Willoughby's Magic Hat is a 1943 Phantasies animated short subject directed by Bob Wickersham, produced by Screen Gems, and released to theatres by Columbia Pictures on April 20, 1943. 1943 is a common year starting on Friday. ... Phantasies was a series of ussually one-shot animated cartoon shorts produced by the Screen Gems studio for Columbia Pictures. ... Animation is the technique in which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model unit (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result with a... Short film - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... Screen Gems is an American subsidiary company of Columbia Pictures Corp. ... Columbia Pictures logo, used only from 1981-1993 Columbia Pictures, now Columbia TriStar Pictures after their merger with the former TriStar Entertainment in 1998, is a film production company, and part of Sony Pictures Entertainment. ... April 20 is the 110th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (111th in leap years). ... 1943 is a common year starting on Friday. ...

The short features the character of a diminutive, weak man named Willoughby Wren. who finds he is granted super-stregnth by wearing a cap woven from the hair of Samson. He then uses his newfound powers to save a young woman from the clutches of a evil Frankenstein's monster like robot, but finds that his powers vanish when the hat falls off of or is removed from his head, which seems to happen often. Samson or Shimshon (שִׁמְשׁוֹן Of the sun (perhaps proclaiming he was radiant and mighty) or [One who] Serves [God], Standard Hebrew Šimšon, Tiberian Hebrew Šimšôn) is the third to last of the Judges of Israel mentioned in the Tanakh. ... Frankensteins Monster (sometimes Frankensteins Creature or The Frankenstein Monster) is an undead creature first appearing in Mary Shelleys novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. ...

The film is notable for its use of stylistic design and unusual camera angles, the influence of Screen Gem employees who had defefected from Walt Disney Productions following the 1941 Disney animator's strike. The designer for Willoughby's Magic Hat, Zack Schwartz, later became one of the co-founders of United Productions of America (UPA), a company that specialized in experimental and avant-garde animated shorts. Walt Disney Productions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Disney animators strike - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... The UPA opening title card from How Now Boing Boing (1954) The legacy of the United Productions of America animation studio, better known as UPA, has largely been forgotten in the wake of the animation renaissance of the 1990s; it has been overshadowed by the commercialization of Warner Bros. ...

Several later Screen Gems shorts featured the Willoughby cahracter, something of an unusual superhero. Superman (left) and Batman, two of the most recognizable and influential superheroes. ...

External link

• Willoughby's Magic Hat at the Internet Movie Database