Santa's Workshop

Santa's Workshop premiered two weeks before Christmas in 1932, when presents from St. Nick were all the more tantalizing to kids in families hit by the Great Depression, then in one of its very worst years. The cartoon includes everyone's favorite features of the Santa Claus myth - the sleigh, the reindeer, the busy elves, the bustling toy factory, the letters from children saying which gifts would make them happiest. There's also a naughty-and-nice book containing the record of every youngster in the world. Molly gets a dolly because she eats her spinach every day, but Billy won't get anything on his long list because he hasn't washed behind his ears in seven years!

Always alert to the importance of branding and name identification, Disney works three of its well-known trademarks into the opening title: "Mickey Mouse Presents a Walt Disney Silly Symphony." At this time the Silly Symphony series was losing popularity and Mickey Mouse was a rising star, but both received a boost from Disney's turn to three-strip Technicolor earlier that year. Santa's Workshop shows how consistent the company has been in using its most effective images, repeating them so often that they seem like everlasting parts of pop-culture tradition; the castle in the first shot of Santa's Workshop was drawn way back in 1932, but it's remarkably similar to the Snow White and Cinderella castles seen in the company's logos to this day.

In matters of racial and ethnic stereotyping, 1930s audiences were generally less sensitive than today's viewers, and Santa's Workshop contains a few regrettable lapses - contrasting a white doll that says "ma-ma," for instance, with a black doll that yells "mammy." But most of the cartoon is colorful fun, and it gains an extra touch of class when toy soldiers parade to a Franz Schubert military march. No wonder TV channels in some Scandinavian countries show it every year on the night before Christmas.

By David Sterritt