Dancing For 40 Days And 40 Nights

For a little while after sound was added to cartoons in 1928, it was entertaining enough to see characters dance in time to the beats of the music. (It took time before theatres converted, in some cases due to the expense and in others because theatre managers viewed sound as a fad).

In Van Beuren’s Noah Knew His Ark (1930), the wind-up gag is the animals swim away from skunks because, as we all know, skunks in cartoons smell.

In the meantime, the second half of the cartoon is dancing and little else.

Noah dances.



Ostriches dance, for a time with their legs detached.



The ostriches lay eggs. The eggs hatch and dance.



Cut to elephants dancing. Whoever animated this scene did a fine job, especially for 1930.



Cut to a different animator. Check Noah’s weird right hand (I imagine this is an in-between).



Monkeys dance and scratch.



Hippos twist and turn in terpsichory.



Van Beuren had this thing about putting a tail in the mouth and playing it.



Sundry animals dance in the next scene. Note the high-quality drawing. Watch out, Walt!



There’s a cut to the ark. Even it dances.



There are a lot of re-used drawings in these scenes, but not a lot of humour. By this time, in another part of New York City, the Fleischers were adding little gags to their cartoons. Van Beuren never really caught up to them.

I can’t tell you the name of the song in the background of the dance, but the next one is Wendell Hall’s theme song from radio’s late 1920s: “It Ain’t Going To Rain No More.”

John Foster and Mannie Davis get screen credit for this short, along with musical director Gene Rodemich.

This cartoon remained on theatre screens into 1931. Van Beuren went bust in 1936 and the cartoons were sold by a distributor for home, school and community group use. We've found a school in small-town California in 1944 that screened it. And kiddies in Los Angeles on February 10, 1949 could catch it at 7:30 p.m. on KTSL.