Fake Cow, Real Milk

Cartoon studios of the 1920s and very early ‘30s had a fascination with mechanical horses which I’ve never understood. Why not draw a real horse? In cartoons, a character can do anything.

Walt Disney took the idea further in 1927 with The Mechanical Cow. Yes, it’s a robot cow with a broom for a tail that lives in a two-storey wooden building with Oswald the rabbit.

Oswald makes money selling milk from the cow. In one scene, he pulls a tank, kind of like those glass balls that used to be at the top of gas pumps, out of the animal, uses the broom tail to fill it up, then connects a hose-like teat to a baby hippo’s mouth and drains the milk from the cow.



Live action films in the late ‘20s liked mechanical animals, too. A Society Circus (1929) starring Arthur Lake included a mechanical hippo.

As for the cartoon, no animators are identified, just Walt Disney in a Winkler Production.