The Skeleton Dance

The year is 1929, the dawn of synchronized sound and animation, and Disney creates what the author brilliantly describes as one of the first cozy spooky films

The Skeleton Dance.

I'm sure many of you listening have seen clips of this.

It's the classic black and white animation where four skeletons pop out of their graves in a spooky atmospheric graveyard.

It is a remarkable pivot.

It's amazing.

But it makes me wonder, is the skeleton dance actually just the modern equivalent of the medieval Danse Macabre just with a jazzier soundtrack and less bubonic plague?

In 2006, Disney included the song on their DVD Disney sing-along songs, Happy Haunting.

And they paired the song with the 1930s animated short film, The Skeleton Dance, by Ubi Iwerks.

So, I'm calling it Disney.

And I think it is a perfectly fitting Halloween song.

That shows the popularity.

And I don't know how popular it was, honestly, between 1996 and 2006.

But I think pairing this up with the skeleton dance by the legendary classic Ubi Iwerks is what put it on the map and then put it under people's minds that it was Disney.

I literally Googled earlier, is Spooky Scary Skeletons a Disney song? And that's where I didn't know this.

including rare original release nitrate prints from the Disney studio.

I believe that I saw a picture of, uh, the skeleton dance, uh, uh, And that's an old classic, especially.

Disney Studios, Fleischer, Warner Brothers, Terry Toons, Lance, Famous Studios, and many other, including classics like The Skeleton Dance, Hell's Bells, The Haunted House, and the classic stop-motion film The Mascot by Starvich.

Gotcha.

And that's what is coming out that I'm excited about,

The practice of recycling animation, that is, using character animation originally made for one cartoon for a later cartoon, goes back to the early days of the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

The 1929 Mickey Mouse cartoon The Haunted House pretty clearly reuses some of the animation from the silly symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance, specifically of the four dancing skeletons, though the later cartoon The Haunted House also adds in new elements to make the presentation more comedic than spooky.

But this is one very early example that begins the practice of recycling animation, often with alterations, from previous cartoons into later Disney efforts to save on labor.

Usually, the recycled elements are from difficult shots in which characters change perspective or size or perform complicated movements.

Okay, well, back with Disney history.

The Skeleton Dance, guess when that was premiered?

1955.

1929.