This is the last Woody Woodpecker short produced by Walter Lantz -- he shut down the studio after discovering that it would take ten years for the 1972 slate of cartoons to turn a profit and threw in the towel.. Fifty-nine years in the industry -- his first recorded credit is from the 1913 Bray cartoon COLONEL HEEZA LIAR IN Africa: fifty-four as a producer and forty-two as his own boss. So he retired to paint for another twenty-two years. Good for him.
It was time, and not just on financial grounds. This cartoon about how Woody and his dog deal with a mean teacher is okay, but the drawings are reduced to colored-in lines and the animation is just a step above TV animation at this stage: everything moves appropriately, but anything that doesn't absolutely have to move doesn't. It's a great fall from Lantz' glory days of the 1940s and the great Woody Woodpeckers directed by Seamus Culhane. Time to move on.
