Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Mickey runs a small-town opera house. He sweeps the lobby, dancing with his broom, and takes the tickets, deflating a customer too fat for the door so that he fits through. The show is a vaudeville bill with Mickey in every role: he leads the pit band, dances a snake dance in a harem costume, does a Hasidic dance, and finally sits down at the piano for a classical recital that turns into a fight, the piano and the stool kicking back at every phrase until the three of them are brawling across the stage. The asbestos safety curtain comes down on Mickey's head, stars burst out and fill the screen, and the film ends.
Why It Matters
- The piano fight is the first of the great Disney musical-instrument battles, and the whole film is a catalogue of what Iwerks could do with rubber-hose animation and a musical score; it is also the first appearance of Mickey's white gloves, worn here to make his hands read against his body, and they never came off.
- It is the first cartoon in which Mickey wears gloves, the first in which Minnie does not appear, and the first to use Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor as cartoon material, a joke that Rachmaninoff himself reportedly enjoyed. Its 1929 copyright has expired, so the cartoon is public domain in the United States.
Notes and Trivia
- The programme also includes a parody of the then-current fashion for Oriental dancers.
- Some reissue prints cut the Hasidic dance.
- See also: The Barn Dance (1929), Steamboat Willie (1928), The Karnival Kid (1929).