A Silent Cartoon With Sound

I was watching the Van Beuren cartoon Happy Polo the other day and thought it looked awfully primitive for 1932. There’s a reason. It’s a silent cartoon from 1929 that Gene Rodemich slapped a sound track and sound effects over it.

That’s also the reason no animators are credited. The short was made when Paul Terry ran the Fables studio. Amedee Van Beuren fired him that year, reconstituted the studio into Van Beuren Productions while Terry and Frank Moser formed their own operation with Joe Coffman.

The cartoon storyline is familiar and weak, even by 1929 standards. A cat (in a top-hat like an 1890s melodrama villain) has sexual desires for a mouse. The hero saves her. We get mechanical horses with detachable parts and other things we’ve seen before.

Perhaps one of the better gags is when the hero and his horse twirl in the air and land on a goal post. The post develops a helping hand which send them back onto the field of play.



Rodemich tosses “Tiger Rag” in the background. The song had been around for a while, but the Mills Brothers recorded a version of it in 1931 that was a smash hit. People who complain about repetitious lyrics in songs today should seek out the words to this one.