Tugboat Granny (1956) User Reviews

The highlight is the opening scene

[utgard14 · 6/10 · 21 February 2016]

Sylvester is once again after Tweety, who is on a tugboat piloted by Granny. The cartoon is mostly a series of gags of Sylvester trying to reach the boat and failing. Despite being in the title, Granny isn't in this much. She's only in the opening scene, where she sings an adorable song with Tweety that's impossible to dislike unless you have a severe personality problem. This is the highlight of the short, as the rest is pretty typical stuff. Great voice work from Mel Blanc and June Foray. Good music from Milt Franklyn. The animation is solid and colorful. Most of the gags work fine but none really stand out. Not one of the best Sylvester & Tweety shorts but a fun one nonetheless.

Entertaining Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, but not one of the best of the series

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 9 January 2015]

Lesser Sylvester and Tweety is not all bad though, not all people like the series but I personally do get enjoyment from them. Granny has next to nothing to do other than sing the title song and while Tweety is better and has a decent balance of cute and anarchic he is too much of a plot device and doesn't have much that is funny. The animation is not bad and is better than most animation nowadays but for Looney Tunes while colourful and fluid in places, others are a little scrappy and lacking in vibrancy.

The music is typically terrific, it's beautifully orchestrated and rhythmically lively like a vast majority of Looney Tunes cartoons. It also synchronises very well with what's happening with the animation, especially with Sylvester's rowing. The title song is very catchy. The humour is mostly in the visual gags rather than the dialogue, which is not bad either but there's much fresher and wittier elsewhere. The gags are very funny, hilarious even with Sylvester bagging all the best moments. Especially good were with the crab, seagull and Sylvester's two attempts at jumping off the bridge(his scream in the smokestack gag is priceless). It's not everyday where you see Sylvester water skiing either. The anchor destroying the boat gag was a little predictable but still funny. The cartoon is fast-paced and is not too repetitive. Sylvester is great fun here as always and he's easy to root for. Mel Blanc's voice acting while with not very much is characteristically reliable.

All in all, there are better Sylvester and Tweety cartoons but Tugboat Granny is entertaining enough. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Even the lesser ones in this series keep a high standard

[nnwahler · 7/10 · 7 February 2008]

It took me quite a while to come around to this one as a favorite, but there's a helluva lotta animation expertise and comic timing that go into it. High Points Of Animation: Art Davis' virtuosic rendering of Sylvester wrestling with the crab (and the crab's immediate dancing back into the sea); also, just about all of Gerry Chiniquy's work--but especially the seagull sequence, and also the scene of Sylvester waterskiing (for a while I thought this was Davis, but Chiniquy's apparently responsible for the last couple minutes). Pink Panther fans take note: Sylvester's surfing routine here bears a very strong resemblance the the big cat's famous wipeout!

As anyone who's ever been near an elementary or primary school well knows . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 29 March 2018]

. . . almost every playground's biggest bullies are the smallest kids, whether those on recess are all in the same grades or a mixed bag. TUGBOAT GRANNY is one of Warner Bros. many warnings regarding such deplorable behavior on the part of the "Mini Me's," as tiny fat cat representative Tweety lords it over the much larger working class dodo Sylvester from its high perch on Granny's luxury tug. Perhaps due to the hit classic "Short People," small kids or critters always think that "everybody is out to get me" as they deviously plot "preemptive" sneak attacks to disable the other guy first. Thus, in less than seven minutes during TUGBOAT GRANNY, the feathered fiend with a chip on his shoulder explodes three watercraft out from under Sylvester and tricks him into a half dozen other predicaments. Warner warns us that when Society allows these tiny tyrants to ride slipshod over the rights of the normal-sized majority, national productivity will plummet until America becomes a basket case on the world stage. So for all of you geriatric geezers who still carry vague memories of booing and hissing Tweety when he popped up on the Big Screen in the Olden Days of the 1900s, now would be a good time to review TUGBOAT GRANNY if you wish to relive all the trauma of being belittled by the Little People in your not-so-glorious days. Otherwise, you may want to skip the painful memories TUGBOAT GRANNY is sure to trigger.