Studio: Laugh-O-Gram Films, Kansas City
Short Synopsis
The three bears, a bowler-hatted father, a mother and a small cub, live in a cottage in the woods and set off on a stroll, leaving their porridge to cool. Goldie Locks, a little girl with a dog, finds the empty house, samples the porridge, tries the chairs, breaks the small one and falls asleep upstairs. In the Laugh-O-Gram version the tale is a springboard for gags: the bears' domestic routine is played for comedy, the dog gets into the kitchen, and when the family comes home the discovery of the sleeping girl turns into a chase through the cottage and out into the woods, with the cub and the dog as the main comic pair. The ending, as in all the Kansas City fairy tales, is a slapstick rout rather than a lesson.
Why It Matters
- The film shows the Laugh-O-Gram staff learning to build personality through movement: the fussy father bear and the tumbling cub are already characters, not just figures, and the chase at the end has the growing speed that the young Disney and his animators prized. It is one of the best-preserved of the Kansas City films.
- Goldie Locks is one of six fairy-tale shorts Disney made in 1922, between Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, when he was running his first studio on borrowed money; the series failed commercially, but it is the seedbed of everything that followed, and Carman Maxwell and the Harman-Ising team went on to long careers.
Notes and Trivia
- The Laugh-O-Gram building at 1127 East 31st Street in Kansas City still stands and has been the subject of preservation campaigns.
- Disney reportedly lived at the studio and bathed at the railway station during the company's last months.
- See also: The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922), Alice's Spooky Adventure (1924).