Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole (1942)

Woody Woodpecker is a stable boy. The stables are located right in an airfield, and the sound of airplanes droning around only fuels his lust to fly. "I want to fly like the birds!" declares the woodpecker. But the only thing the bulldog sergeant on the airfield feels Woody is competent for is clipping the horses with an electric clipper. And considering that Woody accidentally allows the clipper to clip off the sarge's shirt buttons and a long strip of hair off his chin, he may be giving Woody too much credit. Nevertheless, Woody spends his time reading "How to Fly a Plane from the Ground Up." And eventually, he sneaks onto a PU-2.

Date of release
1942-06-21
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (16)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Animation, Comedy
Director
Alex Lovy

Casting

Interesting facts

Ace in the Hole is the fifth animated cartoon short subject in the Woody Woodpecker series. Produced by Walter Lantz Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures, the short was released theatrically on June 22, 1942. Like many other animation and film studios in the 1940s, Walter Lantz Productions through its iconic character, Woody Woodpecker, became part of the war effort.

Production notes

Ace in the Hole (production #1014) was a World War II era animated short. Some erasure of the penciled title on a production drawing in graphite reveals that at some point the original title for this was "America's Ace In The Hole".

Woody's original design became a little softer in starting with Ace in the Hole. His bucked teeth began to disappear, as Lantz realized this feature was extraneous. In addition, the beak and feet colors became slightly brighter and more vibrant, and his big chin is gone.

A number of 1940s aviation and aeronautics terms were used in Ace in the Hole. The title is a play on the card-playing term "ace in the hole" and the "flying ace" who would score five victories in a fighter aircraft. The "clipper" was a reference to the famous Boeing Clipper that had recently gone into service with Pan American World Airways.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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