Various acts -- a cat acrobat, a man and his dog on a pennyfarthing bicycle, and a singer -- appear on a vaudeville stage. Meanwhile, the theater's manager watches the proceedings from his office through a periscope.
It's a movie cartoon from Earl Hurd, and if he is credited with many innovations that made the field economically feasible (summed up in the little credit at the start of most cartoons through the early 1930s: "the Bray-Hurd Patents"), here he makes use of one that made them cheap and dull: looping. As the acts appear on the stage, the orchestra plays beneath them, and their motion is looped over and again. It's a way of filling up the screen, but it's obvious in its cheapness. Neither are any of the other animation gags particularly amusing.
It's a movie cartoon from Earl Hurd, and if he is credited with many innovations that made the field economically feasible (summed up in the little credit at the start of most cartoons through the early 1930s: "the Bray-Hurd Patents"), here he makes use of one that made them cheap and dull: looping. As the acts appear on the stage, the orchestra plays beneath them, and their motion is looped over and again. It's a way of filling up the screen, but it's obvious in its cheapness. Neither are any of the other animation gags particularly amusing.