I now present my eleventh review of an Ox Tales cartoon. It’s number three in the series: “A Small Kindness, A Terrible Nuisance”.
The narrating toucan explains to the audience that Ollie has decided to become a doctor today. He’s sitting at home when he receives his first call. Sammy is crying in pain with a nail stuck in his paw. Ollie pulls out some bandages, but instead of wrapping Sammy’s injured paw he uses them to wrap Sammy’s crying mouth shut. Ollie then encounters a sad looking, loosely skinned dog. Ollie gives it a face lift by tying his loose skin back, giving him no other choice but to smile.
He then finds a stork whose leg has been broken by a lobster. He wraps the leg in bandages then hangs it from the stork’s beak in a sling. The uneven weight distribution causes the stork to topple over and it ends up standing on it’s bad leg. Ollie then finds a sausage dog dragging it’s belly along the ground. Ollie helps it out by bandaging it’s body up to where it’s belly no longer drags along the floor.
Jack has a cold. Every time he sneezes his shell shakes as if it’s about to fall apart. Ollie arrives on the scene and reinforces it with surgical tape. It seems like a good idea but when Jack sneezes again, instead his shell shaking he shoots out of it it like a bullet from a gun.
Hannah the hen has cracked an egg which she was attempting to hatch. Ollie has the solution as he tapes it back together with surgical tape. When the egg finally begins to hatch, the chick can be heard chirping from inside as it tries to break through surgical tape.
Ollie helps out two mothers who keep dropping their babies. A monkey is having a tough time keeping her child attached to her back so Ollie ties it on. A kangaroo is having similar problems. With every leap her joey falls out of her pouch. Ollie comes up with a solution, securing the baby in it’s mother’s pouch with a seat belt.
Ollie then rushes to the scene of a fire with Ellen the elephant in tow. She fills her trunk with water from a pond then uses it like a water hose to extinguish the fire. Unfortunately it leaves Ellen flat and dehydrated. Ollie calls for Rodney’s help in moving her. He ties her trunk to Rodney’s tail, but as Rodney starts to walk away Ellen floats behind him as if she were a kite.
Ollie then comes across two alligators snapping at each other. Both alligator’s mouths are at 180 degrees and they appear to be stuck together. Ollie defuses the situation by zipping their two mouths together as if their teeth where teeth on a zip. He then silences a hissing snake by using it’s forked tongue to tie it’s mouth shut.
Ollie gets his final emergency of the day as Lenny the lion is preying on Zane the zebra. Ollie takes his trusty bandages and uses them to wrap Lenny’s mouth shut. With Lenny unable to bite him, Ollie takes the opportunity to check Lenny’s heart beat with a stethoscope. The stethoscope tickles Lenny and Lenny’s laughing causes the bandages to come loose. With his mouth free, Lenny chases Ollie away as the cartoon comes to a close.
“A Small Kindness, A Terrible Nuisance” is one of those gag after gag after gag cartoons. It worked pretty well and had some funny moments. It contains two scenes that were immortalized in the English and Dutch opening montages. The scene where the bandaged up stork loses it’s balance is one of the clips from the English titles. The scene where Ollie is seen skipping along the bank of an alligator infested lake is from the Dutch titles.
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