August 22 - The Skeleton Dance

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On this day, in 1929, the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, is released to theaters nationwide. In 1928, as Walt travelled by train to New York City to get the soundtrack to Steamboat Willie recorded, he made a stop in Kansas City, Missouri. He had a proposition for an old friend of his, an theater organist by the name of Carl Stalling. Synchronized sound was clearly the future of film, so would Carl be willing to compose music for the other two Mickey Mouse shorts that had already been completed without sound? Not only was Carl willing but during the course of the between the two men, he made a proposition to Walt. What about doing a cartoon series where the animation was drawn for a specific piece of music, rather than writing the music for the animation? For example, maybe have some skeletons dance through a graveyard to some spooky music.

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Even though he had a lot on his plate at that precise moment (what with trying to keep his studio from going under and all), the idea stuck with Walt throughout the whole process of getting the Mickey Mouse series up and running. As things began to roll successfully with his little mouse, he was able to give this new idea his full attention. It probably also helped that Carl was well on his way to becoming the studio’s staff composer. In order to create a second stream of revenue (in case, God forbid, their new star suffered the same fate as their previous one), the Silly Symphony series was born and it was as much of an experiment as anything else.

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As the concept of dancing skeletons developed, a musical piece called March of the Dwarves by Edvar Grieg was chosen as the soundtrack. Animation for the short was turned over to the Studio’s resident technical genius, Ub Iwerks. Like the first couple of Mickey shorts, Ub would do most of the drawings for The Skeleton Dance himself. And, something you would never know considering how marvelous the short is, he banged it out in about six weeks. That’s how good he was. The music was tacked on to an already scheduled recording of the soundtrack for the Mickey short The Opry House in February 1929, helping to keep costs down on the untested new series. At the end of production, The Skeleton Dance cost just under $5,500 to make (about $80,800 today), so Walt wasn’t betting the whole studio on its success but it was still a chunk of change. Now came the dance to find a distributor.

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When Walt sent a print of The Skeleton Dance to the distributor of the Mickey films, the reply was reportedly a terse, two word rejection: “More mice.” Undaunted, Roy Disney arranged to have the short played in two theaters on the West Coast, the Fox Theater in San Francisco and the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Pat Powers, who owned Cinephone (the process Disney used to marry sound and image for their shorts) and made him a party interested in the studio’s continuing success, managed to convince the Roxy Theater in New York City to play it as well. The Skeleton Dance was a hit in all three venues, although it did garner a bit of controversy. The short was considered by some to be too gruesome for children (the skeletons literally scare a couple of cats right out of their fur) and was reportedly later banned in Denmark for the same reason. Columbia Pictures disagreed, however, and agreed to distribute the Silly Symphony series nationwide starting in August. Interestingly, when it played again at the Roxy under the Columbia deal, The Skeleton Dance became the first film to ever play a return engagement there.

Over the decade or so that the Walt Disney Studio produced Silly Symphonies, the series proved to be groundbreaking in so many ways. It includes the first cartoon made in three-color Technicolor, Flowers and Trees (1932), which was also the winner of the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Short; the first use of Disney’s technically superior multi-plane camera in The Old Mill (1937); the studio’s first hit song, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? (1933); the first appearance of Donald Duck in The Wise Little Hen (1934). Mostly, the 75 films in the series were used to try out new techniques and push the envelope of what animation could do. The fact that their popularity eventually outpaced that of Mickey Mouse was just icing on the cake. Over the course of its run, the series would pick up seven Oscars with an additional three nominations.

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Everything the studio learned from producing the Silly Symphonies culminated in their first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The success of Snow White was the beginning of the end for the series, however. Features required so much time and energy to produce that one of the Silly Symphonies, Merbabies, was actually produced by an outside company in exchange for more artists to work on Snow White. Within two years of the studio’s first princess gracing the big screen, the Silly Symphonies ended their triumphant run. And although every other studio in town would try to imitate Disney’s success (the world would be subjected to Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies, Happy Harmonies and Swing Symphonies, all with varying degrees of popularity), the originals still stand out as pieces of art that will continue to be enjoyed for years to come.