Cavalcade of Awesome

This is it. The 10th year of AWESOME-tober-fest begins TODAY! And we are going to start with an old Mickey Mouse cartoon.

On Christmas Eve 1937, three days after Snow White‘s theatrical release, Disney released the cartoon short Lonesome Ghosts.

Walt Disney himself provided the voice for Mickey. I have a fond nostalgia for this short. I remember it well because it came on a cartridge that was released with the Fisher Price Movie Viewer.  And I had one.

The viewer had a crank on it that you moved to advance the film footage. There were a ton of cartridges available but for some reason the only cartridge I remember owning was Lonesome Ghosts.  One of the cool features of the viewer was that if you ran the crank backward, the footage would run backward.  So I would alternate scenes running them forwards and then backwards.  It was endlessly entertaining.

The gist of the cartoon involves four ghosts living in an old abandoned mansion.  They are bored because they’ve scared off all the people.  They see an advertisement in the newspaper for ghost exterminators and they call them in so they can scare them off.

You can watch the short in its entirety here.

Here are the opening title cards.

As I said, these four ghosts are bored having scared away all the people.  So they see in the newspaper an ad for a ghost extermination company and decide to call them in and have some fun.

They imitate a scared lady and ask Mickey, Donald and Goofy to come help.

Our ghost exterminator crew arrives all geared up. Mickey has brought a shotgun. To use. On a GHOST.  I wonder if they’ve ever actually been out on a call before?

So, as I thought, we see the shotgun didn’t work on a ghost. However, not because the ghost is incorporeal.  The ghost actually sticks his fingers in the barrels to make the gun explode.  Interestingly these ghosts are everything except incorporeal as later on Donald actually punches a ghost in the face.  And it lands.

This sequence is the one I remember most with that Movie Viewer above.  The ghosts go in the closet and when Mickey opens it to go after them a ton of water falls out.  I remember watching and reversing this sequence over and over again to see the water rush in and out of the door frame.

One has to wonder if this particular cartoon had any influence whatsoever on the movie Ghostbusters.  Or even the original TV show The Ghost Busters.  Probably yes, on the latter.  For the former, I can’t say for sure.  However, at one point, Goofy does say the line, “I ain’t scared of no ghosts.”

The cartoon is a short eight minutes and change.  It’s a fun watch.  Check it out.