Studio: Van Beuren Studios (Aesop's Fables)
Distributor: Pathé Exchange
Produced by: Amadee J. Van Beuren
Short Synopsis
Farmer Al Falfa, the bearded old farmer who had been the Fables' star since 1921, is a butcher, and a pack of hungry dogs is after his meat. The cartoon is the chase and the defence: the dogs raid the shop, the butcher fights them off with every weapon in a butcher's shop, the meat comes to life, and the whole thing is cut to a recorded orchestral score and a track of barks, bangs and nonsense vocal noises arranged by Josiah Zuro. It was the first Aesop's Fable with sound and one of the first sound cartoons shown to the public anywhere, premiered in New York in August 1928 and released in October, a month before Steamboat Willie. The 1950s television reissue added a narrator and dialogue over the original gibberish and reordered some scenes; the original version has no words at all.
Why It Matters
- Seen now, the film is a crude and energetic Fable whose interest is almost entirely historical, but that interest is real: this is what the first sound cartoon looked like, with the music laid over the action rather than built into it, which is exactly the difference Disney understood and Van Beuren did not.
- Walt Disney saw Dinner Time in New York while he was arranging the recording of Steamboat Willie, and wrote home that it was "a lot of racket and nothing else"; a month later his own film made the sound cartoon a sensation and Dinner Time was forgotten. It is the also-ran of one of the medium's turning points, and it is in the public domain.
Notes and Trivia
- Paul Terry left the Fables studio the following year to found Terrytoons; John Foster took over the series.
- The Strand Theatre premiere used the RCA Photophone sound-on-film system.
- See also: Steamboat Willie (1928), The Three Little Pigs (1921), Toy Time (1931).