Oswald the Lucky Rabbit having largely disappeared form the ken of animators at this point, Walter Lantz was at seas in what direction to move. Disney was ramping up feature production, Schlesinger was finally stepping up to the plate with manic offerings from Clampett and Avery with fine work from Freleng and Tashlin. Mintz was sputtering his way out, even as his animators turned out an occasional brilliant work, Harman & Ising were still going nowhere, Terry was still idling and Fred (Beedlebaum) Quimby was starting to assemble his staff at MGM.So here was Lantz with no star, looking for one. He tried Kiko the Kangaroo. Here he tried a couple of monkeys. Nothing worked. It wouldn't be until the following year that Andy Panda showed up with an actual personality and two years until Woody Woodpecker. So what happens here? The nominal supporting cast of ghosts steal this cartoon.The ghosts are malevolent, imaginative and just plain silly. If the animation in this short lacks any sense of weight, well, for ghosts that works. And the sight gags are good. A nice little funny/scary Halloween cartoon.

This is the most you will ever read about "Jock & Jill, The Simple Simeons (sic)." These boy-and-girl chimpanzees are the undistinguished stars of this undistinguished cartoon churned out by the mildly distinguished Walter Lantz studio.This black-and-white short subject introduces us to some ghosts in an abandoned hotel. They are idle: they get drunk, play the slot machines and line up for their relief checks. The gags aren't funny, but one may have tweaked the censors. An invisible ghost steps out of a bath, falls on the floor and leaves a wet butt-print. Shocking.Another vignette spotlights the general carelessness. A ghost tilts a pinball machine. His punishment is a mechanical arm with a boxing glove that punches him in the face. Why use a ghost in a gag that has nothing to do with him being a ghost?Finally Jock and Jill and their big mopey dog arrive at the hotel. The threesome are among the countless clones of Mickey, Minnie and Pluto that plagued the movie screens in the 1930s. At least Jock and Jill break convention by actually acting a bit like chimps, dragging their knuckles and so forth. Mickey and Minnie didn't act like mice. The dog looks like a sadder Clifford the Big Red Dog, but he engages in a lot of sub-Pluto antics.There is even a sub-Three Stooges moment. We cringe when Jock slaps his dog across the face. Boo! Hiss! Would Mickey do this to Pluto? The dog looks so sad anyway.Jock spends most of this cartoon without Jill. Early on, a ghostly arm comes out of a wall and snatches Jill, who doesn't reappear until the end. Bizarrely, the arm takes the monkey right through the wall with it. This is bad cartoon science. A ghost should be able to go through walls, but not a flesh-and-blood chimp.What follows is a pale copy of Walt Disney's "Lonesome Ghosts" (1937) and numberless other cartoons where mischievous spirits play pranks on the living. When Jock, Jill and the dog escape from the hotel in their broken-down jalopy, that's the end of their bid for cartoon stardom. Jock appeared in one more cartoon, "The Rabbit Hunt" (1938). Now they languish in deserved obscurity.Still, they should be allowed their footnote in cartoon history. Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic" incorrectly lists this as a color Oswald the Rabbit cartoon. "Ghost Town Frolics" is black and white, and Oswald does not appear.Fate has even obscured their debut on video. The 1998 release of "The Ivory Handled Gun" (1935) includes this short, but the packaging boasts only a "vintage cartoon" without revealing the title. I emailed the webmaster of a Walter Lantz site, and not even he knew this was available on video.Well, maybe now we can give Jock & Jill their due, however small that may be.