MR. MAGOO

Mister Magoo is a nice old man, bald and grumpy, who insists on not wanting to wear glasses despite being very short-sighted. Mister Magoo made his first appearance in 1949 in the cartoon "Ragtime Bear" produced by United Productions of America (UPA) a company created a few years earlier by three former Disney employees. The story was written by Milliard Kaufman and brought to Columbia who was looking for funny cartoons with animals. The cartoon was grudgingly accepted, but passed only because a bear was present. The main character is instead the old and grouchy Magoo, who goes on vacation with his nephew Waldo. Waldo wears a raccoon coat and plays a banjo and when Waldo escapes from a bear, Magoo being nearly blind, mistakes the bear for his grandson, with all the hilarious results this misunderstanding brings. After this success UPA went on to produce 52 Magoo cartoons receiving 4 Academy Award nominations and winning it twice with "When Magoo Flew" in 1954 and "Magoo's Puddle Jumper" in 1956. The success of that first short film gave rise to a series that lasted about ten years, a comic book, a series of Sunday tables made for newspapers and numerous commercials. On December 18, 1962 Mister Magoo was the protagonist of an animated film broadcast for NBC TV, where we find him in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, in a humorous reinterpretation of Dickens' "Christmas Carol". The success was such that other films inspired by literary classics were produced that with Magoo in the unlikely guise of Robin Hood from the aim infallible, Long John Silver of Treasure Island, Cyrano de Bergerac, King Arthur, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, William Tell, Captain Kidd, Moby Dick, Shakepeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and many more. The cartoons of Mister Magoo have as their main theme the misunderstandings of the unconscious, an old man who gets into a sea of ​​trouble: when he takes the plane, he believes it is a ship and when he thinks he is on the deck to take a little air is actually found on the wings of the plane. In another episode when he witnesses a gunfight between bandits and policemen, he thinks it is the fireworks of a party and so on. The extraordinary thing is that Mister Magoo passes the light in the midst of all these adventures, as he is always accompanied by an incredible luck, which never leaves him, even when he is a tightrope walker on the scaffolding of skyscrapers, thinking he is on an elevator. Mister Magoo cartoons are currently being broadcast on Italy 1 on Saturday at 11,25.

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