Gerald McBoing-Boing

Original recording, UPA film and sequels[edit]

Dr. Seuss's story had originally appeared on a children's record, scored by Billy May, issued by Capitol Records, and read by radio veteran Harold Peary as "The Great Gildersleeve".^[5]


This film was the first successful theatrical cartoon produced by UPA after their initial experiments with a short series of cartoons featuring Columbia Pictures stalwarts The Fox and the Crow. It was an artistic attempt to break away from the strict realism in animation that had been developed and perfected by Walt Disney. Cartoons did not have to obey the rules of the real world (as the short films of Tex Avery and their cartoon physics proved), and so UPA experimented with a non-realistic style that depicted caricatures rather than lifelike representations.


This was a major step in the development of limited animation, which had the added advantage of being much less expensive to produce.


The story describes Gerald McCloy, a two-year-old boy who begins "talking" in the form of sound effects, his first word being the titular "boing boing". Panicked, his father calls the doctor, who informs him that there is nothing he can do about it. As the boy grows up, he picks up more sounds and is able to make communicative gestures, but is still unable to utter a single word of the English language. In spite of this, he is admitted to a general public school, but more problems arise when he is chided by his peers and given the derogatory name "Gerald McBoing-Boing". After startling (and enraging) his father, he has no choice but to run away and hop a train to an unknown location. Just before he catches the train, however, a talent scout from the NBC Radio Network (as identified by the NBC chimes) discovers Gerald and hires him as NBC's foley artist, performing shows for a division of the company labeled "XYZ" on the microphones, and Gerald becomes very famous.


UPA produced three follow-up shorts: Gerald McBoing Boing's Symphony (1953), How Now Boing Boing (1954), and Gerald McBoing! Boing! on Planet Moo (1956), an Academy Award nominee. The second and third films maintained the Dr. Seuss-style rhyming narration, but were not based on his work. The final film abandoned this approach.


All four Gerald McBoing Boing shorts were released in 1980 on home video under the title Columbia Pictures Presents Cartoon Adventures Starring Gerald McBoing Boing. The shorts were presented in sub-par quality, especially Planet Moo, which was squeezed to fit the CinemaScope frame to standard TV screen size. It was reissued in 1985 as part of RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video's "Magic Window" series of children's videotapes and went out of print in 1995.


The second short was included as a special feature on Sony's 2001 DVD release of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. All but the second were included in the special features of the two-disc special edition of the DVD Hellboy (released on July 27, 2004), as the cartoon can be seen playing on TV monitors in the background in several scenes. In January 2006, Sony re-issued the four shorts on DVD, featuring cleaned-up prints and all presented in their original aspect ratio.


A character rather similar to Gerald McBoing Boing appears as Tiny Tim in the 1962 NBC television special Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, now as a speaking character. On the 2001 DVD release, an animated short was included that features Mr. Magoo, also a UPA character, babysitting McBoing Boing. The short is titled "Magoo Meets McBoing-Boing".