Why, It's a Piano!

Let’s see, there was the jungle picture, and the underwater picture, and the stormy night/horror picture, oh, yes, the Egyptian picture.

We’re talking about Van Beuren cartoons where a) characters discover a piano and play it, and b) there are all kinds of skeletons. (Okay, we cheated. In the horror picture, a skeleton creates a piano).

The Egyptian picture is the Don and Waffles epic Gypped in Egypt (1930), where a sphinx casts some kind of hallucinogenic spell on our heroes because they killed the weirdest-looking camel in animation history.

In this scene, they fall into a room, where Waffles accidentally discovers some mummy case, or something or other, and plays its hands like a piano. Part of the stone wall slides open and a helpful skeleton stretches it into a keyboard, then comes up from the floor to engage in a duet.

Waffles shakes hands with the skeleton and, for reasons known only to him, takes off the skull and tosses it to the shaking Don. Don spends great portions of the cartoon in fear, miming to Waffles not to do something. Waffles maintains a blank expression as he does it anyway.

Don drops the skull and shakes some more in panic. Then a doorway slides open and it’s on to the next scene.

The story isn’t all that coherent and some of the drawing is butt-ugly, but I still like this cartoon. The Film Daily’s review ends: “A nightmare of goofy antics cleverly worked out for the laughs.”

Don and Waffles would evolve into humans named Tom and Jerry, who provided theatre-goers with a few laughs and a lot of puzzled or blank looks from 1931 to 1933.