The Scrappy cartoons have always been a favorite of mine, and maybe always will be-but, in the past,the collectors of 16mm cartoons I was often chatting with would often here a less-than-favorable review of them – saying “The Krazy Kats are better”. While I *had* a lot of Krazy Kats, I usually wouldn’t pursue them in the same way I would the Scrappys, so I ended up with a lot of Scrappys and only a handful of Krazys comparatively over the years. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy them. They were just in a category somewhere below the Scrappys, and when I found some for sale, the Scrappy I didn’t have would be bought first.
Now, all these years later, I’m way, way less likely to focus on collecting film and more about restoring things from film. There’s just too much to do, but I do think, possibly, at some point, I’ll still want to get more Krazys than I have currently.
Of course, The Columbia Krazy Kat isn’t really Krazy Kat at all, at least not in the sense of the brilliant comic strip. The Columbia Krazys are their own entity, bearing more a resemblance to every other studio’s cute 30s characters and the expected population of animals. I have to admit I really like most anything with that formula, so, in that way, the early ones are great. This one, Ritzy Hotel (1932) has all the elements of the best of the series – great animation, funny gags and a happy Joe DeNat score. What could be better?
Ben Harrison and Manny Gould were exclusively helming the direction of the series from 1926, when Mitnz’s studio was in New York, moved to the west coast into the beginning of the sound era though 1933, then continuing to direct some of the cartoons along with the Color Rhapsodies series. It was a popular enough series through those early 30s years, then really began to lose steam in the mid-30s as so many cartoon series do.
I’ve been really enjoying reading your thoughts on these cartoons, and the information each person brings as well. I can’t wait until the end of the school year and the current giant pile of restoration and Blu-ray stuff I’m sorting through to be a little less overwhelming so I can spend a little time writing a little more too!
This week’s print is from Tommy Stathes’ collection- he was kind enough to lend. It’s sadly warping a little here and there, but still a good watch. Thanks Tommy, and have a good week all!
No, this is not a comprehensive history of images in motion on the animated screen. It instead is a look at the subject of animated characters uprooted from their surroundings, and facing the dilemma of relocation by choice or under adverse circumstances. Many a character avoided these consequences by having some hero burst in in the nick of time, to foil a traditional moustached fiend’s vile efforts to foreclose the mortgage. We’ll disregard these, and concentrate on the not-so-lucky, faced with packing up the content of the old homestead and having them carted away. Also, we’ll share focus with the other regular participants in such transient events – the “professional” moving man, who, at least in cartoons, is often responsible for more damage than if the property owners hadn’t bothered to invest in protective packaging for their heirlooms at all. I will not necessarily look at every instance where a character has taken on a new life in a new town or home, but concentrate primarily on the ones where the process of moving itself shares a primary role in the story development. Also, I’ll save a few sidelights for instances where it is not the characters themselves taking the trip, but some massive object newly acquired or among their belongings getting the ride – such as the proverbial favorite, piano moving.
Emile Cohl
I have found it odd in my research that I have scarcely encountered any trace of stories about moving in silent animated cartoons. Perhaps the topic is merely lurking below the surface, playing only brief roles in story development that didn’t reveal themselves in the titles of the pictures, so as to be easily overlooked. If any of you know of silent cartoons other than the two films listed below with sequences for movers, moving vans, or relocations to strange surroundings, your input will be appreciated. In the meanwhile, one film in which not a single cel or hand-drawing is utilized is truly a standout, falling into the category of stop-motion. It is Emile Cohl’s “Le Mobilier Fidele” (aka “The Automatic Moving Company”) (1910). There seems some great confusion over the date and director of this film, as Cohl’s name would seem well established in film history, yet about half of the internet data sources credit direction to one Romeo Bosetti, of whose background I am unaware. The same percentage of sources also peg the film as from 1912 as opposed to 1910. Who knows who is right, but let’s concentrate on the film. An upstairs three-room vacant apartment needs furnishing. Yet, only a single human being appears on screen, a postman, delivering a flier by mail to the residence’s mail slot in the opening shot. In a scene whose precise meaning is blocked to us by either writing in French or bad handwriting, the letter sails of its own power to a writing desk, opens itself, and apparently announces the availability of the services of the Automatic Moving Company within its text. A pen and what appears to be a ledger move in response without the aid of human hands, either approving an order or endorsing a check.
Instantly, without the order or check even traveling to the company head office, a moving van is dispatched – with no driver. The gates of the company lot open to allow the van’s departure, also without human aid. In delightful stop motion, the van arrives at the address of the abode, its rear doors unlatch, and dollies, packing baskets, and large items of furniture begin to unload themselves in a magical parade of household items and bric-a-brac. Into the house, up the stairs, and into the respective master bedroom, parlor, and kitchen skitter the makings of a home, moving into position to find their appropriate spots to make the home appear comfortable and cozy. The labor involved in smoothly transitioning all these objects simultaneously into appropriate positions, including heavy china cabinet, stove, bedstead, etc., must have been a task which would have driven any Bekins man crazy. It is evident that portions of the footage were filmed backwards, making it easier for the final room to assume proper orientation by merely moving out objects from a finished room piece by piece. Yet, the effect is still wonderful and eye-catching. What’s more, the director(s) find the time to make the exercise more than merely mechanical, injecting into the proceedings a few moments of clever humor from the inanimate cast. A small end table which enters the bedroom can’t seem to find its appropriate spot within the room’s layout, and moves around as if in search of something. It attempts to exit the room, but gets briefly hung up when it mistakes the door of a wardrobe closet for the room’s doorway. Finally finding its way out, the end table encounters the furnishings setting themselves up in the parlor. It circles a central table, on which sits a small tiffany lamp. The lamp notices its old friend, and shimmies over to the edge of the table, intercepting the end table on the next go-round. It moves onto the surface of the end table, and the end table now moves as if satisfied, realizing “That’s what I was looking for.” It proceeds back to the bedroom, and finally takes its proper place against the wall near the head of the bed.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, dishes are unpacking themselves one by one from one of the moving baskets, sliding across the kitchen table to stack up into one neat pile. When the contents are emptied, the moving baskets begin to file out of the room – all but one mischievous small basket, which hides under a table. A larger basket, apparently in charge of operations, slides back into the room and pokes around, seeking the missing receptacle. It reacts in pantomime as if it has spotted the playful prankster, and loosens from its middle a strand of rope threaded through loops in the basket side for fastening it shut. Throwing the loose end of the rope like a lasso, the big basket loops the rope through a similar wicker loop in the front of the smaller basket, the rope twisting to knot fast around the wicker. Then, the bigger basket gives a tug, dragging the playful small one out of the room. All the baskets from the various rooms similarly loop rope ends together to form a single-file chain, much like a column of tethered mountain-climbers, and head for the stairs to make their exit from the house. But before reaching the bottom of the stars, they quickly shift into reverse, to allow a last forgotten item of furnishing to make its hefty entrance up the stairs – an upright piano. Then, all the baskets file out of the house, clamber into the back of the van, the van doors close, and everyone goes on their merry way to the next job, for a sudden finish to the film. All this in a mere 3 minutes and 47 seconds (though, in all likelihood, projection speed is wrong for the silent days, and the original running time was more like five minutes). Wonderous!
Max Fleischer presents the only other silent tale of moving I’ve so far found – and it’s a gem chock full of creative sight gags – Ko Ko Packs Up (Out of the Inkwell, 10/17/25). Max has decided to move the cartoon studio to a new undesignated location, and the live moving men are backing up their van to the front door. Ko Ko, peering out from under the stopper of his inkwell, sees Max wrapping up in paper bundles various art supplies from his desk, and tossing them into large packing barrels. He hollers for Max, apparently calling for him to complete drawing him, as he is only a head and shoulders as presently inside the bottle. But Max is too busy to oblige him, and (in missing intertitles) seems to merely inform him that they are in the process of moving. A cuckoo bird (animated, but in a real clock), emerges on the hour, but does not utter the traditional “cuckoo”, instead stating in words that appear on the screen, “Good-bye, Ko Ko.” This makes Ko Ko sad and sentimental, and he begins crying bitterly. His tears emerge from his eyes as ink, and the droplets begin to pile up in big and little stacks. The large stack transforms into the shape of Ko Ko’s lower torso and clown suit, allowing the upper half of Ko Ko in the bottle to jump on top and complete his form, while the smaller tear stack transforms into the outlines of Fitz. And so, our cast is assembled.
Seeing the moving men busy lifting the heavy loaded barrels one by one onto the truck, Ko Ko suggests to Fitz that maybe they’d better get busy and pack up their belongings too. So, they move into their world of cartoon drawing boards, and begin to ready for moving everything in sight. Ko Ko begins by detaching a pot-bellied stove from the wall, and wrapping it up in paper. (Uncertain if the stove is in operation, as the gag is missed of having the paper wrapping burn up from the stove’s heat.) Fitz heads straight to the ice box, and stashes in a packing box his private collection of meat bones therefrom. Ko Ko advances to a wall with four window panes, and removes the whole window frameworks from the wall as if they were merely the flat drawings on paper which they are, leaving the wall with no window holes when he is through. Max himself gets into the comedy act in his real-life world, plucking two live goldfish from the water of their bowl, and wrapping each up in paper in the manner of a fish monger – then also wrapping in its own paper the entire bowl, still full of water, and tossing the bundle into a barrel without signs of a visible leak. Back on the drawing pad, Fitz spots a small staircase leading to an exterior doorway. Ignoring any structural integrity the steps should have, Firs rolls up the stairs platform by platform into a rectangular block, wraps and tosses the block into a barrel. In another room, Ko Ko eyes a parakeet in a cage. He first pulls out the bird’s perch from under his feet, leaving him standing on nothing while Ko Ko wraps it. Then the squawking bird gets the paper-wrap treatment. Finally, before wrapping the cage, Ko Ko guzzles down for his own enjoyment the bird’s two receptacles of drinking water. Fitz finds a loaded bookshelf, and piles four shelves of books from it into a towering column. Then, he picks up the whole column and balances it on his shoulder as if the books were glued together, carrying it to a spot beside an empty barrel. The books become unglued as suddenly as they were previously magnetized, and Fitz merely climbs atop the topmost book, kicking with his feet to separately kick each book one-by-one into the barrel. Ko Ko spots the kitchen sink, and yanks it from the wall to wrap. The act releases a torrent of water from two busted pipes behind the fixture, and a stream of water upon the floor. Koko scratches his head to figure what to do, then again plays upon the flatness of objects in a cartoon, merely reaching to the edge of the frame, and rolling up the outlines of the water stream and gushing pipes into a scroll of flat paper, and tossing the scroll into a barrel.
Fitz now begins posting signs to advise the utility companies of the firm’s relocation. The first reads: “Notice to Gas Co. We’ve moved away. Please shut off the bills and send us the meters.” Another states: “Electric Co. Please shut off current. The service is shocking.” And one to the Telephone Co. states, “For out new address, please call ‘Information’.” Ko Ko continues wrapping up whole rooms in the wall-to-wall carpet as a humongous bundle, while Fitz sets upon the arduous task of individually wrapping each lump of coal in the furnace coal bin. Fitz ventures next to an outside background, where he uproots a water well to deposit in a barrel, then lifts the hole left in the ground from the paper as a precursor of Robert McKimson’s portable holes and tosses it in too. He then yanks down the sun from the sky, and scrolls up all remaining outlines from the background into another scroll of paper, leaving the scenics entirely empty save for the barrel. Ko Ko has meanwhile ventured outside his paper dimension, and in a nice combination of live action and animation, is seen completing the wrapping of a live meowing cat in packing paper. Fitz makes sure he’ll have something to eat, by coaxing a cartoon mouse out of a mousehole, then wrapping him up too. Finally, Ko Ko runs to a real-life vacuum cleaner in a corner, grabbing up the hose and carrying it to Max’s desk. He cuts a hole in the middle of Max’s drawing table, threads the vacuum hose through the hole, then installs his own inkwell as a vacuum nozzle on the hose’s end. He turns on the power. All the remaining contents on the desk, as well as the furniture in the studio, begin to spiral in the suction of air, and disappear into the inkwell nozzle. The pull is so strong, the two moving men, laden with more heavy barrels, are sucked backwards into the room, and miraculously compress to be sucked down the vacuum hose also. Then, of course, Max himself receives the same treatment. Finally, none are left but Ko Ko, who is also pulled off his feet, whirled around in the air several times, and disappears down the inkwell, with the inkwell stopper being last to be sucked into place, sealing off the adventure.
It is possible that Oswald Rabbit was the first cartoon animal to attempt to move a piano – though few living people can verify this, due to the extreme rarity of the short, Nutty Notes (Lantz/Universal, 12/9/29). Tommy Stathes seems to be the only one who has turned up a print, but has only publicly exhibited it in a one-time theatrical setting on the East Coast to my knowledge, letting only a little over a minute of the film become available online as a sample clip. The poster art and a few brief shots suggest Oswald’s task of delivering a piano from a music store, though little is known as to how he does it. If Tommy is reading, perhaps he might be kind enough to provide some form of plot synopsis with a few clues as to the precise moving gags – or maybe any avid fan who might have sat in on his special screening.
Here’s a clip from the film:
Mickey Mouse seems to be next in accepting the task of piano moving, though in fact he is delivering an entire shipment of various musical instruments by horse (or possibly mule) and buggy, in The Delivery Boy (Disney/Columbia, 6/6/31 – Burt Gillett, dir.). The film perhaps qualifies only for an honorable mention, as the actual moving task has practically nothing to do with the meager plot. Mickey just happens by, riding through the countryside with his load, when he spots Minnie washing out her laundry with an old-fashioned washboard and pail. Mickey hides out in a pair of bloomers on her clothesline to get close to her. Minnie, upon discovering him, pulls a stitch on the bloomers, dumping Mickey into the washtub. They’re still playful friends, however, and break into an extended song and dance rendition of “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree”. Mickey carelessly pretends a beehive hanging from a tree is a punching bag, giving the hive several rhythmic jabs and a final knockout punch, sending it flying – right onto the rear end of the hitched mule. The mule kicks and bucks, scattering the load of musical instruments all over the farmyard. Mickey and Minnie duet on the piano, while other animals of the farm take up the other instruments, to perform another extended instrumental arrangement of John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Pluto, who was an additional passenger of the wagon, meanwhile wanders into a construction site adjoining the farm, playfully fetching a lit stick of dynamite tossed by foreman Pete at a blasting site. Pete and a fellow worker refuse to accept from Pluto the retrieved “stick”, instead jumping for safety into a barrel of tar. Pluto thus brings the stick to Mickey and Minnie, who are too busy with the music to notice what the stick is. Pluto begins chewing on the stick like a bone while the fuse burns shorter and shorter. Pluto becomes distracted when his fleas, who have more intelligence than he does, recognize the danger and leap off their host’s back, abandoning the proverbial sinking ship. Pluto curiously follows the fleas out of frame, and out of danger. But the stick is still within immediate proximity of Mickey, Minnie, the piano, and the mule. BLAM!! Mickey and the piano stool land back o the ground relatively unscathed, but the mule has lost his hair, and stands behind the remains of the piano (now reduced to the keyboard and hammers but no strings) with his bony ribs visible as protrusions from his bare skin. Mickey merely lines up the piano hammers with the mule’s ribs, and finishes playing the finale of the march thereon, while Minnie comes down with a tambourine stuck upon her rear end, and smacks it rhythmically to beat out march time to close the number.
Bimbo’s Express (Fleischer/Paramount, Talkartoon (Betty Boop), 8/22/31 – Dave Fleischer, dir., no animator credits on surviving TV prints), is fairly weak as Betty’s cartoons go on gag material, and has no particular plot except for engaging the characters in moving Betty’s furniture. Bimbo runs the express company, with a horse-drawn van and two partners including a heavy hippopotamus and a scrawny alley cat. Bimbo makes a unique personal approach to Betty’s front door, somehow extending his legs and jacking up his own torso about five steps in height to match the height of the door, then scaling the steps leading to the door, retracting the length of his legs for each step so that his head remains at the same height throughout the climb. Betty is busy with some personal grooming, sitting in her nightgown in an easy chair with legs raised, trying to cut her toenails with a scissor. Bimbo knocks, announcing it’s the movers. She states she can’t come to the door right now because she’s in her nightie, and Bimbo replies, “All right, I’ll wait ‘till you take it off.” (Any wonder why the censors would later target this series?) When Bimbo enters (though Betty by now is wearing her full dress and garter), love is in his eyes, and each eyeball tracks an image of Betty in its reflection – slowly from head to toe. We’re over halfway through the cartoon, and not a single piece of furniture has yet been touched. The moving process for the most part lacks in the inventiveness of prop gags present in the previous Ko Ko epic. Bimbo carries a tall Grecian-style sculpture of a shapely woman toward the exit door, paying no attention to the dimension of his carried article and instead making more flirtations with Betty, so that the statue has to duck to avoid having its head snapped off in the doorway. The cat gets hung up on twice-repeating a slide down the staircase banister while carrying a canary cage – the second slide requested by the caged bird, who shouts “More! More!” The horse moves Betty’s stove into the van while still lit, frying an egg in a pan atop it as he goes. A briefly running gag has Bimbo dropping items out a window after yelling “Okay” to the hippo below. Each time, a crash is heard before the hippo responds that he’s got it, making one wonder about the unseen condition of the furniture. Bimbo carries away a bathtub, with an unknown dog bather still in it. A staircase is wrenched out of the wall and carried away by one of the movers (a gag later remembered at Terrytoons, to be seen again in a later chapter of this series). Everything is packed into or on top of the van, and the rig moves off, with the hippo sleeping up top in Betty’s bed, and the cat rocking in a rocking chair. Bimbo asks Betty where they’re going to, and Betty responds “Around the corner” – making the whole proceedings moot, as she could have walked her items to their destination! It is also revealed in song in the final shot that Betty only moved to dodge her rent.
Krazy Kat next accomplishes what Oswald Rabbt might have done in his film, taking moving to new heights in Piano Mover (Charles Mintz/Columbia, 1/4/32 – Ben Harrison/Manny Gould, dir.). Krazy and a small dog assistant (who rides inside the piano) transport an upright model to the site of a mile-tall apartment building by horse-drawn wagon. Krazy’s wagon includes an interesting tail-gate, which folds down to form the shape of steps, allowing the piano itself to come to life and descend the few steps to the ground in an effeminate walk. The dog is small, but removes his shirt to expose bulging muscles to accomplish the task. He threads one end of a rope into a knot around the piano, then forms the rope’s other end into a coil, upon which he jumps as if the rope coil were made of spring metal. Upon jumping off the rope, the compressed coil springs up into the air, traveling twenty stories up, and makes a precise loop to thread itself through a pulley attached to the roof, its end falling back down to the ground. The dog sets himself to pull the rope, while Krazy hops atop the piano to ride it to the top. Unfortunately, as the dog pulls, a sidewalk elevator panel descends below his feet, causing Krazy to be hauled into the air more rapidly than he expected. The fast-rising piano begins to shift its weight in the rope loop, and Krazy desperately struggles to maintain his footing as the piano tips first one way, then another. Several spectacular shots appear throughout the film from overhead view looking down upon Krazy and the suspended piano, with vehicular traffic proceeding through the busy intersections many stories below. Krazy loses his footing, grabbing onto the end key of the piano keyboard with his hands. The keyboard as a unit is yanked nearly off its wooden mounting, then wondrously retracts as if held on by springs, pulling Krazy back up to its level.
Krazy spies a window ledge, seemingly within reach. He cautiously steps across the piano top, planting one foot on the ledge. Suddenly, the piano and rope slide away from him at an angle, causing his legs to engage in an impossible split between piano and ledge. His outmost leg extends halfway across the street, and a playful anthropomorphic tower clock on a building across the way uses its clock hands to grab the piano, and pull it still further away from the apartment building, extending Krazy’s legs to the limit. When the clock can’t quite bring the piano over to his side of the street, it lets go, causing the piano to swing back, and smash Krazy like a pancake against the wall of the apartment building. Krazy recovers, now finding himself hanging by his hands from the window ledge. The window is closed above him, and he desperately knocks on the window glass, hoping someone will let him inside. In one of the film’s best gags (definitely pre-code), a feminine hand opens the window partially, reaching outside to offer Krazy her apartment key! Krazy shakes his head in bewilderment, but nevertheless makes a lunge to grasp the extended arm – and misses. He tumbles down several stories, before spotting two straps hanging out a window from under a pulled windowshade. He grabs for the straps and hangs on tight. They elastically stretch, then retract to draw Krazy up to the new windowsill, as the shade goes up to reveal a female pig, wearing a corset to which the straps are attached. The embarrassed pig smacks Krazy in the jaw, launching him skyward again, then tries to pull down the windowshade, but only adds to her embarrassment by yanking the shade off its mounting entirely.
Krazy finally finds himself in a position of temporary safety, landing in a belly-flop atop a window-washer’s scaffold, on the same floor level as where the suspended piano still hangs. Out of a window immediately above pops Kitty, who remarks, “Ooh, my piano!”, and steps out on the scaffolding, taking a position at its edge to begin playing the instrument while it remains still hanging from the rope and pulley. As it seemed most every studio’s major characters had to do at one point or another in their 1930’s films, Kitty breaks into an extended musical number, of “That’s My Weakness Now”, eventually drawing Krazy into her moment of musical madness, for a vigorous dancing session upon the building ledge. The mood becomes infectious enough for the two that they pay no attention to where they are going, and dance right off the building at the corner. Kitty manages to grasp upon the edge of the ledge with her hands, while Krazy clings to her lace panties, to Kitty’s displeasure. The dog, who all this time has been holding on to the rope below, finds his massive muscles softening to putty from the strain, and extends his neck all the way to the 20th story to yell “Hey!” to Krazy, reminding him he has a job to do, and that the dog’s strength is giving out. Krazy thus gives a jerk upon his own tail like the string pull of a windowshade, and he and Kitty roll up like a retracting shade into a cylinder, regaining the ledge and rolling across its length, back to the other end where the piano still hangs. Whether by the dog’s pulling or by elastic force when the two cats land atop the piano, the instrument and rope shoot skyward once again. Irrepressible Kitty thinks the ride is all a fun game, and begins rocking the piano between her side and Krazy’s like a see-saw. Another overhead shot adds to the impression of visual vertigo by photographically blurring the perspective background behind the characters and spiraling the drawing, giving an interesting effect. Above them, a small bird sits in a nest upon another ledge corner of the building. Spying the twisting rope moving close to him, he becomes convinced that the strands are a tasty treat, and begins eating them away one-by-one. Krazy and Kitty scream below for him to stop, but their pleas are ignored, as the bird snaps the last strand. Another spiral blur follows the cats and the piano down in their dizzying fall. The piano becomes speared upon the top end of a telephone pole, and its descent rate is slowed somewhat by the impact of breaking off each of the step rungs protruding from the pole on the way down. The piano still maintains enough speed to crash through the pavement into a rectangular hole – but it appears that the hole may have already been the existing panel of another street elevator, because the piano rises back to street level from the hole, with the modification that both the instrument and the two cats now rise and fall in compression and expansion, as if built like the expandable bellows of an accordion, for the iris out.
Annie Moved Away (Lantz/Universal, Oswald Rabbit, 5/28/34 – Bill Nolan, dir.) – This one’s plot definitely centers around the subject of moving – but with not a moving man or truck in sight. Annie travels light, getting everything she needs into a small suitcase. Annie is the sweetheart and fiancé of Oswald, and Oswald believes he has everything planned for the big day. Phoning Annie from a drug store pay phone, Oswald declares he has a shiny new roadster, a honeymoon cottage, and the marriage license all at the ready – all he needs now is her. Annie is plenty eager, and agrees to be ready immediately for Ozzie to pick her up. But true love never runs smooth in a cartoon, and a standard model silk-hatted and moustached villain, cad, and rival has overheard it all from outside the phone booth. He hurries out of the store ahead of Oswald, hopping upon a motor scooter that has a bad case of recurring backfires, spraying soot over anyone in its wake, including Ozzie’s anthropomorphic roadster and a stray dog who likes to chase tires. Turning up at Annie’s residence, the roguish ruffian hastily scribbles down on paper a note, reading “This handsome gentleman will fetch you to me. Oswald.” He presents the note to Annie at her door, and out heroine is taken in by the ruse – and taken away atop the handlebars of the villain’s scooter, traveling bag in hand. The neighbors have all witnessed the hasty departure, which quickly becomes the subject of local gossip, as they know nothing of the villain’s fraudulent note. Oswald finally arrives, and makes inquiries for Annie. Convinced that she has dumped Oswald for a more handsome and wealthier man, all the neighbors break into an extended production number, set to a current pop tune most typically associated with Guy Lombardo, “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Aymore”, but with updated, custom lyrics. Several folks of various ethnic or socio-economic stereotype participate in breaking the bad news to Oswald that Annie has vacated for good, and that he has very little chance of ever finding her again – including a Jewish housewife, a bowery tough guy, an English cockney, a black mother and her three offspring in Southern drawl, and an old crone village gossip.
Meanwhile, miles down the road, Annie sits on a bench beneath a tree alongside the villain, waiting for an Oswald who seems destined never to show up. When she inquires of the villain where Oswald can be, the vile opportunist makes his move. “Aw, forget that mug. Give daddy a kiss…” He grasps Annie up in his clutches, and steals several kisses, as she screams Oswald’s name, hoping for help. Of course, Ozzie and his roadster come sadly trudging down the road in the nick of time. The villain grabs Annie and again hops on his scooter. But who else should turn up further down the road but the dog who was left covered in soot by the villain in the earlier sequences. He turns to the audience, and remarks, “Ah, revenge!” Grabbing up the root of a large tree, he physically drags the entire tree into the middle of the road, causing the villain’s scooter to crash into it. The villain lies prone on his belly in the road, while Annie is thrown from the motorbike, right into the waiting Oswald’s arms. Meanwhile, the damaged bike bounces around in the road, sputtering and backfiring twice as badly as before. The dog sees a chance for further sweet revenge, and pulls upon the belt of the villain’s trousers, opening up the rear end of his pants just wide enough to admit the motor scooter as it bounces from the reverberations of its own backfires. The villain thus finds his pants loaded with more than he can handle, and disappears down the road, being bounced all over the countryside by the belching black smoke emitting from the bike in his trousers.
Oswald produces the marriage license, and, in a reuse of half the finale sequence from Oswald’s earlier cartoon “Five and Dime”, is married at the local church to Annie, and arrives with her at the honeymoon cottage, all without missing a beat of their strutting step. They are greeted at the gate by Doc Stork, who suggests that he can bring “a little gift for you”. Oswald tells him they’re sorry, but the house is only big enough for two. “Well, you should have told me that before”, Doc remarks before leaving – as it turns out, his work has already been done, and Oswald and Annie are greeted by 16 junior bunnies, just inside the cottage door. That’s the end, if ever there was one.
Moving Day (Disney/UA, Mickey Mouse, 6/2/36 – Ben Sharpsteen, dir.) – It’s the first of the month, and the wall calendar in Mickey’s and Donald’s rented home indicates that the rent is six months overdue. Mickey and Donald have worn a circular path into the carpet from pacing the floor and wondering what to do about it. A violent knocking at the door (shaking down all the wall fixtures) heralds the arrival of the Sheriff (Pete), armed with a Notice of Dispossession, authorizing him to sell all of Mickey’s and Donand’s furniture to collect the arrearages. Pete is at his most brutal, socking Mickey in the jaw through the door peephole to gain entry, and also physically abusing Donald, lighting a match by striking its tip against the underside of his bill, then lighting his cigar and tossing the still-burning match down Donald’s throat as if he were an ash tray.
Goofy, in this instance cast as a mere friend of the mouse and duck rather than their roommate, pulls up to the rear of the house to make a delivery of ice with his old stake-bed truck. Pete meanwhile busies himself out front, hammering up signs to advertise the Sheriff’s Sale, driving the nails in the wall with punches from his bare hands. “We gotta move”, Mickey and Donald declare to Goofy, informing him of the Sheriff’s presence. Without a word of question, Goofy pitches in to help the boys in their last ditch effort to avoid the consequences. Mickey is next seen in a brief shot, attempting to pack all of his and Donald’s clothing into an old steamer trunk, but having it pop open from being too overstuffed. As was altogether too common the case in the “trio” shorts of the series, Mickey is from this point on nearly entirely written out of the script, with all action and gags handed over to Goofy and Donald. Goofy engages in an extended epic contest to determine who is the most intelligent – one live Goof, or one inanimate upright piano, which refuses to stay on the truck, and keeps rolling back into the house. Goofy catches on that the instrument only likes to roll home when he isn’t looking, so plays games with it by positioning his hat just at the windowsill to make it appear he is watching the piano’s moves. He can’t resist finally appearing at the doorway while his hat remains at the window, to give the piano a razzberry. The piano retaliates by slamming into him in the doorway, thrusting him into the kitchen and right through the refrigerator door. Unphased, the Goof is found inside the refrigerator, happily eating fresh watermelon.
Donald, meanwhile, faces his own troubles, first with a plumber’s helper stuck to his tail, then switching it for a goldfish bowl, while the plunger becomes stuck to his head. His efforts to free himself climax in tying a rope around the bowl, with the other end of the rope fastened to a doorknob, and running with all his might. The bowl pops off, but Donald’s beak gets stuck in a gas jet, which inflates him like a balloon. He pops out of the gas pipe, jetting around the room in deflation, and knocks over everything Mickey and Goofy are trying to carry out of the house, causing general destruction and chaos. Pete overhears the commotion from outside and barges in again. “Busting up my furniture!” he roars. But Donald displays an unusual streak of cleverness, remembering what Pete did to him before. As if to pacify Pete’s anger, Donald raises his head high, exposing the underside of his beak, in an invitation for Pete to strike a match again. However, the wily duck is well aware that gas is still escaping from the gas jet – so when Pete lights up, “KER-BLAMM!!!!!” The camera’s view is entirely masked in explosions and white smoke, and when our vision clears, Goofy has his ice truck in motion, catching every item of Mickey and Donald’s belongings flying from the wreckage into the bed of the truck, along with Donald and Mickey too. Clever Donald looks back at the house with a grin, to view the whole structure blasted away except for the skeleton of the interior plumbing, with Pete stranded in an upstairs bathtub and the shower water nearly drowning him. Donald laughs uproariously – until the last item of the household belongings lands upon him – the plunger, again stuck to his rear end. Donald whirls around in a fit of temper like a dog chasing its own tail, for the iris out.
NEXT: We’ll keep things moving into the later ‘30’s – I promise!
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Now, all these years later, I’m way, way less likely to focus on collecting film and more about restoring things from film. There’s just too much to do, but I do think, possibly, at some point, I’ll still want to get more Krazys than I have currently.
Ben Harrison and Manny Gould were exclusively helming the direction of the series from 1926, when Mitnz’s studio was in New York, moved to the west coast into the beginning of the sound era though 1933, then continuing to direct some of the cartoons along with the Color Rhapsodies series. It was a popular enough series through those early 30s years, then really began to lose steam in the mid-30s as so many cartoon series do. 
Max Fleischer presents the only other silent tale of moving I’ve so far found – and it’s a gem chock full of creative sight gags – Ko Ko Packs Up (Out of the Inkwell, 10/17/25). Max has decided to move the cartoon studio to a new undesignated location, and the live moving men are backing up their van to the front door. Ko Ko, peering out from under the stopper of his inkwell, sees Max wrapping up in paper bundles various art supplies from his desk, and tossing them into large packing barrels. He hollers for Max, apparently calling for him to complete drawing him, as he is only a head and shoulders as presently inside the bottle. But Max is too busy to oblige him, and (in missing intertitles) seems to merely inform him that they are in the process of moving. A cuckoo bird (animated, but in a real clock), emerges on the hour, but does not utter the traditional “cuckoo”, instead stating in words that appear on the screen, “Good-bye, Ko Ko.” This makes Ko Ko sad and sentimental, and he begins crying bitterly. His tears emerge from his eyes as ink, and the droplets begin to pile up in big and little stacks. The large stack transforms into the shape of Ko Ko’s lower torso and clown suit, allowing the upper half of Ko Ko in the bottle to jump on top and complete his form, while the smaller tear stack transforms into the outlines of Fitz. And so, our cast is assembled.
Seeing the moving men busy lifting the heavy loaded barrels one by one onto the truck, Ko Ko suggests to Fitz that maybe they’d better get busy and pack up their belongings too. So, they move into their world of cartoon drawing boards, and begin to ready for moving everything in sight. Ko Ko begins by detaching a pot-bellied stove from the wall, and wrapping it up in paper. (Uncertain if the stove is in operation, as the gag is missed of having the paper wrapping burn up from the stove’s heat.) Fitz heads straight to the ice box, and stashes in a packing box his private collection of meat bones therefrom. Ko Ko advances to a wall with four window panes, and removes the whole window frameworks from the wall as if they were merely the flat drawings on paper which they are, leaving the wall with no window holes when he is through. Max himself gets into the comedy act in his real-life world, plucking two live goldfish from the water of their bowl, and wrapping each up in paper in the manner of a fish monger – then also wrapping in its own paper the entire bowl, still full of water, and tossing the bundle into a barrel without signs of a visible leak. Back on the drawing pad, Fitz spots a small staircase leading to an exterior doorway. Ignoring any structural integrity the steps should have, Firs rolls up the stairs platform by platform into a rectangular block, wraps and tosses the block into a barrel. In another room, Ko Ko eyes a parakeet in a cage. He first pulls out the bird’s perch from under his feet, leaving him standing on nothing while Ko Ko wraps it. Then the squawking bird gets the paper-wrap treatment. Finally, before wrapping the cage, Ko Ko guzzles down for his own enjoyment the bird’s two receptacles of drinking water. Fitz finds a loaded bookshelf, and piles four shelves of books from it into a towering column. Then, he picks up the whole column and balances it on his shoulder as if the books were glued together, carrying it to a spot beside an empty barrel. The books become unglued as suddenly as they were previously magnetized, and Fitz merely climbs atop the topmost book, kicking with his feet to separately kick each book one-by-one into the barrel. Ko Ko spots the kitchen sink, and yanks it from the wall to wrap. The act releases a torrent of water from two busted pipes behind the fixture, and a stream of water upon the floor. Koko scratches his head to figure what to do, then again plays upon the flatness of objects in a cartoon, merely reaching to the edge of the frame, and rolling up the outlines of the water stream and gushing pipes into a scroll of flat paper, and tossing the scroll into a barrel.
Mickey Mouse seems to be next in accepting the task of piano moving, though in fact he is delivering an entire shipment of various musical instruments by horse (or possibly mule) and buggy, in The Delivery Boy (Disney/Columbia, 6/6/31 – Burt Gillett, dir.). The film perhaps qualifies only for an honorable mention, as the actual moving task has practically nothing to do with the meager plot. Mickey just happens by, riding through the countryside with his load, when he spots Minnie washing out her laundry with an old-fashioned washboard and pail. Mickey hides out in a pair of bloomers on her clothesline to get close to her. Minnie, upon discovering him, pulls a stitch on the bloomers, dumping Mickey into the washtub. They’re still playful friends, however, and break into an extended song and dance rendition of “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree”. Mickey carelessly pretends a beehive hanging from a tree is a punching bag, giving the hive several rhythmic jabs and a final knockout punch, sending it flying – right onto the rear end of the hitched mule. The mule kicks and bucks, scattering the load of musical instruments all over the farmyard. Mickey and Minnie duet on the piano, while other animals of the farm take up the other instruments, to perform another extended instrumental arrangement of John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Pluto, who was an additional passenger of the wagon, meanwhile wanders into a construction site adjoining the farm, playfully fetching a lit stick of dynamite tossed by foreman Pete at a blasting site. Pete and a fellow worker refuse to accept from Pluto the retrieved “stick”, instead jumping for safety into a barrel of tar. Pluto thus brings the stick to Mickey and Minnie, who are too busy with the music to notice what the stick is. Pluto begins chewing on the stick like a bone while the fuse burns shorter and shorter. Pluto becomes distracted when his fleas, who have more intelligence than he does, recognize the danger and leap off their host’s back, abandoning the proverbial sinking ship. Pluto curiously follows the fleas out of frame, and out of danger. But the stick is still within immediate proximity of Mickey, Minnie, the piano, and the mule. BLAM!! Mickey and the piano stool land back o the ground relatively unscathed, but the mule has lost his hair, and stands behind the remains of the piano (now reduced to the keyboard and hammers but no strings) with his bony ribs visible as protrusions from his bare skin. Mickey merely lines up the piano hammers with the mule’s ribs, and finishes playing the finale of the march thereon, while Minnie comes down with a tambourine stuck upon her rear end, and smacks it rhythmically to beat out march time to close the number. 
Bimbo’s Express (Fleischer/Paramount, Talkartoon (Betty Boop), 8/22/31 – Dave Fleischer, dir., no animator credits on surviving TV prints), is fairly weak as Betty’s cartoons go on gag material, and has no particular plot except for engaging the characters in moving Betty’s furniture. Bimbo runs the express company, with a horse-drawn van and two partners including a heavy hippopotamus and a scrawny alley cat. Bimbo makes a unique personal approach to Betty’s front door, somehow extending his legs and jacking up his own torso about five steps in height to match the height of the door, then scaling the steps leading to the door, retracting the length of his legs for each step so that his head remains at the same height throughout the climb. Betty is busy with some personal grooming, sitting in her nightgown in an easy chair with legs raised, trying to cut her toenails with a scissor. Bimbo knocks, announcing it’s the movers. She states she can’t come to the door right now because she’s in her nightie, and Bimbo replies, “All right, I’ll wait ‘till you take it off.” (Any wonder why the censors would later target this series?) When Bimbo enters (though Betty by now is wearing her full dress and garter), love is in his eyes, and each eyeball tracks an image of Betty in its reflection – slowly from head to toe. We’re over halfway through the cartoon, and not a single piece of furniture has yet been touched. The moving process for the most part lacks in the inventiveness of prop gags present in the previous Ko Ko epic. Bimbo carries a tall Grecian-style sculpture of a shapely woman toward the exit door, paying no attention to the dimension of his carried article and instead making more flirtations with Betty, so that the statue has to duck to avoid having its head snapped off in the doorway. The cat gets hung up on twice-repeating a slide down the staircase banister while carrying a canary cage – the second slide requested by the caged bird, who shouts “More! More!” The horse moves Betty’s stove into the van while still lit, frying an egg in a pan atop it as he goes. A briefly running gag has Bimbo dropping items out a window after yelling “Okay” to the hippo below. Each time, a crash is heard before the hippo responds that he’s got it, making one wonder about the unseen condition of the furniture. Bimbo carries away a bathtub, with an unknown dog bather still in it. A staircase is wrenched out of the wall and carried away by one of the movers (a gag later remembered at Terrytoons, to be seen again in a later chapter of this series). Everything is packed into or on top of the van, and the rig moves off, with the hippo sleeping up top in Betty’s bed, and the cat rocking in a rocking chair. Bimbo asks Betty where they’re going to, and Betty responds “Around the corner” – making the whole proceedings moot, as she could have walked her items to their destination! It is also revealed in song in the final shot that Betty only moved to dodge her rent.
