A Great Big Bunch of You (1932) Review - Creepy Mannequins and Singing Trash

If you have seven minutes to spare and love weird old black-and-white animation, this is absolutely worth your time. Anyone who loves rubber-hose cartoons will dig it, but if you get annoyed by repetitive 1930s show tunes, you'll probably want to mute it.

It is basically just a manic fever dream set in a city dump. A discarded mannequin comes to life and starts playing a makeshift piano made of literal garbage.

The piano keys are old tin cans and the strings are bedsprings. It’s honestly pretty clever how the animators thought this up.

Soon, the whole junkyard starts bouncing to the beat. We get dancing bottles, musical tires, and some very sketchy-looking cats.

I love how creepy the mannequin looks at first. It has those dead, unblinking eyes that modern horror movies try so hard to copy.

But once he starts singing, you sort of forget he's a hollow plastic shell. His voice is surprisingly smooth, thanks to The King's Men doing the vocals.

There is a moment where a pair of old shoes starts dancing that made me laugh out loud. One shoe has a floppy sole that looks like a tongue.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of A Great Big Bunch of You (1932) through its definitive frames.

It is this kind of stupid, simple humor that makes these early Merrie Melodies so charming. They didn't care about plot back then; they just wanted to make things bounce.

If you've watched other stuff from this era, like the bizarre Goofy Ghosts, you know exactly what flavor of weirdness to expect here. It’s just pure, unfiltered nonsense.

"A great big bunch of you... is all I want!"

The song gets stuck in your head, for better or worse. I've been humming it for three hours and my dog is looking at me funny.

Some of the gags don't really land, though. Like, there is a bit with a cheese grater that just feels a little lazy.

And the animation gets incredibly recycled near the end. You can clearly see the same three frames of a dancing tin can looping over and over.

But hey, it was 1932. They were pumping these out on tiny budgets and probably lots of coffee.

It’s definitely more fun than sitting through a stuffy old melodrama like The Spreading Dawn. Sometimes you just need to watch trash sing.

A few things I noticed on my second watch:

• The tin can piano actually has a decent sound effect.
• One of the cats looks suspiciously like Felix the Cat's bootleg cousin.
• The mannequin's fingers stretch like warm taffy.

Anyway, it’s a neat little time capsule. Go watch it on YouTube when you're supposed to be working. 🗑️🎵