Down the Drain

Cal Howard tries to take a bath. Meanwhile, a plumber next door tries to snake out the building's pipes, with the instrument intruding into his tub.

It's a most peculiar and interesting half-reel comedy from Hugh Harman, combining live action -- Howard and the plumber -- and animation -- bubbles from the bath, as well as a cat who comments on the proceedings. It looks to me like this was originally intended as a test to get a company to back a longer movie. When that failed to sell, Harman decided to recoup some of his costs with the resulting half-reel comedy.

Harman had started out with Disney, then wound up producing cartoons for MGM with Rudolf Ising. When that ended in the early 1940s, he apparently did industrial films for the next twenty years. He died in 1982 at the age of 79.