It's the Musical Spider

Cartoons at Ub Iwerks’ studio started out just like the Silly Symphonies that Iwerks had made for Walt Disney—lots of dancing and singing, no story, light gags.

In The Village Barber (1930), a bumpkin decides to put money in the barber shop player piano. Instead of a piano roll, we get a spider, who zooms toward the camera like characters in, well, an early Disney sound cartoon, and dances out a little classical music tune on the ivories.



A fly joins him. The spider gets jealous of the fly’s talent and tries to eat him, but the fly flies away.



Not terribly strong stuff. Soon Grim Natwick and Berny Wolf would be arriving from New York to start adding risqué material to Flip the Frog’s on-screen efforts.