August 22 - The Skeleton Dance

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

July 7 - Ub Iwerks

Image courtesy youtube.com

On this day, in 1971, Ubbe Ert Iwerks passed away in Burbank, California. Ub, as he usually went by, was born on March 24, 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of German immigrants. When he was eighteen, Ub went to work for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City. He met another young artist working there, Walt Disney, and the two became friends. When one of them began working for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company as an illustrator, the other soon followed (it’s unclear who went first). When Walt decided that he wanted to start his own animation company, Ub said Sign me up! And that’s how the Laugh-O-Gram Studio of Kansas City began. Two friends trying to make their way in the cutthroat film industry. It didn't work out. Neither of the talented young men were business minded and Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt. But our story doesn't end there.

Image courtesy medium.com

The only thing Walt was left with after the bankruptcy of his first studio was a short film that was a hybrid of live action and animation. He took that film with him out to California and convinced his brother, a financial wizard, to start a new studio. The Walt Disney Studio got a contract to produce more films like the one he had. They became known as the Alice Comedies and they were chiefly animated by Walt's old friend, Ub.

Ub followed Walt out to California and became one of the driving forces behind the success of the Walt Disney Studio. He was basically an animating machine, able to churn out quality work at incredible rates. The look and feel of early Disney animation should actually be referred to as the look and feel of Iwerks animation. As the Alice Comedies were winding down in 1927, Walt asked Ub to create a new character. He came up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and supposedly completely animated the first short, Poor Papa, himself. If you look at the bottom of most of the Oswald posters, you can see Ub's signature, which means he created the artwork for those as well. When the studio lost the rights to Oswald in 1928 to Universal, Ub was right in the mix helping to design the studio's next character, Mickey Mouse (who is admittedly just Oswald with round ears instead of long ones and a different tail).

Image courtesy lambiek.net

Ub was responsible for animating most of the first Mickey Mouse shorts as a lot of the Disney staff had been hired away by Universal. Steamboat Willie is almost entirely his work. The same can be said of the early Silly Symphony series as well. Ub did the animation, backgrounds and layouts for The Skeleton Dance. Ub was pouring his heart and soul into incredible characters and animated series, but wasn't feeling the love from the man who was getting all the credit, Walt Disney. By 1930, the relationship between the two friends had become completely broken and Ub walked away from the Disney Studio to start his own.

Image courtesy bcdb.com

The Iwerks Studio received financial backing from investors who had a suspicion that all of Disney's success was due to the work of one guy, Ub. Disney animation did suffer briefly after Ub's departure, but only briefly. Walt hired new, talented people, recovered from the loss of his friend and carried on to bigger and better things. The Iwerks Studio had a contract with MGM and introduced new characters to the genre like Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, but it never quite attained commercial success. The are two claims to fame the studio could make. First, Ub invented a version of a multiplane camera in 1933, famously using parts from an old Chevrolet to do it. This camera shouldn't be confused with the better version that was invented a couple of years later at the Disney studio, but it was definitely an inspiration for that one.  Secondly, the Iwerks Studio was the first place to hire a young man named Chuck Jones, but it had folded long before that claim would mean anything. By 1936, Ub's investors had pulled out of the studio and it faded into history.

Image courtesy cartoonbrew.com

Following the collapse of his studio, Ub was contracted by Leon Schlesinger to animate four Looney Tunes shorts, two of which he also directed. He then spent a few years under contract with Columbia Pictures' animation unit, Screen Gems, directing several of their Color Rhapsodies series. By 1940, Ub and Walt had repaired their friendship enough that Ub would return to work full time at the Walt Disney Studio.

Ub's second career with Disney was mostly involved with the technical side of things. He was kind of put into a department by himself where he worked on creating new visual effects for animation. Ub is credited with coming up with a new process, called the multi-head optical printer, for combining live action with animation that was used in Song of the South. He would win an Academy Award for later improving that process and nab another one for perfecting color traveling matte technology. He also created the xerography process of transferring animator's drawings onto acetate cels that was first used on One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961. That process is basically what brought production costs on animation down enough that Disney continued producing it. As the Sixties progressed, Ub moved into doing effects work with WED Enterprises, the precursor to Walt Disney Imagineering, putting his influence on many of the theme park attractions created during that decade including it's a small world and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

While Ub remains a name that the average citizen might not recognize, he has become revered by those who know and was given several accolades within the entertainment industry. In 1963, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his effects work on a non-Disney project, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. When the Annie Awards were created in 1972, the balloted award for Technical Achievement was named after him. He was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees in 1989 (he was the only honoree that year who hadn't been one of Walt's Nine Old Men). And in 1999, there was a documentary and accompanying book released about his life and work, The Hand Behind the Mouse. 

For the last few years of his life, Ub was involved with the development of shows and attractions for the Florida Project like The Hall of Presidents. He wouldn't live to see Walt Disney World open however. On July 17, 1971, he suffered a fatal heart attack in Burbank, California. He was 70.

November 10 - Carl Stalling

On this day, in 1891, Carl W. Stalling was born in Lexington, Missouri. Carl began playing the piano at the age of six and, by the time he was 12, was the main organist at his local movie theater. By his early 20's, he was conducting his own orchestra in Kansas City. He still played the organ in movie theaters there, but he wasn't just playing the sheet music that studios sent along with each picture, he was improvising new music during the shows. As chance would have it, in the early 1920s, during one of those improvised shows, Carl left a big impression on one of the audience members, who decided he just had to meet the organist. That audience member was a local businessman who made animated shorts, Walt Disney.

Carl and Walt kept up a friendly correspondence even after Walt moved to California. When Walt was on a long train trip to New York City to record the soundtrack for his first cartoon with sound, Steamboat Willie, he looked Carl up during a layover in Kansas City. During their visit, Walt asked Carl to write scores for the two Mickey shorts that had been produced before Steamboat and now needed sound, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho. Walt was so pleased with the results that he offered Carl a position as his studio's first Music Director. Even though it meant relocating, Carl jumped at the opportunity.

One of Carl's talents was the ability to take a piece of existing music, adapt it for the short he was working on and add his own improvisations to make a harmonious whole. It was the norm for someone listening to one of his scores to suddenly hear a recognizable snippet of Beethoven or Mozart (or any other composer really). Carl also pioneered several new techniques for the scoring of animation. One was a precursor to the click track that is widely used today. Another was the use of "bar sheets" which showed what music was going to be playing alongside a shorts storyboards.

Carl's biggest contribution to Disney lore, however, was encouraging Walt to make a new style of shorts. The two friends had a running discussion for a while about what should come first, the animation or the music. Carl convinced Walt that his animators should try creating pictures to go along with an existing piece of music and the Silly Symphonies were born. Carl is credited with composing and arranging the music used in the first Symphony, 1929's The Skeleton Dance. Following the success of Dance, composers at Disney no longer had to try to match their compositions to the action of a short; the matching job fell to the animators instead.

Carl worked for the Walt Disney Studio for about two years, scoring about 20 different shorts, before he left and became a freelancer for a while. In the summer of 1936, he was hired by Leon Schlesinger to be the music director for his studio over at Warner Brothers. That studio had two cartoon series that had started a few years earlier, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. From the moment he was hired, Carl was the composer for almost every single animated short that Warner Brothers put out for the next 22 years. And that included the distinctive electric guitar slide that opened each short and the theme songs. With over 600 shorts to his credit in that part of his career, it works out to a complete score finished every 13 days. Carl's last cartoon with Warner Brothers was 1958's To Itch His Own. He passed away on November 29, 1972 as probably the most famous unknown American composer. He was 81.