DISNEY’S “LAUGH-O-GRAM” SECRET

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We’ve all heard of the story about the animation artist who moved to Hollywood and got the idea to create a cartoon drawing of a rodent. The inspiration for this cartoon character came from a tiny mouse he encountered at his desk inside the Laugh-O-gram Studios in Kansas City, Missouri.

Walter, Elias Disney (5-12-1901 † 15-12-1966) created the world’s number one cartoon character of all times, “Mickey Mouse” in 1928 together with his colleague Ub Iwerks (24-03-1901 † 7–7-1971) and they got world-famous for it. This little cartoon character got a big part in some of his later animation series.

The Laugh-O-Gram Studios

Little red riding hood Disney Laugh-O-Gram studio

Little red riding hood torn

In 1921 drawing artist and cartoon filmmaker Walt Disney started a company on the second floor of the McConahay building. He called it Newman’s Laugh-O-grams Studios Inc and formed an animation crew with some of the first cartoon drawing talents from his time. Together they developed the world’s first animated cartoon characters.
Laugh-O-Grams silent animated cartoons were produced with almost no funds, little income and some help from local investors. Disney got the idea to produce a series of silent animated cartoons which he called the Newman’s Laugh-O-Gram Films. He was inspired by fairy tales from all over the world and started to produce new comedy movies featuring cartoonized animals.

From the start of his career animals have always played a big role in all of his cartoons.
For the first series he started the making of “Little Red Riding Hood” featuring a cat and a dog and made nine cartoons in total. Because of insufficient payments for the movies, this bankrupted Laugh-O-Gram Studios in 1923.

Cinderella secret

In one of the 1922 stories “Cinderella” featuring a common lower class girl named Susie as Cinderella, Jack as the rich Prince and Julius the cat as a cat has some notable events in some of the cartoons images which are not visible with the human eye.
A watermark is depicted as an “L” in the entrance of the cave where the bears flee into when getting chased by “Prince Charming” with his hunting riffle.

In the scene where the Prince is sending out stacked piles of invitations for a ballroom event;
a silhouet of a strange figure suddenly becomes visible. Some kind of illusive cartoon character is standing behind the Prince on his chair in one of the scenes.
This figure accidentally got revealed by a “glitch” technique while editing music and colorizations to the work when it became public domain in 2022.

The invisible character that appears is standing behind the Prince on the chairs backrest and
staring out the window where two feet are drawn. What the role of the kid brother was in this movie and why he was made invisible and came forward as a “glitch” is stranger then fiction. The character only briefly appeared few seconds as a “glitch” figure.
With a special technique this iconic silhouette was filtered out and finally a reasonable explanation why this movie was retitled “The Slippery Kid” and genuine proof that a shadowy figure has always existed in the 1922 Cinderella cartoon.

Cinderella was reproduced and edited with synchronized sound as a Whoopee sketches (USA) and Peter the Puss (UK) cartoon and was renamed “The Slippery Kid” in 1929-1930. The characters were renamed in later reproductions; in 1950 Julius the cat was named Lucifer.
That there has always been an invisible hidden character in this movie that harldy anyone knew about, is actual proof that the magic of Disney goes far beyond the human mind and that some Disney secrets still remain to be uncovered.