Short of the Week

Silly Symphonies, like Mickey Mouse, are an invention of Comic Artist Walt Disney, who at 31 gets about $400,000 a year from his ridiculous creations. Admirers of Silly Symphonies have lately been delighted to see that instead of using black & white line drawings as heretofore, Artist Disney is now making Silly Symphonies in color. Current release, King Neptune, is a bizarre romance in which a brown boatload of pirates is punished in silly-symphonic fashion for molesting a collection of sleek mermaids with green tails. Blue fish bombard the pirate boat with caviar which they spit out of their mouths like cannon balls; flying fish, improved to resemble airplanes, take off smoothly from the flat spinal cord of a good-humored whale; octopi wave their arms like the propeller-blades of autogiros and silver swordfish saw down one mast of the pirates' boat. Finally Neptune causes a storm by stirring the water with one hand, thus sinking the pirates' boat which he uses for an arm chair when it reaches the bottom of his pale green, comfortable ocean.

Contracts for releasing Silly Symphonies changed hands last March, from Columbia to United Artists. One reason Artist Disney decided to try using color was to distinguish United Artists' Symphonies from the old ones. Colored Symphonies cost about $6,000 extra each to produce. So far they have been so well received that Artist Disney will color the remaining eight of this year's 13 symphonies.

If colored Silly Symphonies are an unqualified success, a colored Mickey Mouse will appear next year. Artist Disney has not yet decided whether to make his famed rodent a white mouse with red eyes or black to match his character.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.