Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Mickey conducts a barnyard orchestra of cats, dogs, horses, cows, pigs and goats in the overture to Suppé's Poet and Peasant. The players are not professionals: a dog's tuba blows a pig's toupee off; a goat spanks a pig with his violin bow; a horse plays the drums on a cow's rump; Mickey, short of instruments, pulls the tails of a row of piglets to get the notes he wants. The music struggles on through every interruption. A cow's tail keeps flicking Mickey in the face as he conducts, and he finally ties it to a bucket of water, with the result that the cow upends the bucket over his head. The concert ends with the conductor dripping and shivering.
Why It Matters
- The barnyard concert, with Mickey as a conductor fighting his own orchestra, is the ancestor of The Band Concert of 1935, the first Mickey in colour and one of the best cartoons ever made; this black-and-white rehearsal, with Suppé instead of Rossini and a cow's tail instead of a tornado, has most of the ideas in rough form.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States as a 1930 publication, one of the Mickeys that entered the public domain on 1 January 2026. Some of its animation was reused in The Castaway the following year, and Mickey conducted Suppé again in 1942 in Symphony Hour.
Notes and Trivia
- Bert Lewis had replaced Carl Stalling, who left Disney in January 1930.
- The piglet-tail xylophone is a gag the Fleischers had used with kittens.
- See also: The Band Concert (1935), The Jazz Fool (1929), The Cactus Kid (1930).