OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT - Walter Lantz - "Spooks" (1930)

 Welcome to Day 6 of the Halloween Countdown down in The Dungeon, and tonight's special little feature called "SPOOKS!"

 Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was actually the first Disney animated character predating Mickey! It's a long, wild, and convoluted story that contains the names of heavy hitters Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, Carl Laemmle, and Walter Lantz, and can be read in full detail on Wikipedia, and I suggest that you do!

"Spooks" has a real sketchy almost unfinished look to it, but it's the simplicity that makes it work!

I didn't know they had slim fit pants back in 1930! This dude makes Olive Oyl look like a porker!

This shot makes for a perfect Halloween owl wallpaper!

Next thing you see is this phantom of a character entering an opera house! That's right kids, you might not know who Oswald The Lucky Rabbit is, but almost everyone has heard of "The Phantom Of The Opera" these days, and this cartoon was made as a tribute to Lon Chaney and the very first "Phantom Of The Opera" movie that was made in 1926!

So Let's Get This Shindig Started! Take it away Maestro!

See the little guy on the right, that's not Mickey!

"Tongue Tied Tongue Twister" - Try saying that real fast 13 times in a row, and see what happens to you!

The opera house has a pretty tough crowd on this particular night!

The Phantom hooks the young tongue-tied vocalist up with a wind-up phonograph (Record Player) stuffed into her bustle that she can mime to! What you'll hear in the little sound clip is the record skipping, followed by the phonograph running down and have to get wound back up, kind of like one of those bad Superbowl halftime shows!

She's told by The Phantom that everything will always be fine, as long as she doesn't try and remove his mask!

So, what's the first thing the stupid girl does? Remove his mask of course! Now he's mad because his ugly mug has been exposed!!

This is probably the weirdest shot in the whole cartoon! Also, not Mickey again!

Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Oswald The Lucky Rabbit in the 1920's! It was later that Walt Disney went another direction and ended up creating Mickey Mouse! Woody Woodpecker's Dad Walter Lantz carried on the Oswald cartoons until 1943! Oswald returned to the Disney family in 2010 in the video game called Epic Mickey!

In an effort to save the young lady, Oswald is of course, put through a series of obstacles like this giant spider.......

.......and then these dinosaur critters that run through Oswald's legs with sharp fins on their backs effectively denutting him! How they used to get away with wanton destruction of the family jewels gags in children's cartoons I will never know!

The story ends with The Phantom chasing Oswald down just in time to get in one last gag!

 

The Phantom asks Oswald a simple question! "What does a chicken say when it lays a square egg?" When Oswald doesn't respond correctly, The Phantom slaps him to give him the answer to the question, "OUCH!"  It's all that simple, see you on Saturday!

There are many free streaming versions of Oswald in "Spooks!" Here's the link to just one of them!

ALIEN / Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox - 1979

It's Halloween Countdown Monday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. This is a movie I saw at the theater in 1979, and, wow, what a broken roller coaster ride it was! It's all about a crew aboard a deep space mineral towing vessel, the Nostromo, on its way back to Earth when an SOS transmission is received from a distant planet. For scientific reasons, they decide to make a detour to the planet to check out the source of the mysterious signal.

Eegah!! sent over a moody musical sound clip from this flick for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our cute little Alien egg, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's a taste of... ALIEN!

The crew takes a shuttle down to the planet to investigate, will they discover alien life?.. Only your hairdresser knows for sure!

They come across a spaceship and strange machinery in a weird giant cave, apparently where the SOS signal originated from.

They find a huge skeleton in the pilot's seat, and, the mystery gets pretty damn weird. Then, crewman Kane is attacked by some unknown creature in another part of the cave and is taken back to the ship for medical attention.

After Kane's helmet is cut off, a creepy spider-like thing is found stuck to his face, YOW!!

When the doctors try and remove the parasite, it tightens its grip. When they try to remove a leg, the cut causes acid to spurt out and it immediately melts its way through the floor and nearly through the hull before it stops!

When checking on Kane's condition, they discover the face hugger has disappeared, so, they have to look for the infernal thing! After some tense moments, they find it dead after it falls onto Ripley's head! I still cannot figure out why they looked for it in the dark when they could have just turned the lights on! Oh, right, it's scarier that way!

M-m-m-m, here's the yummy new Alien Pot Pie being created at Mary Colander's bake shop!

John Hurt plays Kane, he was Caligula in my favorite mini-series I watched on cable in the early eighties, the BBC production of I, CLAUDIUS. Here, Kane has just been victim to giving birth to an ugly little baby Alien!!

Everyone's paranoid after the Alien has deep-sixed a crewman or two, now loose in the gigantic Nostromo vessel, so, time to break out the handy dandy flame throwers!

Ash goes haywire and gets his head knocked off, revealing his robot innards!

A look of the Alien with its metal teeth as it closes in for another kill!

Ripley escapes in a small emergency ship and watches as the Nostromo blows the Hell up!

Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, here in this scene putting on her spacesuit after discovering the hideous creature hiding in the shadows!

In a tense moment, she opens the air lock and spears it before it gets lodged in the exhaust shield. After more quick thinking, she hits the full throttle button and turns the Alien into a crispy critter!

The next three Monday posts will showcase scary fun flicks from the eighties, you'll want to check those out! Tune in Wednesday as our Halloween Express continues on its trip to Hell!!

SKELETON FROLIC - Ub Iwerks - "A Color Rhapsody" (1937)

As we ease closer to that fateful day, the undead become friskier! Tonight's Columbia short from 1937 features dancing skeletons and skeleton musicians, and it's rightfully called, "Skeleton Frolic!"

Where else could a tale like this begin than in a creepy olde graveyard?

What fantastic imagery from the legendary Ub Iwerks!

 How's that for an iconically classic Halloween black cat?

The sun has gone down and The Skeleton Orchestra is all ready to play!

This cartoon is all about the skeletons, but there was a brief appearance by some bats just to soup it up a bit!

This part actually looks kind of scary!

The trumpet and the bass player get into a bit of a tussle over whose skull is whose!

Then the dance number starts in earnest. Those clouds give you just a feel for how talented Ub really was!! He probably did that in like five minutes!

The frolicking skeletons go through a bunch of different moves somewhat like what's going to be happening to me in the next couple of hours!!

We used to call this The Shimmy, now they call it "Wobble Baby!"

Five A.M starts coming around, and the morning sun just barely starts showing it's light!

When the rooster crows, all the skeletons know they have to head to lower ground! The technicolor in this cartoon is pretty amazing for 1937 in my humble opinion! Wouldn't this make a cool painting?

The party's over until next Wednesday!

Just like nothing ever happened!!

 

 Frolicking skeletons isn't something that just started happening in 1937, there's a long and varied history of these kinds of activities that people have devoted entire books to on the subject! Just as a couple of extra added reference points, here's Michael Wolgemut's "Orchestra Of The Dead (Liber Chronicarum)" from 1493!

From the Richard Harris Collection, here's an example of frolicking skeletons from Kawanabe Kyosai who lived from 1831 to 1889!

And of course, our friends from South of the border have a long tradition and fascination with the Day of the Dead like in this print by Mexican National Hero Jose Guadalupe Posada who lived from 1852 to 1913 entitled "Jarabe Tapatio Dance!"

If you want to see the whole cartoon, there are many postings of it on YouTube and here's a link to just one of them!  SKELETON FROLIC (1937)