The Endless Skate

Animation cycles can be found all over the place in the cartoons of the New York studios in the 1920s and early ‘30s, and here’s an example from the 1929 Van Beuren cartoon “Skating Hounds.”

Here are ten consecutive drawings.



Put them together on consecutive frames and you have this (it’s a little faster in the actual cartoon):



Sorry for the fuzziness. Someone on a video sharing site didn’t realise that taking a low res video and reposting it at a higher resolution doesn’t improve the resolution. But it’s better than nothing.

Paul Terry and Manny Davis receive the “by” credit on this. The sounds seem to have been an afterthought. Mouths move but nothing comes out of them and a slide whistler is used as a substitute for a voice (Maurice Manne was responsible for the effects). Josiah Zuro’s score includes “Jingle Bells,” “The Skater’s Waltz” and an opening theme with a happy xylophone.