College Capers (1931) User Reviews

Moving into Talking Cartoons

[boblipton · 5/10 · 22 November 2014]

There's an ill-assorted mass of gags in this one, some set in the synchronized cartoon era and a few in the talky cartoon era, in which the uncredited in-betweeners try to match the characters' mouths to words in this one. It works erratically. However, there are a lot of them and when one doesn't work, it's on to the next.

With two directors credited in this college campus comedy, it's hard to figure who's responsible for what. The simple style of character design seems typical of cheap Van Beuren budgets. However, the large number of characters must have added to the cost. It's the extreme variation in quality that makes it less engaging and makes the whole thing just occasionally good.

College Life and Football...Again

[Hitchcoc · 5/10 · 21 February 2019]

Life at college is mostly singing and dancing. After many hijinks, it's time for the big football game between one hippopotamus and about 5000 mice. The action is carefully created to be one dimensional and uninteresting. The mouse students are kept in big mousetraps until it is time for them to go in as substitutes. A below average cartoon offering.

Van Beuren goes to college

[TheLittleSongbird · 2/10 · 16 January 2018]

Van Beuren cartoons are extremely variable, especially in the number of gags and whether the absurdist humour shines through enough (sometimes it does, other times it doesn't), but are strangely interesting. Although they are often poorly animated with barely existent stories and less than compelling lead characters, they are also often outstandingly scored, there can be some fun support characters and some are well-timed and amusing.

College has rarely been this dull in one of the worst of the 1931 batch of Aesop's Fables/Van Beuren cartoons. College is very stressful but it also can be very exciting, which 'College Capers' fails to convey and can't even include the surreal and absurdist humour that can be seen in their best cartoons or at least do it right. There are a couple of decent things but they are far overshadowed by everything else that 'College Capers' does badly wrong.

Best asset about 'College Capers' is the music score, pretty much the best thing consistently of Van Beuren's output. Sometimes even the only good thing. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated, is great fun to listen to and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action.

The teacher character is kind of fun, the only character to have some kind of personality.

Coming onto the numerous criticisms, the animation is not good, in fact it is downright bad most of the time with erratically sloppy character designs in particular while the simplistic background detail and lack of fluidity and crispness are just as difficult to ignore.

Story is very slight to the point of non-existence and suffers from far too erratic pacing a vast majority of the time, something that affects the visuals a lot of the time because most of it is out of sync. It feels aimless and also random and disjointed. It is not as senseless as a lot of the worst of the series, but that still doesn't stop it from being very bland. Likewise with endearing or memorable characters, the characters here are neither, not to mention very poorly animated.

Basically 'College Capers' is a stringing along of gags structured in a way that's disorganised and random. Generally it is very low on laughs, actually none of it is remotely amusing. Nothing is inventive, never rising above the forgettable and there is not much absurdist about them, timing is really sluggish too. This is a reiteration of a lot of the average and less Aesops Fables/Van Beuren cartoons that have been reviewed by me, but this is due to them having the same strengths and drawbacks.

To conclude, very poor. 2/10 Bethany Cox