Robert Reynolds This is a wartime musical one-shot cartoon produced by Terrytoons. There will be spoilers ahead:Despite the title, there's precious little connection to The Barber of Seville in this short, though it's mostly sung (there's a beautiful gag with an elevator where the operator has pretty much the only spoken lines in the cartoon). Most of the best gags have no real connection to the "opera" being staged, instead involving the audience and the orchestra.In many ways, this is a variation on a Mighty Mouse cartoon. The villain is a wolf much like Oil Can Harry. He plays a butcher suffering the wartime meat shortage. A devil pops in and urges him to steal the milkmaid's cow. The milkmaid is a pig dressed like a Spanish lady who loves her cow. She's a poor man's Pearl Pureheart. The wolf, clearly not a bright bulb, steals the cow while the milkmaid is MILKING it! Enter our hero at the maid's song of woe. He's a pig dressed like a matador (lucky it's a cow he's rescuing and not a bull) and he even sounds like Mighty Mouse. He chases the wolf for a while until they have a sword fight up a staircase, the wolf carrying the cow. The villain clearly loses and the closing number is rather cute, if a bit odd.Intercut with the opera, there are scenes of the conductor and the orchestra, including a "war" between the conductor and some musicians in the orchestra. Funny stuff.This cartoon should be more widely known.

boblipton There is a new opera in town as the animals perform the title show. A butcher who cannot get any meat for his shop decides to steal a milk cow in this amusing Terrytoon.Philip Scheib, like most of the cartoon studios' musical directors, like to stretch his wings with the occasional operetta. With this one, he offers some eccentric scoring of Rossini and Mozart, along with the usual assortment of well-executed terry studio gags. For some reason the ink-and-paint department decided to use a lot of yellow in this one. Perhaps paint was in short supply and they were running low on reds and blues.Rationing on the home front was a civilian problem that other Terrytoons had mentioned, including rubber. Several gags in Warner Brothers cartoons mentioned gas rationing. MGM even produced a Wallace Beery feature called RATIONING.