Studio: Walt Disney Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler)
Short Synopsis
Dogs are vanishing from the cartoon town, and Alice and Julius the cat turn detective to find out why. The trail leads to a villain who is kidnapping the dogs, hauling them off in a wagon and turning them into sausages in a factory, a dark joke of a kind common in 1920s cartoons. The two investigators disguise themselves, track the kidnapper, infiltrate the plant and free the prisoners, with Julius getting into and out of the machinery in his usual elastic way, and the film ends with the dogs saved and the villain dealt with. The film survives and was released on the Disney Rarities DVD and in a sound reissue of 1931.
Why It Matters
- The sausage-factory plot is as grim as any gag in the Fleischer catalogue, and it shows the Disney studio in its pre-sentimental days, happy to make a children's comedy out of dogs being ground into meat. The detective disguises give Julius some good character business.
- The film is a reminder that the mid-1920s Disney studio was one small shop among many making this sort of thing, and that its later reputation for gentleness was a choice made in the 1930s. Mysterious Mystery was made in the series' most productive stretch and is one of the better-preserved Margie Gay entries.
Notes and Trivia
- A sound version was released on 15 May 1931.
- The "dogs into sausages" joke recurs in silent comedy and in several Fleischer and Van Beuren cartoons of the period.
- See also: Alice's Balloon Race (1926), Alice in the Wooly West (1926).