1 of 4
Into the life of every diehard Warner Brothers cartoon fan a little rain must fall. One can spend a lifetime seeking the holy grail of seeing all 1,000 shorts and have a grand old time with each one—except when it comes to a certain group, the first Merrie Melodies of the early Thirties. Even the true fanatic can only take two or three in a row: animals and plants dancing, goods in shops after closing time coming to life and dancing, the inevitable arrival of a glowering villain handily thwarted via a Rube Goldberg-style chain of events.
|
|
The strange thing about these insipid little concerts is that at the same time, the studio was producing the Looney Tunes series starring a vaguely Negroid little Mickey Mouse knockoff named Bosko, which, while hardly for the ages either, had a snap and even edge rarely on view in the Merrie Melodies. Aficionados have long collected Bosko on video and DVD, while there has never been a collection of the Merrie Melodies, even bootleg. Where did the idea come from to devote equal time to a series about tap-dancing beetles and soup cans?
The answer is the Disney studio's Silly Symphonies. Merrie Melodies existed in the relationship to them that television's The Munsters would to The Addams Family: that is, they were a shameless ripoff, in fact by ex-Disney workers. This has traditionally been obscure to all but historians and cartoon buffs. Until some Silly Symphonies were released on video in 1990s, they had rarely been seen since airings on the Mickey Mouse Club in the Fifties, and only with their release in newly restored versions with commentary in the user-friendly format of DVD in 2001 have they been truly engaged by a wider public again.
Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman's Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies is a handsome study-cum-picture book on the whole series, released in conjunction with a museum exhibition of materials from the cartoons' production. The text is useful in charting just why so many early Hollywood cartoons were about dancing fauna and flora rather than, say, adults or abstraction as European cartoons have often been. The sources of Disney's style were, in the end, sources for everyone else as well.
The dancing squirrels and peonies were familiar to audiences who had been raised on pantomime stage shows in which people dressed as such things gamboled about. To someone in the early Thirties, The Wizard of Oz was most familiar as an ever-touring stage musical in which the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion were played by actors in fluffy suits with big prosthetic heads hiding their faces. This kind of thing was a staple of musical theater of the period, whereas today the equivalent, The Lion King—fittingly, a Disney product—is considered a novelty.
Of course, then, just as the first early talkie musicals were transcriptions of stage shows, the first musical sound cartoons would feature that which was translatable from current stage shows into a seven-minute format already associated with animals because of Mickey Mouse—cuddly things dancing.
Meanwhile, often the cartoons featured woodland clearings full of cooperating animals with round heads, large eyes, and sunny smiles. That trope was drawn from the magazine tableaus of Harrison Cady, very popular at the time. Thus the mise-en-scène of early musical cartoons, modeled on popular culture sources now utterly forgotten, has come to be thought of as a self-standing genre in itself, occasionally parodied on The Simpsons and elsewhere.
share this page
RSS Feed
