The Helpful Question Mark

Silent cartoons are crammed with words or letters or punctuation marks that are used as props. In the Oswald short Oh Teacher, our hero turns the word “HELP!” screamed by the heroine into a horse which he mounts to ride to the rescue.

The bad guy cat pulls the same kind of thing earlier in the cartoon. He sprouts a question mark over his head which he turns into a rope to knock Oswald off his bicycle so he can have his way with Oswald’s girl-friend (why a cat wants to date a rabbit, I’ll never know).



This is one of the Disney Oswalds, released September 17, 1927.