Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/Dont Give Up the Sheep
From Eccentric Flower
Don't Give Up the Sheep
1951
Summary: Ralph the wolf tries to steal Sam the sheepdog's sheep.
Director: Chuck Jones
Writer: Michael Maltese
Featuring: Wile E. Coyote.
Onreel
0:19 Sound cue: "Baa Baa Black Sheep."
0:34 Sound cue: What would a morning in a Warner cartoon be without "Peer Gynt"?
0:49 This is a time clock for shift workers. The sheepdog's card is stamped with the time he reports to work, and will be stamped later with the time he goes off-shift. The other card already in the "in" slots belongs to the other sheepdog, who will be coming off-shift. The whistle indicates when there is a break in the shift (e.g. once when lunch begins, once when it's over) or the shift ends. This is vital to the clock gag about to happen in the cartoon.
If you felt this was all intrinsically obvious, you're probably right, but with industrial shift work nearly extinct in the US, who knows, this may be required explanation one day.
2:03 Sound cue: "Home Sweet Home."
2:26 Sound cue: A fast "Baa Baa Black Sheep."
3:30 Sound cue (panpipes): "Frühlingslied."
6:06 It feels like there might be one or two musical cues in this sequence, but they're not worth worrying too much about.
6:27 Sound cue: "Five O'Clock Whistle."
Offreel
The title is a joke on "don't give up the ship."
Apparently the end sequence where both sheepdogs spank the wolf with a club was too much for at least one squeamish broadcaster, who cut part of it.
Sam and Ralph
This is the first of the "Sam and Ralph" cartoons. The two in the Golden Collection appear on the Characters page under Wile E. Coyote, just as he is listed above under "Featuring." As I say on the Characters page, if Chuck Jones had wanted me to distinguish Wile E. from Ralph, he shouldn't have used the same model sheet for both of them.
In these pages, and by common convention (e.g. on Wikipedia and so forth), the sheepdog is always Sam, and the wolf is always Ralph. In the cartoons, usage varied. In Don't Give Up the Sheep, the wolf is not named and the dog is Ralph (his replacement on the next shift is Fred). In Sheep Ahoy the two sheepdogs are "Ralph" and "Fred" and the two wolves (shift changes on both sides!) are "Sam" and "George."
Jones did six of these cartoons, all with the same plot, and two of his animators (Phil Monroe and Richard Thompson) did a seventh without him in 1963 (Jones had been fired from Warner in 1962 for exclusivity violations).
- Don't Give Up the Sheep (1953)
- "Sheep Ahoy" (1954)
- "Double or Mutton" (1955)
- Steal Wool (1957)
- "Ready, Woolen and Able" (1960)
- "A Sheep in the Deep" (1962)
- "Woolen Under Where" (1963)
