Zooming Owl Head

The Van Beuren Studio’s original idea of a sound Fables cartoon was to make them just like a silent Fables, but add a music track in the background. A great example is Summertime, released in 1929. There’s no attempt to match mouth movements to voices, or much real dialogue at all. I get the impression sound effects were recorded when musicians and others watching the cartoon made appropriate noises when they saw something on the screen.

The only attempt at synchronisation is when a mouse jumps on piano keys to play the first four notes of “How Dry I Am.”

However, this short has something that was a staple at Van Beuren for a few years—a head zooming toward the camera. In this instance, it’s a sleeping owl disturbed by a squirrel outside enthusiastically cheering a performance of “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a 1914 song written by Walter Donovan and Arthur Fields. The owl kind of hoots (see the lines coming out of its mouth) then the head retreats.



Musical notes fade on and off the screen while being played by a frog and a monkey (in the woods?) while the words “Hooray!” “H-ray!” appears when the squirrel shouts. This may seem superfluous but there were still theatres not equipped for sound, vainly hoping it was a fad and they wouldn’t have to spend money on equipment to pipe in the noise.

Other songs in Carl Edouarde’s score include “The Arkansas Traveler” (played by the frog on a mushroom), “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” (mice clarinet/spring sequence), and “Fire! Turn the Hose on Me” by Richard Whiting and Byron Gay, composed in 1926 (Farmer Al looks at thermometer, sun zooms in).

John Foster and Harry Bailey get the “by” credit.