Ub Iwerks will always be best remembered for the essential role he played in bringing Mickey Mouse to life. But if you’re interested enough in 1930s animation to be reading this site, you probably familiar with the cartoons he made at his own studio, featuring characters such as Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper. They were not particularly successful, and he ended up going back to the Disney studio and working productively on special effects for the rest of his career.
But between the closure of Iwerks’ studio in 1936 and his return to Disney, he directed a bunch of cartoons for other studios—including Charles Mintz’s Screen Gems. They were in the Color Rhapsodies series, and we haven’t mentioned any of them here because didn’t feature Scrappy.
Or so I’ve always assumed. I kinda figured if they had, I’d know about it! But in a recent Scrappyland comment, Mark Kausler—a Friend of Scrappy and as good a friend as animation history has, period—amazed me. He pointed out that Iwerks’ 1938 Color Rhapsody Horse on the Merry Go Round includes a Scrappy appearance.
(Actually, I’m not sure whether the name of this short was Horse on the Merry Go Round or The Horse on the Merry Go Round—newspaper ads that mention it use both titles.)
This isn’t a Scrappy cartoon. Not quite, anyhow. It’s set at an amusement park, and an early scene involves a booth with a wheel-of-fortune style game. Someone wins a prize. A Scrappy doll!
Here he is:
We’ve written about real-world Scrappy dolls in quite a few Scrappyland posts, including this one, this one, and this one. None of them look like the Scrappy doll in Iwerks’ cartoon, but I wouldn’t be startled if Scrappy dolls were indeed awarded as prizes at amusement parks and carnivals. Or at least they should have been.
As Mark says in his comment, this fleeting Scrappy appearance is a bit of a mystery. Did Iwerks himself decide to plant the character in this cartoon? Or maybe the writer did? (Readily-available prints of the short have reissue titles sans credits.) Perhaps it was a willful bit of cross-promotion for the Mintz studio’s biggest star. Or maybe it wasn’t meant to accomplish anything in particular.
I’m not even positive whether most of the people in a typical 1938 audience would have instantly recognized Scrappy and been at least mildly pleased to spot him. If they didn’t, the whole thing would have been kind of pointless, since it’s not a gag—just a bit of scene-setting.
Regardless, I thank Mark for bringing this to our attention. It’s not quite a lost Scrappy cartoon—or a lost cartoon at all, since it’s aired on the Totally Tooned In syndication package and MeTV, and may well show up on the new MeTV Toons channel. Maybe you already knew about it, even. But it’s my favorite Scrappy discovery of 2024.
Here’s Horse on the Merry Go Round in … well, not quite its entirety, but close. An unfortunate gag right after the Scrappy doll’s appearance is cut from this modern TV print. (If you must, you can find a worse copy of the cartoon on YouTube where it’s intact.) This version also gives the cartoon yet another name: the no-nonsense Horse on Merry Go Round. I’m fairly confident that wasn’t its precise original title.
For what it’s worth, Harry, the film was copyright by Columbia Pictures, on Feb. 14, 1938 as “The Horse on the Merry Go Round.” The copyright was renewed on Dec. 23, 1965.
Thanks, Yowp!
I am so glad that we live in a time where Scrappy has a presence on mainstream television once again, even though it’s through little cameos like these.
The three-color Technicolor Color Rhapsodies—at least as far back as 1936’s “Football Bugs”—up into 1939 had “Scrappy Presents” in the opening titles (similar to “Mickey Mouse Presents” on the Silly Symphonies), so in a way, you could say Scrappy was a part of all of them. Most were reissued with Columbia Favorite title cards in the late ’40s and 1950s, but a handful of stragglers escaped, 1939’s “Nell’s Yells” being the newest one.