming "Heart" And "Short"

[boblipton · 6/10 · 2 January 2023]

Cliff Edwards and his group sing "My Little Buckaroo" and a couple of other songs while running a dude ranch and performing for the guests.

Edwards is best remembered for voicing Jiminy Cricket in Disney's PINOCCHIO and numerous other shorts. In 1924, he played the Palace, and performed in Gershwin's first Broadway musical. His singing career extended through 1960 when ill health and erratic habits made him unemployable. His hit records include "Singin' In The Rain" and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love". During that time he made a lot of westerns, when not playing live performances. He died in 1971, aged 76.

Decent Musical Short

[Michael_Elliott · 27 November 2009]

Cliff Edwards and His Buckaroos (1941)

** (out of 4)

Cliff Edwards, playing himself, is working on a dude ranch when word gets around that some rich women are about to pay a visit. The men clean the place up and await the big arrival but things aren't what they seem. I must admit that this film ended and I was sitting there wondering what had happened. The movie runs a brief 9-minutes but this thing was over before anything really happened. There's one minor twist in the film so I'm guessing this is all that was suppose to have been delivered. The movie itself isn't too bad as we get a couple quick music numbers including "I Can't Get Along Little Dogie", which is certainly the highlight of the film. Edwards comes off quite natural here and manages to be charming as he does his thing.

Jiminy Cricket, What A Boring Short

[Calaboss · 4/10 · 21 November 2009]

Fairly harmless, and practically script-less, nonsense about a group of men who dress up as gay cowboys and sing silly country/western songs on a dude ranch. Not much more than a 10 minute, black and white music video of 1930's country tunes.

Disney fans will instantly recognize Cliff Edwards' voice as that of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio. It's understandable that he sang and did voice work, as poor Cliff was not very easy on the eyes. He ended life penniless and the Disney Company wound up paying for his grave marker.

Inoffensive short has nothing to really recommend it, but it shows up from time to time as a TCM space filler.

10 minute musical short with a western flavor

[tomkuwahara · 8/10 · 1 October 2012]

This is a 10 minute short featuring Cliff Edwards, a great bunch of cowboy singers, and his band. I won't bother with the story but concentrate on the singing. I worked for the Disney company the last 8 years so Cliff doing the voice of Jiminy Cricket and singing what is virtually the company's national anthem is very familiar to me. I find most of his crooning with the ukulele very tiring and boring but in this movie short he actually sings out for a change and not so much falsetto. The cowboy singers are very good with decent choral arrangements framing Cliff's voice very nicely. Cliff's face looks very shiny and sweaty. One wonders since he was always battling drugs and alcohol but his voice is spot on. Enjoy the 40's Hollywood idea of cowboys; I grew up with it so had no problems accepting cowboys dressed in silks and furry chaps in the movies although as a Montana native I knew REAL cowboys didn't dress like that. I like the singing style in this short having been myself a singer for 40+ years and a big fan of the music of the 20s-40s. A real treat to hear Cliff doing some real singing, not crooning.

Hear a cricket sing country western songs!

[planktonrules · 28 August 2011]

This is one of the later Vitaphone shorts--known as a "Melody Master". These later musical shorts generally were more straight forward and had simpler sets and no real story to tie it all together--just a famous band of the day doing their stuff.

This short features Cliff Edwards and his band. Although Cliff isn't a name people would recognize today, he was quite famous as the first voice for Disney's Jiminy Cricket--a job taken over after Edwards' death by Hal Smith ('Otis the Drunk' from "The Andy Griffith Show").

Unlike most of the shorts in the set, this one isn't really Swing, Jazz or Big Band--at least not as obviously. Instead, Edwards and his gang play and sing country western ditties--the sort you might expect to hear in a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers film. I was surprised that I actually liked this and found it to be a nice change from the norm for this series. Edwards' voice was very pleasant and seeing them on on what looks like a dude ranch dressed in VERY Hollywood-like western outfits was cute. All in all, one of the better films and one that's worth seeing and hearing--especially since the songs do sound as if they are being sung by the cricket since Edwards' real voice is exactly that of his alter-ego.