I haven’t counted how many times a skeleton arbitrarily shows up in one of their pre-Cubby (1933) shorts but it seems to be often.
Wot a Night (1931) is chock-full of skeletons. There’s one bathing, one playing the piano, a bunch of them dancing and even a quartet of skeletons in blackface singing a spiritual.
The cartoon ends with the mysterious guys who rode in Tom and Jerry’s cab (without paying) pointing at Tom and Jerry. Our heroes turn into skeletons!
Off they run to end the cartoon.
John Foster and George Stallings get the “by” credit. I don’t know the happy tune that Gene Rodemich opens the cartoon with, but here’s the song the minstrel quartet sings.
The Lantz/Nolan cartoons of the early thirties are even more obsessed with skeleton gags. Every Universal cartoon seems to have one.
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