Some Cartoons For Saturday Morning #145

 Hello my friends and happy Saturday morning, once again it is time for some classic cartoons. 

Today's cartoon selection begins with a classic Chuck Jones film starring Bugs Bunny, A Feather in His Hare (1948). While this movie has been pulled from TV airings due to stereotyping of Native Americans in 2001, it is still a really funny cartoon full of great gags. 

The Skelton Dance (1929) was the first of Disney's Silly Symphonies and one of the best. The idea for the series came from musical director Carl Stalling (who would later work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies). The Silly Symphonies were designed to revolve around music. Walt Disney loved the idea and felt that a second series would allow him to experiment more and not be tied down by the formula of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The idea for the first film also is believed to have come from Stalling. Stalling would tell historian Michael Barrier about the genesis of the movie stating, "He thought I meant illustrated songs, but I didn’t have that in mind at all. The Skeleton Dance goes way back to my kid days. When I was eight or ten years old, I saw an ad in The American Boy magazine of a dancing skeleton, and I got my dad to give me a quarter so I could send for it. It turned out to be a pasteboard cut-out of a loose-jointed skeleton, slung over a six-foot cord under the arm pits. It would ‘dance’ when kids pulled and jerked at each end of the string. Ever since I was a kid, I had wanted to see real skeletons dancing and had always enjoyed seeing skeleton dancing acts in vaudeville.” Though Carl Stalling would use an excerpt from Edvard Grieg’s March of the Dwarfs, most of the music was an original by Stalling. The animation for the movie was completed in six weeks. The majority of the animation was done by Ub Iwerks, the Disney studio's main animator at the time. He animated some of the earliest Mickey films entirety by himself. On this film he was assisted by Wilfred Jackson and Les Clark. It is not known for sure what Les Clark animated as some sources state he animated the opening scene and others (including his own) state he animated one skeleton playing another's ribs as a xylophone. Wilfred Jackson most likely animated the scene where the rooster crowing (which was reused in The Cat's Nightmare (1931)). When Walt tried to sell this film, it did not go as smoothly as he excepted. Walt's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, would later speak about this, “Father wasn’t easily discouraged. He took The Skeleton Dance to a friend who ran the United Artists Theater in Los Angeles and asked him to look at it. ‘We’re looking at some other things this morning,’ the man said, ‘and I’ll have my assistant look at it. You go with him’. Father sat beside the assistant while the film was run. It was just before the first morning show; a few customers had drifted in and it was obvious they liked The Skeleton Dance but the assistant didn’t listen to them. ‘Can’t recommend it,’ he said. ‘Too gruesome’. Father got a hold of another friend and asked him if he could put him in touch with Fred Miller who managed the Carthay Circle, one of the biggest and most important theaters in town. Father’s friend sent him to a salesman on Film Row. ‘Maybe he can get him to look at your skeleton film’. Father found the salesman in a pool hall shooting a little Kelly (a game played on a standard pool table with sixteen pool balls where each player draws one of fifteen numbered markers called peas or pills at random from a shake bottle which assigns to them the correspondingly numbered pool ball, kept secret from their opponents, but which they must pocket in order to win the game). ‘Leave your picture here, Disney,’ the Kelly player said. ‘I’ll look at it. If I like it, I’ll get in touch with you’. It sounded like a stall but he actually did look at the film. When he looked he said, ‘I think Fred will like this. I’ll take it over to him myself’. As a result, Miller showed The Skeleton Dance with a feature picture he was running. It went over big. Father clipped the local press notices and mailed them to Powers with a note: ‘If you can get this to Roxy (the nickname of Broadway showman Samuel L. Rothafel who ran New York’s prestigious Roxy Theater), he’ll go for it the way Miller did. Powers got a print to Roxy and Roxy liked it. He ran it in his huge New York theater.” This movie premiered at the Carthay Circle on June 10, 1929 alongside F.W. Murnau's feature film, 4 Devils (1929). The Carthay Circle is where later Disney features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Fantasia (1940) would make their Hollywood premiers. 

Ub Iwerks would later remake The Skelton Dance for Columbia with Skelton Frolic (1937). This film is funnier then the previous cartoon and the use of color adds a lot, but the simple charm of The Skeleton Dance is missing here. This film is the result of Charles Mintz (head of Columbia's cartoon department at the time) farming out some of his Color Rhapsody cartoons to Ub Iwerks. Ub would make these cartoons at his own studio. This cartoon would be reissued to movie theaters in 1954. 

Up next is the 6th Dogfather film, Bows and Errors (1974). While by the 1970's most studios were no longer making cartoons for movie theaters, DePatie-Freleng was helping keep the animated short film alive with multiple series. One of these series were the Dogfather cartoons for the mid-1970's. These shorts were a take-off of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) with the titular character even sounding like Marlin Brando. 17 theatrical cartoon shorts were made of this series. This is one of my favorite cartoons of the series. 

Now it is time for a commercial break. 

When Paul Terry sold the Terrytoons studio to CBS, CBS wanted the studio to keep making theatrical cartoon shorts. With this in mind they put a new man in charge of the studio, Gene Deitch. This was an interesting choice as Deitch was not especially a fan of the Terrytoons, even referring to them as "... the crassest of unadulterated crap …"  Deitch's idea was to get rid of all of the studios characters and create new ones that were more to his liking. One of these characters was Clint Clobber. When Deitch would later make Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM, he would essentially reuse this character as Tom's owner. Here is a delightful Clint Clobber film, Clint Clobber's Cat (1957).

Up next is The Pink Panther in Gong With the Pink (1971).

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The cartoons continue with the Mickey Mouse film, Mickey's Mechanical Man (1933). Paul Fennell animated on this movie and later recalled, "I had a test of Minnie pounding the mat. Walt looked at it and ran it again and he said, 'You know what's wrong with this? You don't know anything about psychology. You ought to go home and read a book on psychology. It's feeling. You've got to really be Minnie, you've got to be pulling for Mickey to beat up that big lunkhead. You've got to hit that mat hard, you've got to stretch.' I got a good bawling out but I didn't understand him. Later on, I knew what he was trying to tell me. We learned it: feeling."  

Today's cartoon selection ends with the third film from the Looney Tunes series, Hold Anything (1930). This movie stars the first star of the Looney Tunes, Bosko. Notice some mice who look specifically like Mickey here. In fact if this whole cartoon feels like a Disney film that is no coincidence, producers and directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising had worked with Walt Disney during the silent era and when they moved on to other things the Disney influence was always clearly felt.  Often times this went beyond being influenced by and into the realm of stealing however. Animator Jack Zander would recall, "We were doing and Hugh Harman said, 'you remember that scene in the Disney picture where Mickey Mouse did so-and-so.' I said 'You want me to do almost the same thing?' and he said 'No I want you to do exactly the same thing.' He said that the picture was playing at some theater that night and he wanted me to go and study the scene, come back and make Bosko do exactly the same thing." 

Thanks for joining me come back next week for more animated treasures. Until then may all your tunes be looney and your melodies merry. 

Resources Used

https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-spooky-story-of-the-skeleton-dance/

The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney by Michael Barrier

Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons by Leonard Maltin

Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies: A Companion Guide to the Classic Cartoon Series by Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman.