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Joe Barbera's cartoon journey started with a spooky Halloween cartoon
You could say it tickled his funny bone.
Picture this: the year is 1929, and an 18-year-old Joe Barbera is working on Wall Street, wishing he could draw for a living instead. He drew in his free time and had begun to sell comics to Collier's and other magazines. Despite these small successes, Barbera's creative pursuits didn't make him enough money to leave his bank job, which he hated.
That all changed when Barbera went to see a Halloween cartoon, which he describes in his autobiography, My Life in Toons. Barbera wrote, "I happened to see Walt Disney's groundbreaking 'Skeleton Dance,' a cartoon short set to Camille Saint-Saens's 'Danse Macabre.'" In the cartoon, owls, bats, and cats flee a graveyard when skeletons come to life to dance and play.
This cartoon was also the first of Disney's Silly Symphony series, and it would prove to be a classic. In years to come, the cartoon would be referenced in other cartoons like Color Rhapsody's "Skeleton Frolic" and, much later, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. More recently, "The Skeleton Dance" experienced a resurgence in popularity from its pairing with Andrew Gold's "Spooky, Scary Skeletons" song on TikTok.
The cartoon left a tremendous impact on Barbera, who wondered, "I saw these skeletons dancing in a row and in unison, and I asked myself: How do you do that? How do you make that happen?" He left the theater, excited and revived, and admittedly not quite an animator yet. He enjoyed getting published in magazines, but creating moving images was much more exciting.
Barbera was also a Broadway fan and a lover of plays, but seeing this cartoon made him realize he could somehow combine his two passions of drawing and playwriting to create something compelling. So, naturally, he wrote a fan letter to Walt Disney.
In the letter, he included a drawing of Mickey Mouse to show his skills, and Walt Disney wrote back promising to call Barbera once he was in New York. The call never came, but Disney's spooky skeletons inspired Barbera to hone his craft and take art classes. One of his teachers at the Pratt Institute connected him to an animator at Fleischer Studios, who hired Barbera and gave him his start in animation.
