LAUGH O GRAM JACK THE GIANT KILLER SERIES
Disney had noted how popular the Out of the Inkwell series from the Fleischer Studios was, which had animated characters interacting with the real world. Instead of paying off his creditors, the money was invested in the live-action/animation demonstration film Alice's Wonderland, starring the youthful Virginia Davis. McCrum, from the Deener Dental Institute, contacted Disney and offered him the job of producing a short subject about dental hygiene intended for the Missouri school system, he brought together some of his staff again and made Tommy Tucker's Tooth, which earned the studio $500. But when the local Kansas City dentist Thomas B. When Pictorial went bankrupt only a few months later, the studio never received the rest of the payment, its financial problems became even more serious, and the staff ended up leaving. The rest of the payment would have to wait until January 1, 1924, when all the shorts had been delivered. Pictorial agreed to pay US$11,000 (equivalent to $170,074 in 2020) for the cartoons, which were supposed to be shown at schools and other non-theatrical places, but only paid $100 in advance. of Tennessee on Sunday, September 16, 1922. The company had financial problems and by the end of 1922, Disney was living in the office and taking baths once a week at Union Station.ĭuring the studio's sales manager Leslie Mace's stay in New York, where he was looking for distributors, he ended up signing a contract for six animated shorts with Pictorial Clubs, Inc. Īmong Disney's employees on the series were several pioneers of animation: Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Friz Freleng, and Carman Maxwell. But encouraged by his shorts' popularity at the theatre, and inspired by, Disney decided he wanted to make his own animated versions of fairy tales too, and invested six months on his first attempt at Little Red Riding Hood. LOGF produced nine of the requested 12 films with little income. On May 23, 1922, when Disney was 20 years old, Laugh-O-gram Films (LOGF) was incorporated by him using the remaining assets of the defunct Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists from local investors. in England, Wardour Films distributed the reels theatrically.In 1921, Walt Disney was contracted by Milton Feld to animate twelve cartoons, which he called Newman's Laugh-O-grams. Dreßler’s pivotal German study Im Reich der Micky Maus included German release information for a 1929 Disney cartoon series entitled “Wuppy” in his Animated Film Encyclopedia (2000), Graham Webb revealed an American equivalent alternately titled “Whoopee Sketches” and “Peter the Puss.” Bollman and Grant were credited as producers for the New York-based Sound Film Distributing Corp. A 1922 press release, discovered by researcher Michael Barrier, announced that the series would include both titles John Kenworthy noted the two titles listed as separate, completed cartoons among Laugh-O-Gram Films’ bankruptcy records.Īs the sound era dawned, the seven fairy tales changed owners. Some, it turns out, continued to distribute Laugh-O-Grams years later all seven of them, not six. Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant Killer (both 1922), two titles traditionally misremembered as one and the same, were actually different shorts. It was also conventional wisdom that the fairy tales had been a series of six, released only in the United States-and perhaps only in part for soon after buying the series from Disney, non-theatrical distributor Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee filed for bankruptcy.īut Pictorial Clubs had shady sister companies in different states. Until recently, it was believed that only four of Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams fairy tale cartoons still existed : Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and The Four Musicians of Bremen (all 1922). A strange contraption, but hey, if it works, it probably saved Red a lot on gas.
Red gets her car out of the garage bearing her name, and we see that it is powered by a dog that is being drawn forward with sausages dangled on a stick behind the car. The mother gives the donuts to Little Red Riding Hood, presumably to take to Grandma. * After a while, the cat eats one of the donuts, then dies, and his nine lives fly out of him as a counter in the bottom right of the screen keeps track. To say nothing of the effect on the ceiling. This seems a rather complicated procedure, with much waste of bread and a significant expenditure of ammunition. She tears off chunks, throws them over her shoulder, and her cat uses a shotgun to blast holes in the bread, making them into donuts, which fall into a pot.
Her cat fetches a man in a helicopter who rescues her.Īs the story opens, a woman is kneading bread. * In the Laugh-o-Gram named after her, Little Red Riding Hood is on her way to deliver some doughnuts when Disney’s first villain attacks her.