I keep seeing these cartoons with dancing or talking skeletons from the 30s. 30s cartoons were also more into graveyards and horror in general like ghosts. The 30s had a skeleton obsession.
What's with the 1930s and Skeleton Cartoons?
I keep seeing these cartoons with dancing or talking skeletons from the 30s. 30s cartoons were also more into graveyards and horror in general like ghosts. The 30s had a skeleton obsession.
Everyone was skeletons in the 30s.
Spooky
Where could you see a good spooky skeleton elsewhere in the 1930s?
Even in live action movies, they'd still be stiff puppet like props, while animation they could be full cool characters.
Now everyone can look up dancing skeleton in google and get 50 results so its not as impressive.
depression era. it was after ww1 and people thought that was the worst thing humanity had done and there was collective traumatization
to be far, ww1 was an absolute hellish nightmare, and it was just to create a distraction from socialism becoming exceedingly popular in the west. the biggest distraction that monarchs in europe could come up with was some bullshit war where working class men were drafted under penalty of imprisonment and work camps to go and practice murder on each other over and over.
unions during 1930s were common and were a political obelisk that wasn't going anywhere. a depression era with little food would likely have skeletons. you literally posted a picture of a skeleton at the dinner table, ready to eat the skeleton of a bird. pretty sure starvation and hunger for the working class is the relatable joke here
this, it was basically the periods memento mori
we had our own memento mori period recently with all the skeleton memes that were floating around.
came to post this
You talking about that jellybean skeleton meme?
Easy to animate.
That, and skeletons are black and white. Perfect for pre-color production values.
You know what ist kind of crazy?
there are barely any horror movies about skeletons.
>You know what ist kind of crazy?
>there are barely any horror movies about skeletons.
Scary Movie btfo skellies as a serious monster threat for a generation
What are they going to do? Force me to drink milk?
Lost Skeleton of Cadavera spoops me.
>you must draw 10000 skulls to get an appreciation of the human form
they're just applying what they learned in art school
Spooky
IDK maybe skeletons & ghosts were the most universal spooky thing they could think of since many other classic monsters (vampires/Frankenstein's/werewolves/etc) were still a smaller audience until a popularity boost from talking pictures.
Probably a little easier to draw too. Got your point across real quick compared to "is that guy with the sharp teeth a vampire or ghoul or some kinda cannibal??"
Trends exist
skeletons are cool
been a staple in art before film too
real reason - Hays code killed it, thus isolating skeletons and Satan to the pre-Hays era. Occult shit (Bimbo's initiation) and other spooky stuff was mass media gold in the 1930s. Then the red scare happened when the US economy went to shit. Big business had to curtail literal uprisings (Bonus Army, Battle of Blair mountain, etc.) and invented communism, rights, and disobedience = evil.
In order to keep the government from regulating film, as was done in Europe, the movie industry invented the Hays code to satisfy the zealots, and preserve a tiny degree of autonomy, at the cost of what made early cartoons and movies cool.