Countdown to Halloween: Wot a Night (1931)

Wot a Night (1931, Van Beuren Studios)
Dir.: John Foster and Vernon Stallings
TC4P Rating: 5/9

When Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks made and released The Skeleton Dance in 1929, it had a huge influence on the cartoon industry at large. (And if you are wondering when I will get to The Skeleton Dance on this site, don't worry... it's coming up very soon.) It is hard to find an animation studio that didn't fill the frames of a short or seven with dancing, laughing skeletons in the early 1930s. Not that skeletons weren't used in animation before The Skeleton Dance, but the huge success of the Disney short made sure that skeletons would not go away as subject matter for many, many years.

Most films that use skeletons as the main characters are usually comprised of very simple, blackout gags and there is usually nothing that really connects any one scene to the next, except perhaps for the general air of spookiness. To connect things together, however loosely, what is needed are a protagonist or two. The human cartoon duo of Tom and Jerry, early stalwarts of the Van Beuren Studios, had an entire series built out of little more than unconnected blackout gags, with very little relatable plot at all, and so combining their tall guy-little guy antics with a pack of frightening skeletons and assorted ghosts was a natural fit.

In Wot a Night, the initial entry in the Tom and Jerry series, our first clue that the night will not be a normal, quiet one is the opening shot of a rain-drenched railroad depot. The wind whirls and whips at the depot so hard that its single building, every object on its platform, the nearby telephone poles, and even a taxi are nearly knocked over with each howling blast. Inside that taxi sit a napping Tom and Jerry – once again, the human non-MGM versions, mind you – and they seem almost oblivious to the weather as the rain and gale force winds smack them directly in the faces. In fact, the taxi itself is taking the storm far worse than they are, as its grill becomes a face that spits out water and shivers and shakes in the cold.

Tom and Jerry, at the provocation of an approaching railroad whistle, suddenly wake up and look with bleary eyes through the storm before them. They leap excitedly from the taxi while the train pulls into the station and peer into the distance, but a savage bolt of lightning hits them glancingly and then a blast of cold rain drenches them. They practically swim back through the air into the warmth and relative safety of the back of the taxi. The train is shown approaching the station on wide oval wheels (for some reason), and it clatters up and down with each rotation of the wheels. Without warning, the tracks are completely flooded by the rain, and several pairs of long oars pop out of the windows of the single passenger car and attempt to row the train towards the station. The train makes it out the flood area and reaches home, with the spent vehicle turning and arching its back to the tune of Shave and a Haircut, and at the "two bits" part, it rears up like a cat or dog and practically poops out its only two passengers onto the ground. (This really makes you wonder about who it was rowing all those pairs of oars.)

The two passengers are a couple of very tall, identical, bearded weirdos, wearing stovepipe hats atop their heads. They head towards the taxi where they are greeted happily by cab drivers Tom and Jerry. However, as our heroes attempt to exhort the pair of weirdos into their cab with cries of "Taxi!" and "Cab!," (practically the only dialogue in the film that isn't sung), the twin beardies turn away from the cab and walk away along the boardwalk. Tom runs ahead of them and herds them back, and it is noticeable that the pair walk oddly with their heads almost stabbing forward on long necks almost like ostriches, though the style of walk is more akin to that of chickens. Once in the cab, Tom peels out of the station, the car spitting mud behind them, but very quickly, the cab finds itself almost completely flooded by the storm.

With the cab having a hard time moving forward through the flood, we see the compartment in the back with the twin weirdos, who find themselves confronted with a very odd companion: a massive frog who swims into the cab through the window. The frog makes a couple of grunting noises and then performs a back flip through the water and swims away. Tom gradually guides the cab through the deep water, and as he does, a pair of rods pop up out of the back of the cab, drop down into the water, and winch the twin weirdos up above the water's surface inside what appears to be a small rowboat or scoop. The weirdos doff their caps in unison in salute to Tom's efforts to help them, a whistle sounding on the soundtrack as their sole mode of discourse. Soon, Tom drives the cab up out of the water and the weirdos now ride high up in the air above inside the rowboat through the rain.

Eventually, they reach a castle sitting atop a large plateau with an entrance through a cave far below the castle. The weirdos are winched back down to the ground, where they step backwards out of the boat, and then march oddly into the cave without paying for Tom and Jerry's services. The boys are not happy with this and chase after them through the door of the cave, but an iron portcullis drops down behind them, sporting a large lock on its gate, and Tom and Jerry find themselves trapped.

High atop the castle, things start to get real spooky. Storm clouds are seen rumbling above the castle, and then one cloud forms its own head and arms and looks down at the castle. The cloud reaches out and starts to play a boisterous tune on the battlements of the castle, pressing down on the merlons along the wall as if playing a pipe organ, with the resulting sounds emitting from the various turrets and other towers forming the top of the castle. In the fields nearby, a pair of trees start playing their branches like flutes to finish the tune

Inside, Jerry paces about with his hands in his pockets. He calls Tom into the room and shows him a set of blinds on a window. Tom begs him not to open it, but Jerry does, revealing nothing but darkness through the window. Behind them, however, a large bat-like creatures flies up out of a hole in the floor. It spreads its huge wings, easily dwarfing the pair in size, but it does nothing more than grimace wickedly as it flies away towards the camera. (As in most other Tom and Jerry shorts, the taller Tom is the bigger 'fraidy cat, and that holds here as well, with Jerry almost nonchalantly gliding through the scenario with little surprise on his face.)

Tom runs into another room and finds an open door where a sign reads "Private" alongside it. A skeleton walks right past them into the room, and then we see the pair as they look into the room, where the skeleton is shown toweling himself off while standing in a slowly draining bathtub. The skeleton whistles and seems not to give Tom and Jerry any notice, and not only rubs down his arms and legs with the towel, but also runs the length of cloth entirely through his empty ribcage. He turns and sees the boys standing there gawking and then panics, screaming and leaping into the air while holding its head in shock! Before they know it, the skeleton spins tightly into a whirl and is sucked down the drain of the tub along with the water!

Tom and Jerry slowly turn around in the hallway and find that there are dozens are ghosts standing directly behind them. Jerry shows no worry, but as Tom finishes yelling at the skeleton in the other room, he turns around, sees the ghosts and drops into a dead faint. His collapsing body causes part of the floor to break away and they fall into the level below, where another skeleton is painting piano keys onto a small ledge in the wall. After he sloshes more paint at the wall to create sheet music, he then pours the rest of the paint from his bucket onto the ground, where it forms into a small stool. He spins the stool seat to meet his rear end so he can begin to play, but the stool refuses to go any higher and forms a face that mocks the skeleton. So the creep spins his lower spine and pelvis instead so that it drops down towards the stool.

In the catacombs nearby, the piano music brings to life a couple dozen skeletons that had previously been shown to lie dashed and crumpled along the ground. They get up, find partners, and begin to dance elegantly to the music. Back at the piano, a female skeleton with hoop earrings and a skirt, plays a pair of castanets while the music takes on a more Spanish air. Tom and Jerry watch the dance from another room, but behind them (in a very odd throwaway gag) a large glove (with two small legs and feet sticking out of it) dances along a shelf next to them. At a break in the song, the glove stops dancing and spreads its fingers, forming an even larger (but not that large) shadow on the wall adjacent. The boys turn to look at the glove, and Tom panics yet again, racing from the room with Jerry tagging along quietly behind him.

In the next room, Jerry finds an umbrella lying on the floor, so he picks it up and starts to play it like an accordion (as you do). From the darkness appear the heads of four other skeletons, who seem to be done up for a minstrel show. [Here comes more of that casual 1930s racism...]

The lead skeleton sings:

"In the Good Book it says that Cain slew Abel..."

And then the other three skeletons provide the choir...

"Yes, good Lawd!"

The first one sings the next line of his tale, with the call and response style continuing for a while...

"He hit him on the head with the leg of a table..."
(Choir) "Yes, good Lawd!"
"Didn't Daniel in the lion's den..."
"What he do?"
"He said unto those colored men..."
"What he say?"
"Ya'll wanna get to hebbin?"
"Sho'! Sho'!"

The lead skeleton then takes the next verse himself...

"Den cut out all yo' crapshootin'
an' git on your long white robe
an' your starry crown!
Be ready when de great day comes!"

All four skeletons join voices for the chorus of the song...

"Good lord, I'm ready

Indeed, I'm ready

Oh, good lord, I'll be ready when the great day comes!"

Sitting all the way to left, the fourth skeleton takes a brief, bass solo...

"Good glory hallelujah!"

After the next refrain, the bass skeleton finishes the song portion of our program with a deepening run down the words, "...the... great... day... comes".

At the conclusion of the gospel song, Jerry pulls out a pair of dice and rolls a seven. The four black skeletons can't keep themselves from leaping onto the dice, but it spells their doom and they end up shattering in dozens of pieces instead. Running outside, Tom trips over a rock and smashes his face into the ground. As he lies there prone, we see large black footsteps tracking up towards Tom, and when they reach his head, the footsteps roll up into a ball and then burst into the shapes of the two tall weirdos who took the cab to the castle in the beginning. Tom panics and his underwear-clad body jolts from out of his clothes, slithers around to the back of his suit, and then climbs back inside again.

Jerry finally catches up and both pairs – Tom and Jerry and the bearded weirdos – take turns eyeing each other quizzically. One weirdo turns to the other one and nods his head, making a "mmm-hmmm" noise of approval. The other weirdo makes the same noise and nods back to the first. They both point their index fingers in the direction of Tom and Jerry and then walk away. Tom turns and points his finger at his smaller partner, and Jerry lifts his shirt to discover that there is nothing but a skeleton underneath. Tom is shocked, but all he does is turn away from Jerry, buried his face in his hand and snicker at what has happened to his buddy.

But Jerry moves over to Tom and lifts the back of his shirt to also reveal naught but a skeleton's bones. Panicking yet again, Tom turns and looks down at his chest. His shirt pops open and he sees nothing but ribs. He screams and runs offscreen. Jerry runs after him, and then the pair are shown running away with their hands waving above their heads. Their pants are starting to fall off and revealing even more bones. Tom briefly stops and cries in vain at Jerry, and then both continue running and waving as the film irises to a close.

The film is no great shakes as an adventure or as animation, but it does have moments that transcend the general blandness. The opening set-up of the drenched rail station and the tale leading up to the arrival at the castle is an appropriately eerie and imaginative beginning. It actually makes you think that something greater is going to occur once the castle is reached, but the bat/vampire sequence doesn't pay off (I will grant them that it is quite weird), much in the same way that the giant frog in the cab is an interesting touch but does nothing for the film in the end except give it a fleeting sense of true surrealism. The skeleton sequences are fun in bits, but to be seen as anything but a play off of what The Skeleton Dance did so simply and brilliantly, you've got to bring a little bit more.

The dynamic between Tom and Jerry is always what brings the most enjoyment to me out of their films. Tom is a big, tall basket case in any situation and useless in a fight for their lives, but Jerry – the more diminutive one who is roughly the shape and size of a cannonball with limbs – is always utterly calm in any situation. He usually stands with his hands in his pockets, taking in whatever is happening before them, and then either acting or exiting depending on the severity of their danger. In this film, it takes his ultimate magical turn into a skeleton to finally lose his composure, but before that, he could almost be sleepwalking through most scenes. In contrast against the more manic Tom (who has a couple of good moments, especially when he crawls out of his clothes in his long johns), Jerry is quite enjoyable to watch here.

The more racist themes that pop up often in the series are here in its very beginning as well. In late September, I posted a piece on another Tom and Jerry short from a year later than this one called Plane Dumb. [You can read that article here.] That adventure, in which the pair travel to Africa, is a full-on blackface-makeup adventure, so at least this film doesn't go quite as far in offense. But this one does contain the first version of a sequence that is replicated in Plane Dumb: the animation and music (though a longer take) of the four black skeleton minstrels that Tom and Jerry encounter. It is unfortunate that otherwise light, silly cartoons are tainted by such sequences, but that's history, folks. You gotta take the lumps with the smooth.

As a Halloween cartoon, though, this one has the goods, in quantity if not quality. Perhaps parents looking for a safe cartoon for the kiddies might want to steer clear for those particular scenes, but experienced adults can make up their own minds for their party atmosphere.

Until the next haunting time,

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

A Shark Film Office Special Edition: Plane Dumb (1932)

Plane Dumb (1932, Van Beuren Studios) 

Dir.: John Foster and George Rufle

TC4P Rating: 4/9

So, I spent some time years back on this site heaping light praise upon a much-neglected series like Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry shorts, and then I ran into the film Plane Dumb. The title Plane Dumb could very nearly describe the actions of the animators as they contrived this wannabe Amos N' Andy homage. Apparently, donning blackface not only helped disguise the very white Tom and Jerry as they roamed about Africa in 1932, but it also seems to have lowered the team's respective IQs to the negative, changed their speech patterns automatically, and somehow also made their disarrayed and lighter-colored hair to instantly turn short, dark and curly. Ah, the magical properties of a common, everyday makeup kit!

I read a couple of reviews for this cartoon short years ago where each of the writers complained that Tom and Jerry were traveling to Africa "for no good reason". Let me state this from the outset: Tom's plan is to fly non-stop across the ocean to Africa so as to bring fame and fortune to the pair. As simple and understandable as that. Non-stop flight... cross the ocean... fame and fortune. If this seems like "no good reason" to the reviewers, well, then they are probably not clued into the fact that when this film was made, the world was only five years removed from Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Europe. And although Lindbergh had done it already, there were plenty of daring aviators in those days. The feat was, given the limits of technology at the time, still quite a challenge to accomplish, and many more people besides Lindbergh continued to attempt it well after he achieved the goal. Just because you are first up the mountain doesn't mean that the next 10,000 mountaineers are just going to give up trying. It's the impulse of exploration that exists to this day, and it seems like enough of a "good reason" to me. (Not that I am going to try it myself... I have cartoons to watch.)

Now that I am done with the philosophical portion of this review, let's jump back to the film, which still has "no good reason" behind its creative impulses. How else to accept the continued harassment and degradation of other races by the mass media controlled by the white establishment of the day? As said, Tom wants to fly across the ocean to Africa so that they can become heroes, but Jerry couldn't care less. He sits bored and listless in the passenger seat, but expresses worry that they might not be safe in Africa. Then Tom hits Jerry with his 'brilliant" idea to put on blackface makeup to disguise themselves on the "Dark Continent," which they do. Soon, the pair are transformed completely (as described in the first paragraph). They shake hands at the completion of their task, and as their voices switch to Amos 'n' Andy mode, they both shake hands and say at the same time, "Well, I'm sho' glad to see you again!"

Apparently, though, the disguise also whisks away Tom's abilities to fly the plane, and he loses control and dives the craft down into the ocean. The biplane's wings rise to the surface, and the now-darkened (the makeup does not wash off) pair climb onto the wings of the plan and dangle their feet in the water. "Well," starts Jerry, "I wonder how far it is to there!" Tom's answer: "'bout twenty knots!" Jerry scratches his head at this, and asks, "How come they got knots in the ocean?" Tom shrugs his shoulders, and answers, "Tropical wave gets heavy, it gets tangled, it makes knots!" To prove his remark, he points out several waves which meet with other wave crests and knot up three times in succession, following comedy's Universal Rule of Threes.

An octopus suddenly climbs up and with a huge smile, happily puts an arm over each of the lad's shoulders. Both men shriek, but Jerry is even more alarmed, and cries, "I tol' you I didn't wanna go to Africa!" "Wait a minute!" interrupts Tom, "Is we in Africa?" "No we ain't in Africa!" is Jerry's reply. Tom asks, "Does it look like we is gonna get to Africa?" "It shoooooooo' don't...," fears Jerry. "Then what has you gotta kick about?" The octopus, probably alone in his opinion, finds this hilarious, and laughs uproariously. It kisses Tom full on the cheek, but Tom takes this as an attack and punches it in the nose. (Yeah, I know that octopuses don't have recognizable noses, but this one does... a big, black button nose.) The punch from Tom ires the octopod, who briefly spanks the gangly man on the bottom, and then the huge mollusc spins his arms and wallops the pair (Tom on the rear and Jerry in the head) over and over again in bicycle fashion. The octopod then dives back into the water.

Just after that attack, a crowd of sharks are shown swirling about the pair's feet. Tom and Jerry take turns both accusing each other good-naturedly of tickling the other one's feet, but then their mood changes when shark after shark starts breaches from the water and leap over their heads. "Dinner station's in the front," jokes Tom as he ducks his noggin down against the wing. "Look here, man! These is shawks!" Jerry continues, "Will they eat ya?" to which Tom, still ducking his head, replies, "If they don't, they'll sho' mess you up plenty!" 

From below, a large sawfish skewers the plane's wings right through their center and starts to saw through, so the lads are forced to springboard off the end of the wings and then run along the top of an long rainbow of breaching sharks. "We running, ain't we?" asks Jerry, and Tom finishes with, "But we ain't gettin' anyplace!" The last shark goes past, and the pair drop into the briny drink. They struggle to stay afloat, but because we don't see Tom and Jerry swim before this in the cartoon, it is hard to tell if their inability to swim is because they are now black (which would play off the once commonly held stereotype that blacks are bad at swimming) or if they just can't swim period. (I am banking on the stereotype, given when it was made.)

A large ominous-seeming black whale zooms through the waves and then the film cuts back to the boys struggling in the water. Suddenly, they are standing upright with their feet still just below the water, and Jerry proclaims, "Hey, sista! We been saved by a submarine!" The whale pops up with the pair on his back well above the water, and Tom says, "No! This is a whale!" Jerry wonders where it is going, and Tom says, "Ask him. I don't speak whale-ish!" The whale continues to cut through the water at a high rate of speed towards the shore. They decide to try to stop the whale by sitting "on his nose to smother him". When they do, the whale spouts them high up into the air, and eventually aims them towards the shore by adjusting its spout. The boys are deposited with a rough tumble or two onto a patch of ground, where just moments before, a crowd of assorted jungle animals were watching their approach. (The lion, for future reference, ran into a nearby cave...)

After they are charged by a pair of strange-looking imaginary animals, Tom and Jerry run into the cave, which is cloaked entirely in complete darkness, so that only their eyes, enormous lips, and single-toothed mouths can be seen. Their heads swell up to fill the screen as they carry on with their "What was dat?" "Where iz we?"-style routine. At one point, Tom's eyes get all weird and googly for the briefest of moments, merely for sake of adding more weirdness to the scene. Soon enough, when the lights come back on, they get assaulted by a huge bat and then the lights go out again, leaving us once more with their lips and eyes only. A deep growl is heard in the darkness, and we assume it is the lion we saw walking into the cave earlier. "Jerry," says Tom, "turn loose my leg!" "I ain't holdin' yo' leg!" When Tom reaches the point of begging his diminutive friend with "Jerry! Jerry! Please say 'Yes, you iz holdin' me!'," then the lights come back on and the boys face off with a quartet of black skeletons. The skeletons sing in gospel fashion, naturally in four-part harmony...

"Good lord, I'm ready

Indeed, I'm ready

Oh, good lord, I'll be ready when the great day comes!"

Sitting all the way to left, the fourth skeleton takes a brief, bass solo...

"Good glory hallelujah!"

They repeat the refrain, and at the end, the bass skeleton finishes solo with "the great day comes" again. (Note: This animation and song is recycled from an earlier Tom and Jerry short called Wot a Night from 1931.) The four black skeletons then burst into pieces and lie all about the floor in front of the boys. Tom and Jerry shriek and run out of the cave in fear and end up being surrounded, from behind every object imaginable, by an entire tribe of headhunters. The lads run for their lives as spear after spear is thrown past them. For some reason, with the spears flying all about the pair, Tom and Jerry both wipe the blackface from their faces, but it helps them not at all in escaping from their predicament. They end the film in a cliffhanger, in danger for their lives with no chance of escape dangling before them. The film irises out, and not a moment too soon.

Like most of the film, the ending seems to not matter, for the only purpose seems to have been to get Tom and Jerry into blackface so they could carry off what must have been some already pretty standard and tired vaudeville routines involving the supposed behavior of blacks in the 1930s. (There are probably even more subtle digs piled in here that meant more in the time period, but I am unaware of them.) That a cartoon series that could actually be so fun would resort to gags like this for a joke here and there would be more bearable, but to need the use of such a gimmick for an entire film is unforgivable. On top of this, never once is a real laugh approached within its far too long seven-minute running time. (They don't even reach the shores of Africa until 5 minutes into the thing.)

If anything saves this film from being a total waste of time, it is a few, brief scenes, most of them involving the ocean creatures Tom and Jerry encounter. There are those marvelous shots of the mass of sharks swirling about beneath the floating wings and the tickled feet of the boys. I also like the scene with Tom and Jerry running along the backs of the voracious, leaping sharks, and the scene where the whale is seen cutting through the water, where he rather humorously filters a bunch of fish out through his gapped teeth. I also like the scene where the plane is flying above Africa, and the Dark Continent is shown with what must be about a half-mile of jungle spread out across its obviously not-in-scale relief map. It's the one part of the film that actually strikes me as being wittily designed.

I'll admit it openly. I do have a certain fascination with Hollywood films that use blackface, not just as a gimmick, but sometimes as the impetus for the plot. I'm embarrassed when I see Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, or Fred Astaire (all of whom I adore otherwise) or Al Jolson (whom I don't) don the makeup, and with it the stereotyped garb, mannerisms and characteristics that come with the disguise. But I can't turn away. It's a fascination like that with a trainwreck. You want to think better of the people involved, especially when they are entertainers you appreciate normally, but then you realize they were just as complicit in even the casual racism of the day as everyone else, including their audiences.

If you make it deep into Al Jolson's Wonder Bar, which is a horrid exercise in how not to make a musical comedy for the first 3/4 of the film (though there are several tidbits of pre-Code verbal naughtiness worth hearing), you end up viewing Busby Berkeley's production of Goin' to Heaven on a Mule, with its "Here you is in Hebbenly'Land!" lyrics and its giant dancing watermelons... and your jaw just drops. I will admit that I found some of this pretty funny when I was a teenager and young adult, but then I made a solid attempt to raise my game and tried to put all the lazy stereotyping that I learned growing up in the '70s in Alaska behind me. Along the same lines, you watch some scenes like this in older films, and wonder how some of these white stars could perform like this, especially given that they were often surrounded by real blacks with real talent, and one wonders how they were able to shut off that part of their brain that said, "This is the wrong thing to do." Or were they just too trapped in the studio system and the overreaching norms of the time to be able to do anything about it at the time?

Now, the Van Beuren Studios were not Hollywood: they were New York-based, and right across the street from the Fleischers Studio. (According to Maltin, Fleischer artists would sometimes moonlight at Van Beuren due to their proximity, which is not a surprise.) Many of the early Fleischer films, too, dealt with such stereotypes, though often (but not always) in a much subtler fashion, sometimes incorporating characteristics into their plots and drawings, but not always in the then-commonly accepted "blackface" mode.

I thought at first that perhaps the voices used by Tom and Jerry while in blackface were white performers such as on Amos 'n' Andy, but according to IMDb, the parts of the duo in this cartoon are played by seminal African-American songwriters and performers of the day, Aubrey Lyles and F.E. Miller, known by the comedy team name of Miller and Lyles. (This cartoon was completed in the year before Lyles died relatively young from tuberculosis.) This surprised me, though I have yet to find another source to back this information up, except that the film was also (according to IMDb and the Big Cartoon Database) apparently released under the alternate title of Miller and Lyles All Wet. 

No matter who provides the voice or fills the role, outrageous and incorrect racial stereotypes are just that. Van Beuren stoops pretty low with Plane Dumb, bringing us that common mode and sending it straight into the commode. The film has a few cute moments, but stinks otherwise, and a definite step down from other films in the Tom and Jerry series (but not that many steps down). They did the wrong thing in this picture, especially given that it is not only a slap in the face of another race of humans, but it is a badly done slap in the face.

But you can't look away... especially to Dixieland.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it:

[This review was originally written and published on May 2, 2006. It has been updated with a rewrite, a video link, and new photos and republished on September 21, 2017. Further revisions were done on October 13, 2017.]

Countdown to Halloween: The Haunted Ship (1930)

For the month of October, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc is taking part in an annual internet celebration known as the Countdown to Halloween. This is the fourth year that I have participated in this countdown, but the first with my Cel Bloc site. To find out more about the Countdown to Halloween, and to see a list of participating websites and blogs, go to http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/.

The Haunted Ship (A Van Beuren Studios Aesop's Fable, 1930)
Directors: Mannie Davis and John Foster
Cel Bloc Rating: 6/9

Part of the joy of continuing this experiment has been rediscovering for myself cartoon characters with whom I was fleetingly familiar, but had discounted because they weren't as famous or prevalent as other characters. It has been a distinct pleasure to reunite my eyes with Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry, the human tall guy–little guy combo which starred in a couple dozen films in the early 1930s, though some of the films are much better than others in the series.

I will be utterly honest in my assertion that I was not aware that the original Tom and Jerry (who had their semi-heyday long before MGM's cat and mouse came along) had morphed from an even earlier Van Beuren team: Waffles the Cat and Don Dog. Starring in a handful of Van Beuren's Aesop's Sound Fables, Waffles, the more excitable of the two, and Don, the short, cool breeze who fears nothing, are close enough to their human descendants to have caused me to do a double-take when I first viewed their first film, The Haunted Ship, from 1930.

With a beginning strikingly reminiscent of the some of those Tom and Jerry shorts, Waffles and Don start out buzzing through the skies in a plump little airplane, that seems about as able of flight as a Vienna sausage. Don sits nonchalantly on the tail of the plane and casually lifts his hat to us, and Waffles, who is ostensibly the pilot because he occasionally maneuvers a small steering wheel, is more concerned with playing the entire plane's body as if it were a vibraphone. He runs two mallets back and forth in musical fashion over the exhaust pipes, the wings, and even off the whirling propeller, happily playing away, pretty much oblivious to any need to guide the plane along its way.

However, in the skies overhead, a nasty-looking cloud forms a grimace filled with evil intent, as it blows wind and lightning down on the chubby plane. Waffles blows too, not wind and lightning like the evil cloud, but a trumpet instead, as he carries his jazzy tune over from bashing the parts of the plane to playing an actual musical instrument, while his diminutive buddy Don does a neat tapdance upon the tail of the plane, displaying a daredevil's lack of fear of heights. At one point, Don even dances off the edge of the tail into midair, and then shuffles backwards to safety, with nothing more than mild surprise that we went a tad too far. However, we see the cloud overhead, where its top edge has now formed into the shape of three working figures who pump and bucket the rain through the cloud and down onto the inhabitants of the plump plane.

Waffles and Don have taken to rowing their plane through the rain, but another lightning strike causes their paddles to disappear, and a third strike has Waffles yowling and hiding in the cockpit. A body made of lightning lands on the wing, and after the fear-ridden Waffles points it out, the pugnacious Don wallops the lightning-figure on the head and knocks it off the plane. But they are nowhere near to safe yet. The pair zoom off as fast as the little plane can go with the lightning-figure running through the air after them. They hop the next cloud that they meet, yelling "Hey!" and landing back inside the plane. The lightning follows, and when they meet the next cloud, they leap and yell "Hey!" again, but land on top. They fall into the cloud, and the lightning leaps inside for the fight. The plane, now wrecked, falls down towards the ocean with the pair inside it.

Thinking fast, Waffles and Don pop open a trap door and climb down an escape ladder in its rear, both wearing life preservers. They leap from the ladder and splash into the ocean, but as the plane nears impact, they climb up the ladder and back into the craft, perhaps thinking that it might float on the surface. The plane, however, sinks below the waves once they climb back inside, and so they drift down to the bottom of the ocean, where a dapper-looking walrus sings to them in the heaviest of baritones of impending doom: "Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware! Be---ware!" As the shanty-singing mammal departs, Don blows him a quick raspberry, which forces Waffles to knock Don in the head with a hammer for his rudeness.

The pair leave the confines of their downed and drowned plane, and make their way to a sunken ship which bears the name "Davy Jones" upon it. They dive through a window and into the hold where they discover vast amounts of treasure. Their joy is cut short suddenly by a piercing noise of a slide-whistle and a door which opens on its own accord. A question mark appears above Waffles' head and then zips around to Don's tail, where it pokes him and pushes the duo towards the now closing door. (Kind of a reverse variation on a Felix-style gag.) Another whistle whines, the door flies open, and a huge black octopus ambles threateningly through it, and then moves towards the camera until it crowds out most of the frame, and then swims out of the shot. As they reach for the door again, another fearsome monster fish with a lion-like mane and jaws, slides out from underneath some furniture behind them and slinks off to not be seen again. [Note: The animation for these creatures would be used again, notably in the later Tom and Jerry underwater short, Rocketeers, in 1932.]

They step swiftly into the hall, where Waffles is confronted by a floating skull. He is absolutely chilled by the site, and yowls and screeches in place but Don merely rocks back and forth calmly on his heels. Waffles twirls about to hide his eyes, but another skull pops up in the porthole behind him, scaring the yowl-ready Waffles yet again. Don, meanwhile, only scratches his head in boredom. The skull disappears, but a large anchor chain nearby them starts moving and rattling about, and it is discovered that the arm of a skeleton is pulling it. Don, ever the calm one, pulls out a hammer and casually wings it at the bones, causing the skeleton's hand to drop the chain and disappear from view. A fish swims towards the camera, getting larger and larger and then turning, showing that its full size easily dwarfs the pair of them, and Waffles continues to shiver uncontrollably. Then a trapdoor opens under their feet!

Waffles and Don find themselves sliding down a huge staircase. A tremendous dragon-like eel, then an an odd combination of eel and ray, and finally a shark with a strange style of dorsal fin glide past them from opposite directions, causing Waffles to leap back and forth in utter fear. Finally, the fraidy cat discovers a bell, which naturally has has to ring. The call for service brings a pair of skeletons down the stairs: one whose bones are the normal bleached white, and one with entirely black bones (but a white jaw, most likely a nod to blackface makeup, to make the skull appear as if it has large lips, and therefore a racial joke). The skeletons dance in practiced formation at the bottom of the stairs and salute in attention, but Waffles pushes Don into the skeletons, and the head falls off the white one's shoulders.

As Waffles makes his escape, Don picks up the skull and hurls it all the way down the hall until it hits Waffles in the head and knocks him flat. When Waffles comes to and sees the skull floating above the floor, he jumps clear out of his clothes and reenters them through his pants legs. He starts to berate Don, but an eel breaks up his complaints when it slides out of a hole in a barrel behind Waffles and swims through his legs. Then all of the cabin doors in the hall open up, revealing a waving, dancing skeleton in each one. Waffles and Don run away from the hall and enter a bar-room. Waffles, however, runs into the wall and hits his head, and since he is all shaken up, Don laughs at him and places him at the piano. Reluctantly at first, Waffles starts banging out a tune on the keys, and Don picks up two mallets and uses a sleeping crocodile for a vibraphone.

Waffles and Don continue to play as four drunken sea turtles stand at the bar and slug down one more shot each, and then join together to sing the old standard Sweet Adeline in swell four-part harmony.

"Sweet Adeline,
(My Adeline,)
My Adeline, 
(My Adeline,)
At night, dear heart, 
(At night, dear heart,)"

At the start of the second line, a fat catfish embellishes the song with a Gershwin riff played through a clarinet formed from his lips, while two happy starfish caper by his tail.

"For you I pine. 
(For you I pine.)
In all my dreams, 
(In all my dreams,)
Your fair face beams. 
(Your fair face beams.)"

Soon, we see another crocodile with his mouth agape, and a frog, who may be meant to resemble Harpo Marx though it bears no wig, has several strings wired through the croc's teeth and plucks at them for a harp solo.

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline!
(Sweet Ad-e-liiiiiine!)"

When the turtles finish their verse, their tongues hit the floor in drunken reverie (they make a "Nyaaagh!" sound and pass out) and Waffles and Don carry off the tune with an extended vamp in a tango style. Fish sway all about them, and a lobster wields its claws like castanets, until its shell drops to its tail and its polka-dotted underwear are revealed. Two smiling eels dance to the beat, and a ten-limbed octopus shuffles its three pairs of feet while waving its four gloved hands. Don does a tap dance, and we see many fish out on the dance floor take up his lead. The turtles revive themselves, crawl out of their shells completely naked, each with a cute bellybutton, dance a quick jig and then reprise the final line of Sweet Adeline.

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline!"

With the last note, the catfish swings a bottle into the head of the baritone turtle. A full crowd of sea creatures go crazy with their applause and laughter, but the noise is enough to wake up the spirit of Davy Jones, and his captain's hat-wearing skeleton hops out of his locker looking for trouble. Waffles turns a passing turtle into a squeezebox and Don plays off the heads of three eels to start the next number, but Davy Jones intervenes. "Who are you?" a shaking Waffles the Cat asks of the skeleton, and the reply comes back, "I am Davy Jones!" Waffles splits immediately, with Davy Jones fast on his heels, but Don, who is not afraid of anything apparently, follows them and sticks his mallets into Jones' bones and sends the captain crashing into Waffles. The two of them tumble head over heels together for some distance. Outside, we get a very detailed shot of the deck of the haunted ship from above (but slightly off center) as vast numbers of sea creatures spill out of the hold and swim up towards the camera and then past, followed by Waffles and Don, who in turn are still being chased by the evil Davy Jones.

Inside the bar, the four turtles are still piled in a heap on the floor, but they revive long enough to sing:

"You're the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline! Sweet Ad-e-liiiiiine!"

Their open mouths crane forward to take up the entire screen, and we can see their uvulas shaking with the final held note. Staring straight down their gullets, we see the iris out.

When I started to watch this cartoon, I immediately thought I was watching a Tom and Jerry short, and it took me a few seconds to realize that I was dealing with a cat and dog act. But their personalities are almost the same as the human version, though if anything, Don is an even cooler customer than Jerry, though both seem to always be itching for a fight. Tom is as much a flustered 'fraidy cat as Waffles, though in Waffles' case, he quite literally is such a creature (being an actual cat, you know... well, an actual cartoon cat).

The film itself, with its concentration on small character work rather than extensive gags, is quite enjoyable, in fact, I find it to be one of the more satisfying of the hit-and-miss Aesop's Fables series. Certainly, many of the elements are repeated in later, arguably better Tom and Jerry shorts, but the sequential progression of the story actually moves along with few bumps, being a lot smoother than, say, some similar shorts from the company's same period. And there is a spooky enough atmosphere inside the ship to make this necessary for an annual Halloween revisiting. That final shot with the sea creatures flying out of the hold is certainly a unique one so far, though it does display a lack of true resolution in the story. The musical sequence stands out even larger, and I especially love the concentration on the singing drunken turtles. Somehow, their design reminds me an awful lot of Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle.

But not as much as Waffles and Don remind me of Tom and Jerry. Sure, Waffles has a tail and Don's hat is different from Jerry's, but if you squint, you could easily miss that the former are a cat and dog (except for Waffles' annoying habit of yowling). What I didn't miss is the fact that I have spent most of my life missing out on this excellent entry in Aesop's Fables.

I have a feeling I will be diving back down to The Haunted Ship again every Halloween.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

[Note: The original version of this article was posted on June 2, 2006, but has been given a drastic revision and updated with new photos and a video link on October 19, 2016.]