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Cartoon time! The Max Fleischer studio made Gulliver's Travels in 1940. It wasn't the greatest animated feature ever made but it was reasonably popular…and a big reason was a character named Gabby. The Fleischer Brothers promptly spun him off into his own series of short cartoons and they made nine of them, of which this was the third. It's called All's Well and they spend most of the cartoon singing a tune of the same name which was also introduced in Gulliver's Travels. After Mr. Disney's success introducing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" in the first Three Little Pigs short, there were many animated attempts to use cartoons to "plug" a song into best-selling status…none, of course, as successful. This was just such an attempt and I don't think it's a coincidence that, like the Big Bad Wolf song, "All's Well" is one of those "Don't worry, everything will be fine" songs that America seemed to need in the thirties and early forties.

Gabby was voiced by Vance "Pinto" Colvig, who was also the voice of Goofy and several other memorable characters during his Disney years…including Practical Pig in the Three Little Pigs cartoons. He later originated the role of Bozo the Clown. It sounds like his voice was sped a bit for Gabby, which they didn't do often at Fleischer's because they liked to record the voices to picture after the animation was done. The baby voice sounds a lot like Mae Questel but I think it's Margie Hines. Here's the film — which, by the way, was released on January 17, 1941…