Composers Datebook

We have a silly anniversary to note today – seriously! On today's date in 1929, Walt Disney released his first "Silly Symphonies" cartoon. Entitled "The Skeleton Dance," it depicted four skeletons dancing and making music in a graveyard, employing bizarre instruments, including an unfortunate cat played like a fiddle and the skeletons' own bones, played like a xylophone. While its release on Halloween might have been more appropriate, perhaps "The Skeleton Dance" provided some pleasurable spinal chills for moviegoers on a hot August evening back in 1929. In any case, this "Silly Symphony" was a huge success for Disney, became an instant classic, and was voted #18 in a 1994 poll of "The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time" by professional animators. And speaking of classics, a bit of Edvard Grieg's spooky "March of the Trolls" was used to great effect in "The Skeleton Dance." But credit for its success should go first to Carl W. Stalling, a legendary composer and arranger of cartoon music and absolute master of unexpected segues, witty allusions, and surreal orchestration, and second, to pioneering Disney animator Ub Iwerks, likewise a master in his field. | Chuck Jones, an animator famous for his much later Warner Brothers cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, had worked for Iwerks' studio in his youth, and put it this way: "Iwerks is Screwy spelled backwards."