phantom_tollbooth Bob Clampett's 'An Itch in Time' milks seven minutes of crazy action out of a very small premise. Elmer Fudd tells his dog that if he scratches himself just once more that he will be given a dreaded bath. Unfortunately for the dog, a relentless flea makes it all but impossible to stop from scratching. The cartoon switches between the flea's progress inside the dog's fur and the dog's desperate attempts to cope with it. In a great sequence that really captures the frustration of an itch that can't be scratched, the dog changes colour from brown to blue to red to polka dotted to plaid! It sounds ludicrously surreal but it perfectly evokes the indescribable feeling of an itch in a way only Clampett could. There are several other elements which make 'An Itch in Time' pure Clampett. There's the grotesque concept itself, which leads to some graphic scenes of the flea munching on the dog's flesh. There's the unrestrained violence that rears its head in any scene featuring the cat. Most notably, there's the dirty jokes including a huge shot of the dog's behind which causes the flea to wolf-whistle and a hysterical sequence in which the dog attempts to scratch himself by dragging his backside along the floor. He momentarily breaks off to address the audience: "Hey, I better cut this out. I may get to like it"! With a very limited concept, Clampett manages to make 'An Itch in Time' a unique, minutiae-based cartoon. Like an early episode of 'Seinfeld', 'An Itch in Time' is practically about nothing but very funny with it.

slymusic Wonderfully directed by Bob Clampett, "An Itch in Time" is an entertaining Warner Bros. cartoon that is quite full of the kind of elaborate sight gags one would expect from Clampett. (He was, after all, the man who put the word "looney" in Looney Tunes.) The plot concerns a pesty little hillbilly flea with a voracious appetite. After spotting Elmer Fudd's dog, the flea believes he has just found his next meal.There are several memorable scenes from "An Itch in Time" that I shall now relate. First off, how could anybody forget the delightful little song "There'll Be Food around the Corner," sung repeatedly by the flea in his high-pitched voice? With the aid of a telescope in search of food, the flea stumbles upon a close-up of the dog's rump and lets out a wolf whistle! Elmer's flea powder sprinklings on the dog turn out to be a snowstorm for the flea. When Elmer catches his cat scratching the dog, both pets quite humorously cower in front of him (with a great sound effect) and helplessly look upward at him with large eyes. When Elmer and the dog slip on a bar of soap, they both respectively resemble Santa Claus and a reindeer as they are covered with soap bubbles. Even the sight of Elmer laughing at a Looney Tunes comic book is memorable! "An Itch in Time" can be found on Disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3, with a very entertaining audio commentary by Warner Bros. animator Bill Melendez and contemporary animator John Kricfalusi. If I only had one concern for this film, I really feel that it was not necessary for the cat to shoot himself in the head at the very end after being a witness to all of Bob Clampett's craziness.

bob the moo Elmer Fudd is at home reading his Porky Pig comic by the open fire with his dog asleep by his side. When a flea enters the house it heads straight for the dog, making both the dog's and Elmer's night a misery. However getting rid of him is not so easy.When this cartoon started I had reasonable hopes as I thought it might be a Bugs Bunny cartoon due to the presence of Elmer Fudd. However not only wasn't it, but Elmer himself seems to be in there simply to have a well known character in the cartoon. The main characters are actually the dog and the flea – neither of which are very good characters. The dog is OK but the flea is an annoying little fellow with a high voice that just grated on me.The jokes are OK without ever being very good. I think what pit me off the most was just the weakness of the characters – they weren't very interesting and, although their jokes would have made me laugh if other characters had done them, the weaknesses in their characters just seemed to drain a lot of the laughs out of the cartoon.Overall this could have been better and, indeed, many viewers may well find it funnier than I did. But for me a cartoon is not simply the jokes, it is also the characters and the plot framework. Here neither of those factors came into play and the already weak cartoon was just made weaker.

mfiof `An Itch In Time' is one of a string of home runs Bob Clampett hit for WB in the early 1940s, including `Horton Hatches The Egg' and `Tortoise Wins By A Hare.' Soaked in manic timing and exaggerated mayhem, it's basically the saga of a flea who's busy breaking ground for a new home, and the dog whose ground is being broken. Because master Elmer will give him a dreaded flea bath if he so much as scratches, the unlucky canine is forced to endure an upward spiral of torment as the homesteading flea uses pick-axes and power tools to clear the `land.' Ultimately, the little monster lights the fuse to a small mountain of high explosives he's piled onto his victim's backside! There's a tremendous explosion, and the hapless pooch covers his eyes as his rear end erupts in a blazing Fourth of July display! That really has to hurt, and the dog takes flight, but soon he stops the action and says with a merry smile, `You guys better cut it out, 'cause I think I'm starting to like it!' For years this kinky confession was censored, but current prints have restored the clip, so now viewers can enjoy it in its original devilish glory. Still cut, however, is the closing gag in which the cat blows his brains out after he laments, `Now I've seen everything!' This was a common gag at WB, but it has since been purged from this cartoon and several others, including `Horton.'