STRANGE TOONS: THE PET

Winsor McCay was the cartoonist behind the surreal, classic comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and an animation pioneer who created short films in the 1910s and 20s that were literally decades ahead of what anybody else was doing. His 1914 short Gertie the Dinosaur is still pretty well known. His other films have become more obscure, but they're still worth hunting down.

1921's The Pet is a blackly funny short based on The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, another long-running comic strips in which various people would eat a bit of bad rarebit (a kind of faux-rabbit, made from melted cheese) and then have colorful nightmares. The Pet is a little slow at times, but it's important to bear in mind that this was 1921, a year before Walt Disney began releasing his own crude cartoons and seven years before Steamboat Willie. And if you stick with The Pet, you'll see a knockout conclusion eerily similar to another famous monster story filmed a few years later.

The cartoon is meant to be silent, but with a musical score. This version unfortunately lacks any music, but try to imagine the cheery tunes from an old Little Rascals short gradually giving way to the music you'd hear when the monster is breaking free from Doctor Frankenstein's lab.

Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Pet | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

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