Go East, Young Toon (Part 2)

When animated films became “talkies” (or at least, music and noise-ies), it would seem like a natural progression that score composers would turn to the distinctive strains of Oriental or Tin-Pan-Alley Oriental musical pieces for atmosphere. After all, the 1920’s had carved out a veritable niche for such pieces as exotic novelty music, which sold well in conjunction with the continuing popular trends classifying anything Middle-Eastern as exciting, romantic, and full of mystique. The song pluggers were pushing such material by the crateload, and churned out several major and minor hits, including “Palesteena”, “Old King Tut”, “Egyptian Ella”, and the ever-standard, “The Sheik of Araby”, to name a few. What is a bit surprising is that most of the groundbreakers in employing this material for animated adventures turned out to be the little guys of the industry – some of the lowest-budgeted firms in the business. It would take a little time before the bigger boys would jump on the bandwagon, and, although some of their work may be head-and-shoulders above their predecessors in artistic quality, by the time they came on the Arabian scene, the basic genre was no longer anything new, so the overall effect of their efforts may have been diminished somewhat. Yet, even when the novelty had worn off, the appeal of the hardships of the desert, battles against riffs, and Arabian romance still continued to carry many a storyline for years to come.

I am under the impression that Charles Mintz’s ninth sound Krazy Kat cartoon, Desert Sunk (Columbia, 2/27/30 – Ben Harrison/Manny Gould, dir.) is considered lost – although there is considerable possibility that a Vitaphone disc soundtrack exists. (Should anyone be in possession of it or know of its contents, it would be of considerable interest if any rundown of Arabian tunes included in the score could be compiled, considering that this appears to be the first cartoon especially scored for the genre (unless we count the sound reissue of Felix’s “Arabiantics” from last week, which still may have hit the screen later than this Krazy cartoon). Yet, from sources unknown, IMDB provides us with a synopsis – possibly from trade magazines? It goes as follows:

“Riding a camel through the desert, Krazy and his Minnie-Mouse lookalike girlfriend are spotted by one of the sultan’s men, who kidnaps the girl for his boss’s harem. Krazy makes his way into the Sultan’s tent, and there dons whiskers and hides in a bowl, only his head showing. The girl picks it up and dances, doing a Salome and John the Baptist routine. Just before you can say, why?, the Sultan gets into the spirit of the dance and joins them. They wrap his turban around him until he looks like a giant worm, then roll him into a ball and parade out, and everyone follows.”

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Hot Turkey (Terrytoons, 5/4/30 – Frank Moser, dir.) – Paul Terry’s sixth sound short, during the year when every episode used a food pun for a title. It is one that seems to have been bypassed for television by CBS, and is currently handed down to us through a surviving French nitrate print (though it is quite likely negatives with the American titles still exist in UCLA’s holdings). It begins, as did all the earliest Terry releases, with a remarkable live-action shot of a young Phillip Sheib conducting the Terrytoons orchestra, as a parade of animated camels passes slowly on the opposite bank of a desert oasis. Sound quality (especially since copies are sourced from a nitrate) is of exceptionally high fidelity – though synchronization leaves something to be desired with respect to many of the sound effects, a bit more carelessly layered in in post-production than was usual for Terry’s early sound titles, some of which seem to be timed with great precision – odd for a man who balked entirely at investing in sound at Van Beuren. Its stars, as with many of the early-season Terrytoons not featuring Farmer Al Falfa, are a pair of black mice. (The French prints of the series went so far as to give the male mouse a name – Placide.) At least they are more angular in snout design than a certain mouse couple created at a studio of a man named Walt – so there is, at least in appearance, little chance of confusing Terry’s pair with the mice they were no doubt intended to imitate.

There is very little to call a plot. The girl mouse dances a sort of belly-dance in her Arabian garden, calling upon a pet crocodile to come to the surface and open its mouth, inside which is a full set of harp strings for her to play. Placide comes up outside for a date, bringing with him a pair of ostriches, one of whom serves as steed for the girl, so that they can go for a joyride in the desert. Meanwhile, at the nearby heavily-guarded Sultan’s palace, a Sultan cat is reviewing his harem of dancing girls, and seems plenty fed up with the old crowd, giving the current dancing performer the hook to remove her from the floor. A shot displaying an all-cat orchestra of drums and wind instruments is an interesting prototype of things to come – much more primitive than we remember in drawing style, but staged in nearly the identical way to later scenes of familiarity in the Technicolor “Somewhere In Egypt” for Gandy Goose, and “King Tut’s Tomb” for Heckle and Jeckle. A fatter cat displaces such a large amount of weight while dancing that she crashes through the floor. Having enough of this sort of entertainment, the Sultan emerges outside, mounting a camel for his daily ride (borrowing the gag from Mutt and Jeff of portions of the beast’s anatomy converting into a staircase for the Sultan to climb aboard). As the Sultan gallops out of the palace gates, he is followed by a squad of his best soldiers, all of whom march in stiff, right-angled sideways stances like ancient temple paintings.

On the desert, the Sultan spots the two mice, using the combined necks of their ostrich steeds as a jump rope. (Isn’t physical exertion like such exercise non-recommendable in desert heat?) On the Sultan’s orders, the soldiers seize the girl as a new member for the Sultan’s harem, while Placide is socked in the jaw and left behind on the sand. One reasonably comical shot shows the Sultan, in his haste to get back to the palace, being knocked off his camel by the low archway of the palace entrance, then rebounding about four more times off the gateway walls as he staggers to find his way inside. Once back in his throne room, he has the girl dance for him, and his mouth waters in admiration of her. Finally, he can contain his emotions no longer, and attempts to seize her. They chase all around the throne room, and in and out of secret passages in the floor. Perhaps the most adult gag has the cat and mouse continue the chase within the canopies of the Sultan’s bed – and dozens of other harem girls fleeing from within the confines of the same bed canopies! (Was this why CBS did not include this cartoon in its lineup? It is odd, because the few harem shots could have been easily cut out without doing anything adverse to the story continuity.) Placide finally revives, and, finding the ostriches have run off to escape the previous battle with the palace guards, conveniently locates a camel resting in the wild, gallops away to the palace, and cranks the camel’s tail to raise its hump like a hydraulic lift up to an upper-story balcony. Without much in the way of complications, he engages in a fist-fight with the Sultan, delivers a knockout punch, and the two mice gallop away upon the camel, whose previously-seen one hump suddenly divides into a bobbing pair, alternating in rising and falls beneath the seated mice, who share a kiss from opposite humps.

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Charles Mintz returns once again, though this time utilizing the directing of Dick Huemor, for the premiere episode of the Toby the Pup series created for Radio Pictures, The Museum (8/19/30). Toby is far from a standout character, presenting little in the way of personality traits except for a certain degree of a sense of mischief. Here, he plays the night watchman and janitor for a museum of art and natural history – allowing him to hobnob at night with the living exhibits rather than tending to his work. He begins conducting a musicale amid the busts, statues, and skeletons, using strands from his broom as harp strings, a dinosaur skeleton as the world’s largest xylophone, and the like. The exhibits join in the tune (the seated statue of Atlas, for example, dancing a traditional Jewish dance with his bent knees). Most notable are two sequences choreographed to include dance moves without the aid of arms – one between a trio of armless Venus Di Milo statues, and the second shared by three dancing sarcophagus cases, which open to reveal three cloth-wrapped mummies of mismatched size, who perform a hip-swiveling mummy-dance within their wrappings. Toby unwraps one of the mummies, to reveal inside not one skeleton, but six small ones, performing a dance around a central Maypole. Toby finally performs his own tap step toward the camera along a long corridor, with rows of living statutes on either side beating out a dance-time rhythm with the claps of their hands. But Toby’s boss, a lion who is the museum curator, finally shows up, and bops Toby a sound blow upon the cranium. Toby’s whole body transforms into the shape of a carnival high-striker, the lion’s blow causing a bell to ring where Toby’s head should be. A dazed Toby reverts back to original form, and ends the film abruptly by handing the lion a cigar as a prize for his demonstration of brute strength.

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Gypped In Egypt (Van Beuren/Pathe, Aesop’s Fables. 11/9/30 – John Foster/Mannie Davis, dir.) – John Foster became associated with a string of Van Beuren and Terrytoons titles that can best be described as abstract “streams of consciousness”, where all rules of logic, time, space, and the time-space continuum, seemed to be tossed out the window, in favor of chaotic madness, either as a dream or with a dream-like ability to transport from situation to situation randomly, not by any identifiable force and for no apparent reason. I’m not sure how many of these exist in the silent era (one for sure is Farmer Al Falfa’s “A Day Off” – one of the most strikingly weird cartoons of all time) – but this one must have been among the first to appear with sound.

Waffles and Don, a tall cat and short dog pair (predating but predicting the studio’s human duo of Tom and Jerry) have licked the problem of traveling by camel. Instead of riding atop those uncomfortable humps, they’ve strung a hammock underneath the animal’s torso. A good solution for a while, until a twitch of one of the steed’s rear knees kicks them out of their comfortable bed onto the scorching sands. Don immediately feels pangs of thirst, but spots reflection off an oasis, consisting of a pool that seems no more than four inches across. Both of our heroes and the camel merrily skip to the watering hole, at which also stands a tiny bird of pencil-thin width. Before Waffles and Don can indulge, the camel cranes its neck between them, wanting to drink first. It takes all of our heroes’ energies to attempt to restrain the camel from doing so, and Waffles finally socks the camel with a right to the jaw, causing the beast to fall to the sand and roll over helplessly upon his lumpy back. Our heroes misjudged, however, who their real competition was – as the small bird dips its beak into the water, and syphons the entire contents of the pool into its own belly, inflating like a balloon, then weightily flapping itself away into the sky. Now turning back to check the condition of their transportation, Waffles and Don find the camel still and lifeless. In a surreal scene, from the far reaches of the horizon, the giant head and neck of the Sphinx extend into the foreground, uttering with horrific expression the incriminating accusation, “You KILLED him!” Suddenly, things get stranger – as the Sphinx dissolves from the landscape, leaving only the empty sand, and is replaced by multiple exposures of revolving pyramids, a stampede of transparent camel ghosts, and our heroes suddenly find themselves falling down a dark hole, into the heart of a subterranean Egyptian tomb (a favorite setting for Foster madness, to be returned to on multiple occasions in subsequent Terrytoons).

Our heroes find themselves inside a room through which random bats fly, and in the center of which rests a sarcophagus, the lid of which is decorated with a full carved figure, likely of the unfortunate encased inside. Waffles is scared to death, shaking like a leaf, and can barely lay eyes upon the foreboding box. Don, on the other hand, has a veritable immunity to fear, and curiously spies a small slot in the side of the wooden case. Suspecting it of being the right size for a coin, Don drops a nickel in. The lid slowly opens, revealing not a wrapped mummy, but a skeleton. Waffles experiences fits, but Don calmly watches, as music begins playing from within, like a giant music box, and the skeleton rises, disconnecting some of his ribs and chattering his teeth, to beat out a castanet rhythm to the tune, then exiting the box to perform a short dance. A brief shot of the background wall predicts a much more elaborate Disney outing to appear the following year, as a number of figures painted on the stone wall briefly come to life, dancing to the music and rowing a barge in rhythm up the Nile. The dance concludes, and the skeleton returns to the box as the lid closes – but he accidentally detaches and leaves outside one leg and foot. Waffles is again spooked by the dismembered limb, but Don thinks it nothing more than a curiosity – even when the skeleton peers out of the box again, and shouts, “Gimme my leg.” Don lets him have it – smacking him with it right on the skull. Waffles seems to no longer want any association with his troublemaking friend, and on an impulse, pushes Don into the box too. But he soon meets the same fate, as the clutching hand of the skeleton reaches out, grabbing Waffles by the tail and dragging him inside as well. An all-out brawl erupts within the confines of the box, the mummy case bouncing all around the room, until even the carved figure on the lid can’t take it, springs off the box, then sails away through a small opening in the side wall of the chamber. The base of the still-vibrating box approaches the camera, engulfing the scene in white – then suddenly, we are magically transported to another chamber entirely, where there is no sign of the first skeleton or its case, and a panting Waffles and Don stand free of their enclosure.

Waffles pantomimes regret at pushing Don in, and begs for forgiveness. Don waves the whole incident off, expressing no hard feelings. But that still gets them no closer to an escape, or making sense of this world. Don spots a statue of some Egyptian royalty, the figure displaying a long white goatee. Don playfully decides to pull on the figure’s whiskers. Such act pulls the jaw open on the statue, revealing the whirring mechanism of a fire alarm. In another bit Foster would repeat several times in his career, a skeleton in a fire hat answers the call, riding a chariot pulled by two sphinx-like cats. Waffles and Don are swept along for the ride, while a full population of skeletons inside the tomb run around in panic and sheer chaos. The chariot hits a bump, and Waffles and Don are thrown off, falling through a trap door and into another chamber, in which rests only a solitary sculpture containing two hands with two rather flattened fingers on each. Don nonchalantly leans on the sculpture, pressing upon the fingers of one hand – and hears piano notes. He presses on the others, and hears more notes of higher pitch. He begins pecking out a primitive four-note melody on the finger-keys. Them a hatch opens in the wall above the sculpture. A skeleton leans through the hatchway, and offers a helping hand, stretching the sculpture sideways, to expand it into the full keyboard of an upright piano. To make things more interesting, another trap door opens in the floor in front of the statue, producing two piano stools, and a full skeleton to serve as accompanist.

So, for at least a full minute, Don and the skeleton play a four-handed jazzy interpretation of “Chopsticks”! The skeleton shakes a bony hand with Don in congratulations at the conclusion of the song, but never-emotional Don uncaringly and casually removes his piano-partner’s skull from his neck, and tosses it to a terrified Waffles. Waffles lets the “hot potato” drop to the floor, with no immediate consequence. Just to progress the cartoon along, a doorway opens in the wall for no good reason. Waffles and Don race up a lengthy spiral staircase, which ends at a doorway to a small room. A floor closes in behind them, sealing them away from the stairs. Suddenly, a bony hand pulls a safety gate down behind our heroes and over the entrance to the small room, and its owner emerges into view, as a skeleton elevator operator, pulling a lever to make the room rise to the highest tower of the tomb. At the top, a large stone panel opens in the tower’s exterior wall, hinged to serve as a landing for our heroes to step out upon. For no good reason, our heroes keep right on walking past its edge, as if they’ve reached their floor, and stand on air. “Nice ride”, says Waffles (though Don gives the skeleton a razzberry), while the skeleton operator only laughs, walks back inside, and seals the exterior doorway shut. Of course, even in 1930, a cartoon character doesn’t fall until he looks down – which our heroes do. Waffles desperately pounds on the tower wall, calling to be let back in, but falls with Don nonetheless, spinning over and over, and making a hard landing upon the sand. But they are outside! The two attempt to race toward the horizon, in search of a way out of this nightmare – but never find it, as they are met again by the giant head of the Sphinx, with whirling evil eyes, which follows them in the opposite direction as fast as they can run, for the iris out.

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Africa (Lantz/Universal, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 12/1/30) – Title is a bit misleading, bringing first impressions of it being a jungle epic. Instead, it could more properly have been named “Egypt”. Perhaps Lantz didn’t want to confuse it with the Dinky Doodle title of similar name previously released – though confusion could just as easily have resulted between this cartoon’s selected title and the prior silent Disney Oswald, “Africa Before Dark”.

This film exists, as likely as not, for the primary purpose of introducing a theme song for Oswald. Two other studios had already gotten the jump on Lantz in this department. Mickey Mouse was first as usual, introducing “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo” in “Mickey’s Follies” in 1929. Krazy Kat had followed with “The Cat’s Meow” early in 1930. So Oswald was number 3 – but perhaps he tried harder! He manages to devote about two-thirds of this cartoon to the song’s presentation – a larger percentage than the sequence in which Mickey sang and danced. Furthermore, unlike the Mickey number, which was performed at an intentionally deliberate and slow tempo to allow the animators to provide distinct extremes for every syllable – often grotesque in their lip distortions – the Oswald theme “The Lucky Rabbit Song” is presented at a sprightly pace, with some tongue-twisting banter in the bridge, yet with realistic and fully in-sync lip movements throughout. (My immediate guess is that, although Lantz and Bill Nolan share production credit on this film, the loose-penned, notoriously off-model Nolan did NOT work on the synchronized dialogue shots, the technical problems of which he had gingerly avoided in earlier films.) The lip and sync work is in fact so good, it is surprising that, except for rare song interludes here and there, its finesse was essentially not repeated for a good many years to come – obviously not for lack of know-how, but simply because it probably cost Lantz more expense and budget to produce than he was willing to expend on any regular basis.

An intertitle opens the film for a good pun-gag” “Five miles from Cairo – and not a Chiropractor in sight.” Plotwise, Oswald, in big-game hunting mode, travels the desert (how many hunters hunt in the open desert?), getting a bumpy ride atop a two-humped camel. An x-ray view shows the camel’s humps working like cylinders in an automobile, powered by a drive-shaft of a backbone, with “cylinders” that appear to be built of a pair of matching bowling balls or cannonballs. Along comes a lion (in fact, the same one seen in color in the animated sequence of Paul Whiteman’s “The King of Jazz”). Again, what’s a lion doing emerging onto the open sands instead of hidden in jungle foliage? Oswald draws a bead on the beast with his rifle, but its bullets merely bounce around on top and hit Oswald in the face, and its barrel hopelessly droops. Oswald resorts instead to pulling on the camel’s tail as if the spring launcher from a pinball machine, and ejecting from the camel’s mouth the two internal black balls that were his humps. The lion, in the middle of an open-mouthed roar, swallows them both, and retreats as the world’s first two-humped lion. Oswald laughs heartily, then spies three dancing girls in ancient Egyptian garb performing a twisted-limbs unison dance along a poolside path leading into a palace. Oswald falls into step with them, bringing up the rear. However, his steps are somewhat more awkward, and accompanied by Arabian-flavored music played with deliberately off-key harmonies. Entering the palace, he finds a Cleopatra-type queen (is this Hortensia with longer curls?) on her royal couch. A simple inquiry of “Who are you?” by the Queen launches us into the Lucky Rabbit song – a number which attendees of Walt Disney World may recognize as recently familiar, as it was revived for a live show featuring the character as a costumed figure, somehow acquired for use by the Disney company in the deal that returned rights to the early Oswald to the hands of the Disney company – even though the theme postdates Disney’s involvement with the character. During the production number, Oswald tap dances on drum heads, then is joined in his dancing by four mummies – except these four, unlike those in the Toby cartoon, have arms – so the dancing moves are not particularly original. Then, the Sphinx and even the pyramids sing along. Finally, the Queen rises, seeming intent upon confronting Oswald, but instead confesses that she now has that “Oswald habit”, and asks him to be her King. Oswald accepts – but he is a little late. A burly Pharaoh-type was there ahead of him, and shouts, “Sez you!”, picks up Oswald, and boots him out of the palace, where Oswald applies the brakes in mid-air, barely escaping the open jaws of crocodiles in the pool outside. Oswald turns a 180-degree spin, and races off, vanishing over the sand dunes, as a curtain closes upon the scene.

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Another possible casualty missing in action from the sound era is The Sultan’s Cat (Terrytoons/Educational, Farmer Al Falfa, 5/17/31), which is currently listed on internet sources as believed lost, rather than as within the holdings of the UCLA archives. No trade synopsis has yet been posted online – though an appealing movie poster exists, depicting Farmer Al in a fez, presumably as a sultan, while his cat attempts to woo a female feline dressed in veil and harem outfit.

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Egyptian Melodies (Disney/Columbia, Silly Symphony, 8/19/31 – Wilfred Jackson, dir.) – In the previous season, Jackson had introduced a small but still considerably-oversized spider as an unlikely starring character in the Silly Symphony, “Midnight In a Toy Shop”, in which the spider led us on a personal tour, via a bug’s life point-of-view, in investigating a darkened toy shop after closing. This imaginative short likely paved the way for Harman and Ising’s similar investigation of a magazine rack at midnight (without the aid of a bug) in Warner’s “I Like Mountain Music”, and the entire sub-genre of “Midnight in…” scenarios which both Harman-Ising and Warner would engage in over the next couple of decades. Disney themselves would further follow up with similar “Midnight In…” setups (again minus the bug), in such films as “The Clock Store” and “The China Shop” – both directed by Jackson.

It was, again, unusual to cast a spider as the lead – considering it was rare enough to see a spider even portrayed as a good guy, instead usually making appearances as the heavy, out to capture helpless insects who must combine their forces to vanquish the foe (witness such films as Max Fleischer’s later Color Classic, The Cobweb Hotel). Yet, Jackson apparently thought his character to be so appealing, he devised a new and more exotic territory for him to explore in this comeback film from the following year – the interior of the Sphinx. In actuality, the spider is more appealing here than in his previous film. It seemed a little creepy before for a spider to be infiltrating the otherwise clean, cheery, and presumed antiseptic world of a shop devoted to the play of kids. (After all, couldn’t they have sprayed the place?) Here, the atmosphere is already deep, dark, and creepy – so, encountering a spider as a tour guide, even if his demeanor and intentions are entirely innocent, doesn’t seem at all out of place.

We begin with an exterior view of the famous monument, and track in to a closer view of the doorway in the building’s chest – where out spider is just setting up housekeeping with a small web in the corner, and currently passing the time playing its strands like a harp. Suddenly and without warning, the door beside him begins to violently vibrate, causing the spider to jump down to the ground in fright. The vibration stops, but the vault door slowly creaks open of its own power, with the nice touch of dusty cobwebs dangling from its edges (signs, perhaps, of other spiders having gone before him?). The cautious-but-curious spider takes a few steps to the doorway’s edge and peers into the blackness inside, then “breaks the fourth wall” by turning to the audience, giving us a “Sh-h-h-h-” to be very quiet, then beckoning us with a gesture of several hands to follow.

A shot fantastic in shading and detail follows – the like of which no one else save Max Fleischer could have approached. The camera view very slowly dissolves from total blackness to dim light, as if our own eyes are adjusting to the lack of illumination. We find ourselves following behind the spider in slow and measured steps, tracking in POV 3-dimension through a narrow, stone-lined corridor. The massive stones on both walls, floor, and ceiling are all depicted in varying gray tones from one another, and without harsh black ink outlines, allowing the scene to take on feelings of depth and perspective movement that plain moving lines against a solid gray shade could never have conveyed – and something not equaled until sheer math was able to create such maze images in computer games (It is strangely coincidental that Max Fleischer would construct one of his own most memorable 3-D POV effects for release only a mere month prior to the release of this cartoon – the torture chamber dash in “Bimbo’s Initiation”. Yet, while fantastic and stunning in its own right, the Bimbo sequence did not exert itself with the same attention to detail in shading as the Disney, using very little in the way of variance of gray shades, and relying only on the changing perspective of traditional black outlines to convey its motion. What is further strange is that the release dates of these competing films are so close, it is impossible to conceive that either studio knew of or was copying the work of the other at time of creation – unless one had spies (or crossing personnel with tattle-tale lips) within the ranks of the other during production.) The Disney corridor is a lengthy repeating cycle that extends two stories, first traveling in a straight line until the passage veers to the left, then tilting into a downwards view to traverse a small flight of stairs, ending in a right turn to enter the next floor. Whoever conceived it must have used a slide rule to calculate the changing dimensions and angles to near perfection. Then, just imagine the instructions and supervision that must have gone to the ink and paint department, to get the look right for every frame. Just to vary things up as the cycle finally repeats, additional animation is overlaid to complicate the situation. On the second floor, a large stone block falls from the ceiling, almost crushing the spider. As he makes the next turn, he misjudges the stairs, and bounces down them at double tempo. Then, on floor number three, a new overlay of cels, also in gray shades, is placed at the mid-point of the corridor, providing an extra hallway into a large interior chamber of the tomb. This animation was too good to use for only one occasion, and fans may recall a shorter reuse of said cels as a corridor of the spooky castle in Mickey Mouse’s “The Mad Doctor”.

Spotting the new hallway, the spider disappears around its corner, then, in a new shot, is seen just inside the chamber’s doorway, laughing, and giving us the signal to come in and see what he sees. On the floor rests an odd invention – an hourglass, with the sand nearly run out of one side, but with a difference – with a large alarm-clock bell fastened on top. The device looks totally impractical, prompting the spider’s giggles – but darned if the thing doesn’t actually go off, ringing loudly. The sound startles the spider to take cover inside a large box propped against the wall and to close the lid – but it doesn’t take long for the spider to emerge again, screaming and running toward the camera. “Mummies!”, the spider shouts (on bended knee in Al Jolson fashion), discovering the box to be an occupied mummy case. He jumps into a large earthen jar (possibly intended to serve as a spittoon), while four of such boxes open, and we are treated to another armless “mummy dance” by the quartet of wrapped corpses, similar to the dance in Toby the Pup’s museum above. An added detail appears for a surprise laugh, as the dancing figures turn to reveal their backsides, displaying two-button drop seats in the position of their rears, just like a suit of long underwear. (Wonder who buttons them back up after use?)

The mummies finish their quadrille, and close themselves up in their cases again. The spider pokes his head out of the jar cautiously, glad that the dancing troupe is gone – only to discover more surprising and spooky goings-on. Painted images on the walls everywhere, flat in dimension, and with traditional angled-limb style of temple depictions, begin to move about freely upon every wall and pillar. A procession of soldiers parades on one level before a painted Pharaoh and his two palace fan-slaves on another level above. To demonstrate the paintings’ flatness, the marching images bend around corners of the chamber walls at the proper right-angles to remain flush to the stone surfaces – except for one marcher bringing up the rear, who misses the turn, walks off the wall into this air, then rushes back to the stone surface, briefly revealing his other side, which is entirely flat and blank. After the soldiers pass the throne, two dancing girls wearing cymbals upon both arms and their rear-ends perform a loud dance punctuated with cymbal crashes, as they either smack their own arms together or bump their backsides upon each other (a routine somewhat similar to the cantina girl in “El Terrible Toreador”, batting out a rhythm everywhere on her body with a tambourine). The Pharaoh gets so exited, he pulls down painted curtains in front of the faces of both his painted slaves, so he can have the enthralling view all to himself. As the dance concludes, the attention of the Pharaoh, and of all the other painted figures on the lower levels, is diverted to another level on the wall above, where two drivers in horse-drawn chariots awaiting the starting flag to begin a race. (This defies the illusion of character flatness a little, as during the course of the event, the drivers and their chariots are somehow able to move past one another, suggesting that there is some microscopic degree of relative depth between their images to allow them to squeeze by.

The exciting chase has the lead switch several times between the drivers, one who is garbed in white, the other in black. One level of spectator soldiers painted below alternates between soldiers in white outfits and soldiers in black – each color group rooting for the driver of matching color, while the opposite army snarls in frustration whenever their matching driver falls behind. Finally, each side grows tired of seeing the other squad cheering for their opponent, and tempers flare – resulting in each soldier engaging in a personal battle with the opposing soldier closest at hand, dueling with spears. One funny shot shows two opposing soldiers painted together upon a stripe encircling a granite column, chasing each other in a circle around the pillar. One of them tosses his spear at the other, but the opponent ducks, causing the flying spear to follow the circular path around the pillar, then stab its own owner in the rear end. The terrified spider begins to panic, as the room seems to spin wildly before his eyes, every image on every wall engaged in an all-out war amongst themselves. He runs back into the narrow corridors, and, in a repetition of the cycle of shaded drawings in reverse at about quadruple-speed, races two levels upwards, back to the Sphinx entrance. He does not stop there, and doesn’t even waste the time to bid us all good-bye, but runs off across the desert sands, likely never to return.

Had there ever been any further travels for our spider, it might have been interesting if his lust for adventure had been emphasized by outfitting him in a miniature jungle pith-helmet or other explorer garb – an early-day Indiana Jones or Commander McBragg. Perhaps Disney has the makings of a hidden franchise here – The Sagas of Sydney Spider! It is possible even Chuck Jones thought so, borrowing the idea for his own derivative twist on bug’s eye exploration, as depicted in “Joe Glow, the Firefly” (1941).

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Movie Mad (Ub Iwerks (Celebrity Pictures)/MGM, Flip the Frog, 8/29/31) – Gate crashing at a Hollywood studio was nothing new. Felix the Cat tried it in 1923 in “Felix In Hollywood”. But this Flip short might mark the earliest sound film to employ the scenario – and to showcase a running chase between the intruder and a studio cop. (This same basic idea would become the core storyline for Donald Duck’s “The Autograph Hound” in 1939 – making one wonder if Walt and his boys were still remembering the early works of their prodigal competitor, who himself would return to the studio the following year.) Flip begins the film with an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin, as he follows lessons in a book on how to become a movie actor. But neither acting nor a fake moustache will get him past the cop at the gate, who can pick him out as a phoney even in a crowd. Flip tries a trick only possible in the cartoons – hiding under the shadow of a fat pig wearing a wide overcoat (by merely lifting the edge of the shadow from the pavement, and crawling underneath). But, as if the lump left in the shadow from Flip’s presence isn’t enough of a giveaway, someone takes the pig’s overcoat, reducing the width of his shadow behind to reveal the crouching frog to view. Just when Flip has run out of ideas to fool the guard, he gains entry without even trying – by leaning on a fence board, which is only loosely nailed, and pivots, “flipping” Flip inside the studio walls.

The chase is on. Flip intrudes upon various movie sets, including a pie-throwing sequence between a mustached pig and a slim canine (dead ringers for Laurel and Hardy), a Western pitting a cowboy hero against a melodrama villain (leaving Flip reaching for the skies, with his pants down), and a romantic love-scene between a seductive vamp cat and a soldier of the Czar (Flip turning up in a duplicate Russian outfit, and attempting to steal the scene from the leading man). Finally, to avoid the cop once again, Flip slips into the attire of a veiled harem dancing girl. The cop, upon spying him, becomes amorous and flirtatious, and Flip, to avoid his unwanted attentions, tosses the cop a rose – with a bee in it, who immediately stings the cop’s nose. Flip dashes in the other direction, and finds he has stumbled into the set of an Arabian Nights movie, where his outfit makes him appear to be one of the cast. Standing before a pillowed throne in a palace setting, Flip is addressed by an actor pig portraying a sultan. “Ah, Fatima”, says the sultan. Flip responds, “Oh, Murad.” For decades, I never knew what these references were about. Then, a listen to some old time radio provided a clue – in a broadcast sponsored by Fatima cigarettes – a long defunct brand of Liggett & Myers. “Murad”, it turns out, was a competing brand of cigarettes, also using Turkish tobacco. Thus, a topical gag of 1930’s pop culture – something Iwerks delved into only very rarely – with its references now lost in the Arabian sands of time. Perhaps we might have more expected a line like this to crop up in some Warner cartoon a few years later. Anyway, Flip tries to cover by going into a harem dance, until a stagehand happens by, cleaning up the next set with a vacuum cleaner. Briefly bending over, and allowing the vacuum nozzle to point behind him, the stagehand unintentionally sucks away all of Flip’s disguise, revealing the imposter. The sultan claps his hands, summoning a giant palace guard with a scimitar, who is ordered to eject Flip. Flip avoids the guard’s blade by running for the exit, but runs straight into the waiting arms of the cop, who finally boots him out onto the street. Flip ends the story by pulling out his book of acting instruction, giving the book a loud razzberry, them tearing at its pages and stomping upon the book upon the ground.

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In his last short for Columbia Pictures, Mickey Mouse gets in one of his most exotic adventures. Mickey in Arabia (Disney/Columbia, 7/11/32 – Wilfred Jackson, dir.) finds our hero and his lady love Minnie in an elaborate traveling compartment atop a camel, entering a walled city in the far East. Much of the early score utilizes a famous light classic composed in 1920 as yet another lasting tribute to the Arabian mystique – Albert W. Ketelby’s “In a Persian Market”. A lot of sightseeing takes place in the Bazaar, with Minnie snapping photographs. Sights include a snake charmer with tail-tapping serpents, a mother balancing a plank on her head carrying five earthen pots in which her children all ride, and two tykes playing jump rope with an elderly man’s long beard. Mickey poses with a local veiled beauty, who briefly lifts her veil to smile for the camera, exposing horrendous dentures. A juggler manages to halt all his balls in mid-air so they won’t blur in Minnie’s shot. But as Minnie backs up further and further for a long shot, she fails to see the treacherous hands of Sheik Pete lunging for her from the peephole of a large wooden door. The Sheik takes off with his prize aboard a fast stallion. Mickey’s camel, however, has gotten into a barrel of beer in the marketplace (a reworking of Mickey’s troubles with his ostrich mount in The Gallopin’ Gaucho (1928)), and staggers and stumbles his way across the sands – even flipping over and running on his humps instead of his legs. (One can only wonder if some of this may also have been reworked from the lost Oswald film “Harem Scarem” discussed last week.) While Pete pursues Minnie inside his palace fortress, Mickey scales the wall, leaps in on a chandelier, and kicks Pete headfirst into a giant gong. The gong alerts an army of palace guards, who surround the mice. But Pete, turban pushed down over his eyes, does what Pete does best – pulls out two pistols, and shoots blindly throughout the palace. Everybody, including the guards, scatter for cover.

After a minute or so of mayhem, Pete runs out of bullets, and finally gets the turban off of his eyes. Mickey struggles to open a large door padlock, and is almost shish-kabobbed by Pete’s flying scimitar. Mickey attempts to pull it from the door to use as a weapon himself – but only comes up with the hilt – no blade. He narrowly misses having Pete do him in again while weaponless. Pete sources new weaponry from two barrels of assorted knives and swords. Several penetrate a decorative screen, which Mickey bends to spring the weapons back en masse on Pete like a catapult, reducing Pete to his long underwear. (In desert heat, do sheiks really wear red flannels?) Pete pursues Mickey (who is carrying Minnie in a large earthen jug) up a spiral tower staircase and out onto the palace walls. Mickey misses a step, causing the jug with Minnie to bounce along the wall and off its edge, Mickey narrowly saving Minnie from doom by pulling her up with her hat strap. But the wall edge they are standing on collapses, sending them both falling. A window awning below breaks their fall. Above, Pete dives on them, armed with another scimitar. But Mickey cranks the awning shut so that Pete flies by them, landing with his head buried in the sand below, and the drop-seat of his underwear open. As Mickey and Minnie reopen the awning, one last threat presents itself – the palace guards have regrouped above, and hurl armfuls of spears at them. Once again, Mickey folds up the awning in the nick of time – and the spears all find their mark right in Pete’s drop-seat. Pete runs off howling into the desert with a tail of spears resembling a peacock, while Mickey and Minnie safely land on the humps of their now-revived camel, and go happily bouncing off astride him, to their next adventure.

NEXT WEEK: Mummies, magic, and our first encounters with the foreign legion and the 40 thieves.