Sing, Mummy

Cartoons of the early 1930s were filled with singing. At Warners, happy characters designed from interconnected circles carried on, accompanied by tunes from hit movie musicals. At Fleischer’s, musical numbers would be interrupted for incidental characters spurting out a brief gag before going away. At Van Beuren, well, the musicals were just odd and disjointed.

Magic Mummy stars Margie Hines in the title role. A Phantom-of-the-Opera-like skeleton character kidnaps a mummy and demands that she sing in a theatre filled with a skeleton audience. The audience gets into the song, using bones to play on other audience members’ heads.



The orchestra pit is really a graveyard, with ghouls rising up from the grass to play instruments.



Some poses by the unwrapped Egyptian mummy as she sings “Sing,” a 1932 song by Harold Mooney and Hughie Prince.



The cartoon stars Tom and Jerry as cops who are ordered to find whoever is stealing mummies. They try to bust the skeleton Svengali. The audience makes a break for it.



Here’s a hopping version of the song by the Dorseys.