Our first film is a classic Disney cartoon. This is the first Silly Symphony cartoon. As much as Walt Disney loved Mickey Mouse, he wanted to be known for more than just Mickey cartoons. Carl Stalling, Disney's current musical director (later the musical director for Warner Brothers' animation department) came up with the idea of doing a series of musical based shorts. He came up with a rough idea of skeletons dancing to music. That idea would result in this film. The majority of the animation of this cartoon was done by a man named Ub Iwerks, who was at this time Disney's right hand man (he also co-created Mickey Mouse with Walt). Ub was one of the greatest animators to ever live, though when he was called away to head his own cartoon studio, he films would suffer from his lack of story and gag sense. However he would come back to Disney as a special effects man, where he made great advances combining live-action with animation with such films as The Three Caballeros and Mary Poppins. This film was directed by Walt himself. Distributors were originally worried about releasing a cartoon that they considered too gruesome, and did not want to release the film at all. However the cartoon ended up being a huge hit. A man named Joesph Barbera was in fact inspired by seeing this cartoon in theaters to go into the field of animation. So from 1929 here is The Skeleton Dance.
Our next film is a Walter Lantz Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon. Oswald was created by a man (you may have heard of him) named Walt Disney. This was before their was a Disney studio, so these cartoons were made for Universal Studios. Oswald became one of the most popular cartoon characters of the silent era. Walt Disney wanted a raise and when approaching Universal short department head Charles Mintz, he found out Mintz wanted him to take a pay cut. Walt Disney refused and Charles Mintz hired away Walt Disney's unit, and took control of the cartoons himself. This was the reason for the creation of Mickey Mouse. However Mintz time in charge was brief. Head of Universal, Carl Leamele would fire Mintz and put Walter Lantz in charge of Universal's cartoon unit. Lantz never truly understood the character of Oswald, but his Oswald cartoons were full of enough imaginiation and just plain weirdness to make up for this. Though Lantz's first Oswald cartoons were silent films, he would usher Oswald into the talking era. This cartoon would be a parody of the 1925 silent film version of Phantom of the Opera (directed by Rupert Julian, and staring Lon Chaney). Our film is called Spooks was directed by Lantz himself, released in 1930, and has a fantastic ending joke.
Last for today comes a fairly early Tom and Jerry cartoon called Fraidy Cat. Like many of these earlier Tom and Jerry cartoons this film is bit slower than we have grown to be used to for Tom and Jerry, and designs may look a bit off. However that does not mean that this is not a charming cartoon in it's own right. It features some quite good character animation and a great joke involving a vaccum cleaner. Like all the Tom and Jerry cartoons up until 1958's Tot Watchers this film was directed by William Hannah and Joesph Barbera. The radio show Tom was listening to near the beginning was a real radio show called The Witching Hour, and the woman doing the voice you hear was Martha Wentworth, who actually did the voice for the radio show. She did many voices for animation for various studios, she also voiced Owl Johnson's mother in I Love To Singa, Porky Pig's teacher Miss Cud in I Haven't Got a Hat, The Nanny in 101 Dalmatians, Daffy Duck's Wife in His Bitter Half to name a few. You can see her in Live action in Orson Welles' The Stranger as the character of Sara. Anyway while this may not be the best Tom and Jerry cartoon, it is quite entertaining.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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