| Dancing Skeletons | |
|---|---|
 | |
|
Real name |
Unknown |
|
First appearance |
The Skeleton Dance (August 22, 1929) |
|
Original publisher |
Disney |
|
Created by |
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks |
Origin[]
At the stoke of midnight, a group of animated skeletons rise from their graves and start dancing throughout a spooky moonlit cemetery.
The Skeleton Dance film begins with an owl perched on a branch, in front of the full moon, then shows an empty graveyard with a church in the background. The minute hand on the church's clock strikes twelve, causing its bell to start tolling, which causes a group of bats to flee from the belfry. A dog howls at the moon, while two cats fight over a grave. A skeleton emerges from the grave and frolics, but at the sound of the owl, the skeleton hides behind a grave. Upset about over-reacting over the owl's hooting, the skeleton detaches its head from its neck and chucks it at the owl, knocking the owl's feathers off. Then the head bounces back to the grave and returns to its body.
Next, four skeletons emerge from the grave and start dancing. One of them takes two bones and plays its partner's spine and head to produce music. Another skeleton dances alone and then plays a cat's tail as if it were a violin. The crowing of a rooster tells them it's close to dawn. The skeletons rush to hide, but their bodies collide and blend together. The skeletons, now mingled, return to the grave.
In the Haunted House cartoon, Mickey Mouse takes shelter in a house that he is passing and soon discovers that it is haunted when he knocks on the first door and receives no answer, but pulls the door knob open when the entire porch collapses. When Mickey enters the house, the door locks itself, before Mickey is startled by several bats appearing from cracks in the wall and a large spider descending from the ceiling, while hiding in a chamber pot. After climbing out of the chamber pot, Mickey then hears the sound of ghosts and flees into a hallway before the lights of a chandelier above go out. He shouts three times in the dark, but lights a match, and looks around, and finds a shadow of a cloaked figure appearing in his shadow.
Dizzy with fear at this, Mickey screams, panics, and flees in fright, but is pursued by his pursuer, who growls with other growling noises too. The cloaked figure and several skeletons corner Mickey in a room, and compel him to play the organ while skeletons dance along to the music, one of them using a thermostat as an accordion. When the music stops, Mickey sneaks away, and tries to escape, but is spotted by the skeletons, who try to stop him, and as he runs into dead ends and tries to open a door, the door handle is a skeleton hand, who shakes Mickey frantically. He runs up a staircase and bumps into two more skeletons in a bed. He finally falls out of a window and into a barrel full of skeletons, and as he quickly escapes to open the door, a skeleton, that pops out from the door of an outhouse, is busy using the toilet, and spooks him off, and as Mickey runs away terrified, the skeleton shuts the door when Mickey leaves.
Public Domain Animated Appearances[]
- The Skeleton Dance (1929)
- The Haunted House (1929)
Notes[]
- The Haunted House borrows animation from Disney's first Silly Symphony cartoon, The Skeleton Dance, which was released earlier in 1929, although most of the sequence is new.
- Part of the animation from Skeleton Dance short appeared in the 2007 film Ghost Rider.