It's All About the Money

Cartoons of the early 1930s included inanimate things that come to life for the sake of a gag. Dave Fleischer was great this because the springing-to-life came out of nowhere and ended quickly after a wisecrack or some silly bit of business.

Here’s an example from the Iwerks studio, in the Flip cartoon Laughing Gas (1931). A patient walks out of a dentist’s shop without paying its bill. Doctor Flip doesn’t do anything about it, but his cash register is outraged.

There’s no dialogue so these frames can tell the gag.



It’s not really funny, but it’s a cute scene.

Iwerks sure loved those irradiating lines, didn’t he? They all over his cartoons. (In an interview with Mike Barrier, Hugh Harman called them “flicker marks”).

Iwerks’ name is the only credit on the screen in this short.