The Artist's Model

It's back to the Pen-and-Ink Vaudeville, where the handyman is playing peek-a-boo with the underdressed star act this week, a jazz band of monkeys led by a gorilla perform and a slack-wire artist gets into a jam.

This, like THE HOBOKEN NIGHTINGALE, is one of a series of cartoons that Earl Hurd did for Educational Pictures. Even for 1924, it strikes me as a rather tired series of gags, although musical accompaniment in the theater would doubtless have considerably spiced it up. The bosses at Educational seem to have agreed. Despite Hurd's position at one of the founders of the industry, the series was cancelled after thirteen shorts and after the end of the following year, he was out of the movie business for nine years.

While Hurd was not broke -- he had his share of the Hurd-Bray patents, I would guess, and he returned to newspaper cartooning -- he would not work in movie animation until he went to work for Disney, toiling in uncredited animation work, but soon rising to story man on the Pluto shorts (which were essentially silents), and credited for adaptation on SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. He died in 1940, two weeks after his sixtieth birthday.