Symphonie enchaînée

In Mickey Mouse's twenty-first cartoon for Walt Disney Productions, Mickey is a convict in prison who participants in a breakout. A guard emerges from the building with two dogs that sniff the trail of the escapees. According to author Gijs Grob, an expert on Mickey Mouse, "These hounds are possibly the most elaborately designed and most naturally behaving animals in any theatrical cartoon hitherto." One of the dogs eventually morphed into the Disney character Pluto. The cartoon, August 1930's "The Chain Gang," marked the first appearance of one of Disney's more popular animated creations.

Ub Iwerks, who had been with Disney from the start of his business career and was responsible for first sketching the Mickey Mouse character, left Walt in May 1930. One of his replacements was Norm Ferguson, a cameraman with the company since 1929, who switched to the drawing board despite no formal art training. An early assignment of his was to draw the two hounds chasing Mickey. Ferguson modeled the dogs after his own English Pointer. He received praise from his colleagues after "The Chain Gang" was released. Don Graham, an in-house art instructor at Disney, describes "The dogs were alive, real. They seemed to breathe. They moved like dogs, not drawings of dogs. The drawings explained not so much what a real dog looked like, but what a real dog did."

First named Rover in October 1930's 'The Picnic,' as Minnie's pet, Pluto received his permanent name as Mickey's dog in May 1931's 'The Moose Hunt.' The lively dog was reportedly named after the newly discovered (dwarf) planet, Pluto, in the spring of 1930. He's the only animal friend of Mickey's who doesn't have human traits, unlike his counterpart dog Goofy. He communicates with facial and physical expressions as well as barking and grunting. But he's been a popular figure for Disney, appearing in 24 Mickey Mouse films and 90 cartoons from 1930 until 1953. He's seen in several Disney feature films and is currently one of the star attractions at both Disney parks.

This is a rather odd Mickey Mouse cartoon, where he is part of a chain gang who likes to sing and dance. Old goodie-two-shoes Mickey ends up in prison, which is something very unconventional for the beloved mouse.

Definitely a different Mickey cartoon - a little suspenseful but minus the laughs.

Grade C

Obviously, our celebrity mouse has committed some atrocity to be put in prison and forced to break rocks on a chain gang. He never claims his innocence. Because of the boredom of his guard, Mickey is able to start playing his harmonica and getting all the other prisoners involved. Soon there is a jailbreak and he is caught in the middle. Good Mickey Mouse episode.

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.

Mickey Mouse attempts a daring escape from THE CHAIN GANG which holds him captive.

This enjoyable little black & white cartoon is notable as the film debut for Pluto, who does double duty by playing both of the bloodhounds which chase Mickey into the swamp. Clarabelle Cow is one of the inmates on the chain & Pegleg Pete portrays one of the scurvy guards. That's the classic 'Prisoner Song' which the Mouse and his buddies perform shortly before the escape attempt. Walt Disney provides Mickey with his squeaky voice.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a storm of naysayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.

'The Chain Gang' is a delightful Mickey Mouse short from his early sound period. I was surprised that this one features Mickey in prison (on a chain gang, no less), and we're never told how he came to be there in the first place. The cartoon manages to imply that he's guilty of something, rather than stitched up.

I'll just address a couple of points that modern viewers might miss. IMDb viewer Ron Oliver says that Mickey performs something called 'the classic "Prisoner's Song"' (I must have missed that one) in this cartoon. That's not correct. Mickey and the other inmates perform a maudlin waltz-time ballad that was very well-known in 1930, when this cartoon was made: so well-known that Disney didn't even bother to have his voice artists sing the words, apparently figuring that cinema audiences would recognise the song from its melody alone.

The song which Mickey and the others are performing has a lyric which begins like this: "If I had the wings of an angel, / Over these prison walls I would fly...". Since I recognised the melody, I thought it quite funny that these cartoon inmates were performing this particular song.

Many of the early Disney toons were quite vulgar, with gags featuring racial stereotypes or crudities such as Mickey playing a melody on a female dog's nipples. The nearest we get to such things in 'The Chain Gang' is one visual gag quite early in the toon. When the warder (played by Big Pete) threatens Mickey, the mouse raises one hand in a placating gesture with fingers splayed. Then he turns his head into profile to look at his own hand. At this point, Mickey grins mysteriously and then drops his hand. If you look closely, for one brief instant Mickey's head and hand are in just the proper position so that he's thumbing his nose. In the 1930s (and earlier) the gesture of thumb to nose was considered extremely vulgar in the United States; if Disney had tried this gag a few years later, with the Hays Office in place, he likely wouldn't have got away with it.

I shan't spoil the end of the cartoon for you. It was a big surprise for me, since Mickey ended up someplace unexpected. I'll rate 'The Chain Gang' 7 out of 10. Now that nobody recognises (nor stigmatises) the nose-thumbing gesture anymore, parents can put this cartoon on their family viewing list.