Well, before Tex tried it out at Warner Bros., you can see the same gag in a Van Beuren cartoon.
In the Manny Davis-directed Nut Factory, released on August 11, 1933, an old woman is calling a Sherlock Holmes-ish Cubby Bear. Cubby’s assistant answers. The woman tries to explain what’s going on, but then found it better to talk to the cat directly.
The cartoon begins with the warped premise that someone is stealing false teeth from residents of the Old Ladies Home. Cubby and his assistant are on the case. After going in disguise, and dealing with ghosts and skeletons (which have nothing to do with the plot), they finally discover who is responsible.
Van Beuren cartoons can be odd, but this could be the oddest story they created for Cubby. I’d love to know how they came up with the idea of squirrels stealing teeth and creating a factory in a tree.
Gene Rodemich supplies the score. I wonder how much was his original music.
It is indeed an odd story, but I don't think there's any great mystery behind it. Old-fashioned nutcracker dolls, like the one that inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet, had large mouths with exaggerated teeth painted on them; you placed the nut to be cracked in the nutcracker's jaws. So the idea of opening nuts with artificial teeth had already been around for a long time. Squirrels eat a lot of nuts, so where could they find a plentiful source of false teeth for cracking them? In an old folks' home, of course! Sounds logical to me.
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