Snap Dragon

Once there was a young man who went to knight school. His name was Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy, but he was not very brave or even very bright. When the other students went to jousting class, Gawaine would hide in the woods. At last the headmaster gave up and told him to take the snap course in dragon-slaying. Gawaine was delighted, and spent the rest of his school days hacking at the model dragon on the south meadow. On commencement day, the headmaster gave Gawaine a magic word ("Rumplesnitz") and sent him forth to slay real live dragons. The very next day, Gawaine said the good word to a lavender dragon, and with a biff of his battle-axe, cut off the creature's head.

After that there was no stopping Gawaine. He slew dragons all over the place, as many as three a day, until he had slain 49. Alas, success went to his head. He took to drink, and whenever he went out he wore eight pounds of medals. And so it happened that Gawaine met up with his 50th dragon . . .

The 51st Dragon, taken from the text by the late Heywood Broun, is the second cartoon in U.P.A.'s (United Productions of America) series of comic legends for moderns. Like the first, an animation of James Thurber's Unicorn in the Garden (TIME, Oct. 26), it is a nasal little ballad that ends with a sly intellectual hiccup. The admirers of Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker and Porky Pig are not likely to be broken up with hilarity. Still, it is refreshing to laugh at an idea instead of an oink, and the kidding of medieval styles in art is cleverly done. And yet the danger does begin to appear, in a kind of sterile facility in many of the drawings, that U.P.A. could easily be caught in its cleverness, as Disney and his imitators were in their treacle.

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