Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
Katrina Van Tassel is courted by two men who loathe each other: the gangling schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the burly Brom Bones. Ichabod reads up on the legend of the Headless Horseman and jumps when a courier arrives, with an invitation to a party at Van Tassel Hall. At the party both suitors fawn over Katrina and, in the scramble, kiss each other; Brom stumbles through a dance while Ichabod shows off his tap-dancing, which delights Katrina and enrages Brom, who imagines his rival as a snake, a skunk and a donkey. By the fire an old man tells the tale of the Horseman, and Brom gets an idea. At midnight Ichabod rides home through the dark wood, and the Headless Horseman, pumpkin head under his arm, comes thundering after him.
Why It Matters
- The midnight ride is the first use of the multiplane camera in animation: Iwerks built a rig that held several layers of background glass at different distances from the lens, so that the trees and the moon move at different speeds as Ichabod gallops, giving the chase real depth. Disney's famous multiplane came three years later.
- The ComiColor fairy tales are the Iwerks studio's best work, and The Headless Horseman, with its party sequence and its dark ride, is one of the two or three strongest; Disney's own version, in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, followed in 1949. Its copyright was renewed by Exclusive Pictures on 9 May 1962 (R295118), so it remains protected in the US until the end of 2029, although it has long circulated in Cinecolor prints of varying quality as if it were free.
Notes and Trivia
- Iwerks's multiplane rig was built from parts of an old Chevrolet; he was as much an engineer as an animator.
- The Headless Horseman became a Halloween staple of early television packages of public-domain cartoons.
- See also: Jack and the Beanstalk (1933), Balloon Land (1935), The Old Mill (1937).
