Walt Disney's "The Skeleton Dance" premieres in theaters - August 22nd, 1929

On this day in 1929, the animated short “The Skeleton Dance” held its official premiere at the Roxy Theatre in New York City.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that digs deep into history one day at a time.
I'm Gabe Lucier, and in this episode, we're kicking off
the spooky season a little early by talking about a

(00:22):
groundbreaking cartoon about a group of capering cadavers. The day
was August twenty second, nineteen twenty nine. The animated short
The Skeleton Dance held its official premiere at the Roxy

(00:42):
Theater in New York City. The five and a half
minute black and white cartoon showcased the spookier side of
the Disney Studios by depicting a merry band of undead
skeletons frolicking in a graveyard. The Macobs subject matter marked
a major departure from the happy, Go Lucky Mickey Mouse

(01:03):
shorts that had come before it, but thanks to its
upbeat music and comical choreography, The Skeleton Dance managed to
strike the perfect balance between silly and scary. Audiences young
and old fell in love with the short, and nearly
one hundred years later, many families now count it as
essential viewing during the Halloween season. After the success of

(01:28):
nineteen twenty eight s Steamboat Willie. Walt Disney and his
team were eager to continue experimenting with synchronized sound. The
studio's next innovative idea on that front came from Carl Stalling,
the composer who wrote the scores for the early Mickey
Mouse cartoons. He proposed that instead of animating a short

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and then adding the sound later, as had been done
for Steamboat Willie, they should try creating the music and
the animation at the same time. That way, the acttiontion
could take its cues from the music while still leaving
room for the music to react to and punctuate key
moments of action. Stalling believed this new, more collaborative approach

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would make everyone's jobs a lot easier, while also providing
a more immersive experience for the audience. Walt Disney signed
off on the idea and began developing a new series
of shorts called the Silly Symphonies to highlight the music
forward approach. A total of seventy five shorts would be
produced for the series between nineteen twenty nine and nineteen

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thirty nine, and the first one out of the gate
was The Skeleton Dance. Once again, it was Carl Stalling
who came up with the initial premise. In nineteen twenty nine,
he met with animator ub Eyeworks, the creative visionary behind
the design of Mickey Mouse, and pitched him the idea
of making their first silly symphony a graveyard jamboree. The

(02:58):
storyline of the short was appropriately bare bones in a creepy,
wind swept cemetery, a church bell chimes at midnight and
the landscape springs to life. Bats pour from the belfry,
A bony dog howls at the full moon, and two
black cats fight on top of gravestones. Suddenly, a menacing

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skeleton rises between them and scares all the animals away.
The bony figure then skulks and skips through the graveyard,
eventually attracting the attention of three other skeletons. The gruesome
quartet proceed to dance together while at various times holding hands,
spinning in circles, and using each other as pogo sticks.

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At one point, one of the skeletons falls to pieces,
only to be reassembled as a xylophone, which one of
the other skeletons then plays using a pair of thigh bones.
The crew is clearly having the time of their after lives,
but their fun is cut short by the row of
a rooster. With the morning sun about to rise, the

(04:03):
skeleton's end their dance for the time being and make
a mad dash back into the grave. Carl Stalling's inspiration
for this supernatural frolic was a mail order skeleton puppet
he had owned as a child. As he later explained
in a nineteen sixty nine interview quote, the skeleton dance
goes way back to my kid days. When I was

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eight or ten years old, I saw an ad in
the American Boy magazine of a dancing skeleton, and I
got my dad to give me a quarter so I
could send for it. It turned out to be a
pasteboard cutout of a loose jointed skeleton slung over a
six foot cord under the armpits. It would dance when
kids pulled and jerked at each end of the string.

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Ever since I was a kid, I had wanted to
see real skeletons dancing. Stalling eventually concluded that cartoon skeletons
would be the next best thing, and luckily for his
inner child, of Iworks and Walt Disney agreed with him.
Once the project was greenlit, Stalling got to work on
the music. The initial plan was to set the short

(05:11):
to an eerie nineteenth century tone poem called Dance Macabre
by Camille Sansans. However, the studio was unable to secure
the rights to use the music, forcing Stalling to come
up with his own spooky track. He used Edvard Grieg's
March of the Dwarfs as a starting point, but then

(05:32):
pivoted to writing an original foxtrot piece. He set the
tune in the minor key to make it suitable for
a graveyard, but still kept things lively enough to appeal
to the jazz age crowd. Take a listen. Meanwhile, as

(06:05):
Stalling hammered away at the score of Iworks, headed to
the library for inspiration. He found photographs of Etruscan tombs
with dancing skeletons painted on the walls, and he studied
illustrations of dancing skeletons drawn by the eighteenth century English
artist Thomas Rowlinson. With these models to draw from Iworks,

(06:26):
began crafting his own skeleton soiree in January of nineteen
twenty nine. It took him less than six weeks to
finish animating the entire short, with almost every frame of
it drawn by his own hand. Around the same time,
in late February, Stalling recorded the short's finished soundtrack at
the Pat Powers Cinophone Studio in New York City. The

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Disney Studio's first attempt at non post zync sound proved successful.
The Skeleton Dance combined physical gags with music in a
way that had never been done before. The skeletons gnashed
their teeth in rhythm with the music, and sped up
or slowed down their movements to match the tempo. There
were even whimsical touches, like when one skeleton plays the

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spine and ribcage of another like a makeshift xylophone, and
the music we hear switches to that same instrument. Still,
no matter how innovative or amusing the Skeleton Dance was,
there was no getting around the grim nature of its
subject matter. There just hadn't been anything like it in
American animation, so there was no telling what audiences might

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think of it. For that reason, many theater owners were
reluctant to screen the short, fearing that it might upset
or offend their customers, and because Disney had only released
a handful of Mickey shorts. At that point, he didn't
yet have the sway to convince them to take a gamble.
As a result, Walt Disney spent four months trying to

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find a movie theater that would even show The Skeleton Dance. Finally,
in mid June, he struck a deal with the manager
of the Cartha Circle Theater in Los Angeles. The prestigious
movie palace agreed to screen the short in front of
the feature film Four Devils, but only for a single night.
A couple other exclusive screenings were booked over the next

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two months, including at the Fox Theater in San Francisco
and the Roxy Theater in New York City. The positive
reception to these sneak previews helped Disney to finally land
a distributor. In early August, Columbia Pictures signed a contract
to distribute the Silly Symphony series nationally, starting with The

(08:41):
Skeleton Dance. The short was given an official premiere at
the Roxy Theater on August twenty second, nineteen twenty nine,
making it the first picture in the theatre's history to
have a second engagement. Although the bizarre premise had put
people off at first, the Skeleton Dance won over audiences
and critics alike with its spooky brand of humor. The

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Film Daily called it one of the most novel cartoon
subjects ever shown on a screen, and Variety gave a
similarly glowing review, encouraging viewers to go see the short,
but not to bring their children. The success of The
Skeleton Dance proved that Disney had a future beyond just
Mickey Mouse. It encouraged the studio to commit to The

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Silly Symphony's format, and in doing so, it paved the
way to Disney's first feature length film, nineteen thirty seven's
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film that managed
to be pretty scary in its own right even without
dancing skeletons. I'm gay, Blues gay, and hopefully you now

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know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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feel free to send them my way by writing to
this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Kasby Bias

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for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in history class,