In the midst of Mickey Mouse's breakout success in synchronized sound cartoons, Walt Disney surprised the world by launching another series - the Silly Symphonies. The genesis of the idea came while Walt Disney was working on the soundtrack for "Steamboat Willie," with his old Kansas City acquaintance Carl Stalling helping to compose the scores. It was Carl who suggested a series of "musical novelty" shorts, even pitching the first idea - skeletons dancing in a graveyard.
"The Skeleton Dance" finds a quartet of skeletons coming to life on a moonlit night in a graveyard, engaging in bone-rattling frivolity until the sun comes up.
Like the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts, the majority of "The Skeleton Dance" was animated by Ub Iwerks, who, during his time away from Disney, would essentially remake the short for Columbia Pictures' Color Rhapsody series with 1937's "Skeleton Frolic." At the time of its production, "The Skeleton Dance" was the most expensive film Disney had made, with a final negative cost of $5,485.40.
Despite Mickey Mouse's success, distributor Columbia Pictures needed convincing to distribute the Silly Symphony series. "The Skeleton Dance" ran for a short engagement in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York before Columbia agreed to distribute the short, which officially entered into wide release on August 22nd, 1929.
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