WHERE'S MY HIPPOPOTAMUS?

Stamaty's cumulative chase ensues from a preposterous premise, and the figures involved are his familiar squat grotesques--but the two-color (plus gray) filling gives the drawings a softer look and the story follows a more conventional course than Who Needs Donuts (1973) and the others. This starts when Henry's hippopotamus Herbert, hitched to a parking meter, breaks loose to follow a hay truck. Henry, returning from an errand, assumes that Herbert has been stolen, and takes a banana peel found at the scene of the presumed crime for a clue. Before the search ends in a park party with both Herbert and the innocent suspect accounted for, Henry has been joined by a fruitseller who sold the banana, a bowler who sometimes bowled with its buyer, a dry cleaner who cleaned his suspenders, and a fortune teller he sometimes visited. It's tamed-down Stamaty (even the shop signs are fewer and straighter), with a reasonable outcome, but only mildly diverting.