The Skeleton Dance Tribute

In the year 1929, Walt Disney began producing the “Silly Symphonies.” The “Silly Symphonies,” were a series of short films created as a way to experiment with new filmmaking techniques, featuring different characters and different stories in each film. Disney produced a total of 75 “Silly Symphonies,” from 1929-1939. They won a total of seven Oscars, and the very first “Silly Symphony,” produced was a film called The Skeleton Dance, released to theaters on August 22th, 1929, 91 years ago today. I thought we could explore the intriguing history of that short.

I’ll begin with a synopsis: On a dark night at a church cemetery, four skeletons arise from their graves and begin dancing and playing musical instruments by using each other’s bodies. They play until sunrise, when they quickly rush back to their graves, forming a chimera (a mythological monster) on their way.

It’s curious that Walt Disney released a short film about skeletons dancing in August, considering that skeletons are synonymous with Halloween, in October. Walt Disney, however, was a big believer in scaring people creatively, often quoted as having said “People like to be scared,” and one could say that he made this short simply to scare people, but in an entertaining way. 

In addition to being the first of the “Silly Symphonies,” “Skeleton Dance,” was very popular, as it was also one of the first shorts Walt Disney produced with fully synchronized sound. (The “other first” was the Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie, released on November 18th, 1928). “Skeleton Dance” was produced and directed by Walt, though it was animated by Ub Iwerks, who was later asked by Columbia Pictures, Disney’s then-distributor, to readapt the short in color for Columbia’s Color Rhapsody series in 1937, and it was renamed Skeleton Frolic.

  

The skeleton characters in the short reappeared in the Mickey Mouse short The Haunted House, released on December 2nd, 1929, and they also appeared in an episode of the Disney Channel Series House of Mouse (2001-2003). They even appear in the Disneyland Paris Attraction, Phantom Manor, which is the Disneyland Paris version of The Haunted Mansion. There is also a level based on the short in the PlayStation3 video game Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, which was released in 2012.

All in all, “Skeleton Dance,” is a haunting, though entertaining short that helped Walt Disney continue to build on his success as a cartoonist. It was known for its unique blend of sound, music, and animation. Had it not been for “Skeleton Dance’s,” success, Disney never would have been able to produce the rest of the “Silly Symphonies” series, or the early “Mickey Mouse” cartoons. They both set the stage for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) eight years later, and the launch of Disney’s world of animation.