Lonesome Ghosts (1937)
Animated short
#3990
Date: 7-26-2012
Directed by Burt Gillett
Featuring the voices of Billy Bletcher, Pinto Colvig and Walt Disney
Country: USA
What it is: Spooky cartoon
Four bored ghosts decide to spice up their life by luring three hapless ghost catchers to their haunted mansion and having some fun with them.
It looks like this Disney cartoon may be one of the main inspirations for the movie GHOSTBUSTERS; Goofy even says "I ain't scared of no ghosts!" at one point. The plot is simple enough; the three ghost catchers show up at the mansion and the ghosts terrorize them one at a time. The animation is excellent, as I would expect from Disney at this period. It's a solid, amusing cartoon, but I must confess that for some reason, I rarely find myself laughing at the Disney shorts near as much as I do at the Warner Brothers shorts at their best; for example, during the sequence in which Goofy deals with a ghost who is pulling the old mirror gag on him, I found myself thinking how much funnier it would be if it had the timing of a Warner Brothers cartoon backed with the music of Carl Stalling. Still, this is a worthy cartoon. And I do need to remind myself that this one was made several years before Warner Brothers would hit their stride.
