PHXenon Caelum
Established
Okay, let me rephrase that: have you ever wondered why everything the Disney Corporation does is regarded with cynicism? Why it is that even the most benign things made by Disney are treated as if there’s still something fishy about them? Well, I can assure you that it has nothing to do with an overzealous dose of skepticism towards a family-friendly company. But in order to understand what I’m getting at, we need to take a little trip down history lane.
In its early days, Disney’s competitor was known as Fleischer Studios. Based in New York rather than California, Fleischer could be considered more ãdül†, raunchier than the more family-friendly, tamer Disney. Of course, we all know how this rivalry of sorts ended. With Disney becoming ever more popular and Max and Dave Fleischer fading into obscurity.
Yet still, every time an animator at Disney makes a mistake, writers don’t really think things through, or some girl from one of those dumb teen sitcoms finds her G-spot – someone somewhere will cook up some kooky conspiracy theory to explain it. And now I know there’s a reason for that.
It all began in my quiet town in New York state, when our local theatre decided to auction off some of its old film reels they had kept in their attic. The new manager was apparently more interested in making a quick buck than preserving pieces of film history. Either way, I got some really old reels from the thirties and even two from the twenties. All in all I got five reels for a hundred dollars – a pretty cheap price considering collectors would probably pay ten times the amount!
When I then started watching them on the old projector my grandfather passed on to me after he died, I was surprised to find that they were all Fleischer cartoons. And in good condition too! The ones I got were titled “Cobweb Hotel”, “There’s Something About A Soldier”, “The Old Man on the Mountain” and “Bimbo’s Initiation”. The last one’s reel was also bigger, which caused me to believe that it was Bimbo’s Initiation and a few other shorts added as bonus features of sorts. This immediately got my hopes up in seeing a never released short or even a making-of.
Now, sure, all of these shorts can be seen on sites like YouTube and I’ve seen them myself before too, but putting in the actual film reels gives watching these shorts another feeling entirely! All of them played out like they should, nothing out of the ordinary. All of them except for “Bimbo’s Initiation”. For those who don’t know, this short tells the story of how Bimbo, a dog-like figure, gets pressured into a cult and has a rather comedic twist at the end.
The short began normally at first. We see Bimbo walking down the street and whistling, walking over three gullies as he goes on. He then falls through the fourth gully where he gets trapped by Mickey who seals the lid with a giant lock! Not kidding, that actually happens! Go watch it for yourself! We then get various scenes of Bimbo being badgered into the obscure cult and we hear the catchy “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?” from the cult leader, after which Bimbo emphatically declares “No!” before he’s tortured in various ways by the cult in order to be forced into it.
After some more scenes of torture, Bimbo falls through a door and is asked one last time to join the cult, again refuses and it’s revealed that the leader is actually Betty Boop (here in her early, dog-like persona) and that the cult is made up of nothing but Betty Boop clones! Bimbo then accepts his initiation and the short ends.
But this is where MY copy differs from the original release.
Instead of falling through the door and into another room, Bimbo then falls into a cave! Eerie music begins to play as Bimbo makes his way through, staring at the stalactites above him as he walks. Then a loud screech of a trumpet sounds as a strange, bird-like creature appears before him. The previous music begins to play and instead of “Wanna be a member?” the bird sings “Welcome to Xibalba! Welcome to Xibalba!” And instead of saying “No!”, Bimbo just stares at the bird at first, then breaks the fourth wall, before his eyes widen while displaying a wide, creepy grin, before the short fades to black for some good three minutes.
I was bewildered and stopped the projector immediately. But then I realized that this reel was bigger than the others and since I was curious about what else was on it, I started the projector again and waited for what was to come next.
The black screen cuts to a white title card that reads “The Butchers’ Curse”. The Butchers’ Curse? What does that mean? The title card cuts out and Bimbo again walks through the cave, this time accompanied by native-themed music. And when I say native-themed, I don’t mean some old-timey, borderline-racist imagining of native music. No, I mean actual native music that one would hear an authentic native band playing. It consists mostly of flutes accompanied by a beating drum designed to convey an eerie mood.
Bimbo walks into a large cavern filled with all kinds of strange beings and monsters, two of them sitting on thrones. One was skeletal in appearance, the other more bird-like. The strangest thing about all the characters other then Bimbo is the way they are drawn. While Bimbo’s outline and features are very bold and simplistic, the outline of the other characters are thin and they have very realistic features. So much so that one can even see the dimples in the faces when they speak!
The bird-like figure on the throne then stands up, holds a sceptre in the air and “speaks”. The reason I put it in quotations is because it doesn’t actually speak. Instead, a rhythmic clacking sounds, like small pieces of wood being smashed together, and a set of strange symbols emanate from the figure’s mouth. The short cuts to Bimbo looking horrified and emphatically declaring “No!” once again. Loud shrieking of trumpets sound and out of the mouth of everyone else comes but one symbol. Bimbo shrieks in horror and wants to run, but gets seized by a skeletal figure wearing… eyes (?!) and a second figure carrying an axe. They violently rip Bimbo's shirt from his body and take him out of the cavern. What happens then is difficult to describe.
The skeleton and axe-monster take Bimbo into a small room with a single, blood-stained altar in the middle. They bind Bimbo onto it and look at each other. We then get a close-up of each of the figures smiling. This is spliced together with close-ups of Max and Dave’s faces. First the skeleton, then Max, followed by the axe-monster and then Dave. They too are smiling. But not a kind smile as if posing for a photo or the something similar. It’s more a deranged smile that starts out as a grin, then gets evermore maddening as the close-ups progress. This goes on for about a minute. The film then cuts to Bimbo’s throat as we see the axe swing in and out of the frame and as soon as it chops Bimbo’s head off, the short cuts to a close-up of a dead, decapitated cub of some kind of great cat bleeding from its throat. The close-up dissolves into a cartoon form of the shot and the two figures laugh and cackle while Bimbo is nowhere to be seen.
Drums begin to play again as the decapitated head is carried to the centre of the previous, cavernous room where we see an effigy of… Walt Disney?! Max and Dave Fleischer in cartoon form enter and are spoken to by the other, skeletal, figure on a throne. This is again indicated by the symbols emanating from its mouth. The two are subsequently each given a strange, black knife of sorts and we again cut to live-action footage of them cutting into one of their hands, thus bleeding excessively, before we see them smearing their blood on a real-life effigy of Walt. The short again cuts to the cartoon where the axe-monster from the decapitation scene does the same with the effigy of Walt and the characters in the cavern find it a good sport to play with it like a basketball, tossing it around and around.
Eventually, the head makes its way to one of the figures on the thrones which places the head in a box and then points his scepter to Max and Dave who kneel down before him. The scene darkens and a large piece of text is displayed all across the screen and seemingly written in the same, strange symbols as seen before. This is the end of the short. That is, sort of. After the text the short cuts to a black screen with a text saying "©Fleischer Studios MCMXL".
After the reel ended, I stopped the projector and just stared at the now blank screen for what seemed like an eternity. What the actual brain**** did I just watch?! Sure, Fleischer Studios was no stranger to the hellish or occult. One of their shorts, "Red Hot Mamma", even shows Betty Boop literally going to hell in a dream and freezing it and the Devil in it! But Max and Dave never actually depicted graphic violence in their work. So what was this? An obscure personal project? A desperate attempt to save their studio? I decided to find out.
A few days later, I had a digital copy made of the reel so that I could take screenshots and post them on forums in search for an answer. It took several weeks but eventually someone did answer me. The user known as vintage_23 told me that the writing displayed was Mayan, as was the entire theme of “The Butchers’ Curse”. The user told me that the scene with the skeleton and axe-guy was a well known scene in Mayan mythology depicting the god of death (skeleton) and the rain god (axe) sacrifice something called ‘the jaguar baby’.
Vintage_23 also told me that the figures in the cavern were the lords of Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, and that they were drawn in what was known as ‘codex style’. Vintage_23 was even nice enough to translate the emanating pieces of writing for me. This is what was said during “The Butchers’ Curse”:
1st scene in cavern: "You, Bimbo, are to be sacrificed as an act of revenge by your creators!"
All figures in cavern (roughly translated): "Sacrifice him! Sacrifice him!" Max and Dave are spoken to: "You who have been wronged, sacrifice your blood with these blades and your wish shall be fulfilled!"
And this is the entire text at the end of the short (again, translated very loosely): "On this day, the 31st of October, 1940, we, Max and Dave Fleischer, take revenge against our enemy, Walt Disney. May he never find peace. May all of his works be frowned upon and may his name forever be associated with the stench of foulness! May Disney forever work with their dark shadow looming over him."
Vintage_23 also told me that I would have to concur with him that this must’ve been an elaborate hoax someone had pulled on me. I asked the person why that was and he sent but one reply:
“Because we haven’t been able to decipher and read Mayan until the 90s, 80’s at best!”
Reading this, I just sat there staring at the screen for who knows how long, just as I had done after watching the short film.
But I knew this wasn’t a clever forgery. It couldn’t be. As you recall, I bought this reel at an auction at my local theatre where it had been lying in its attic for who knows how long. If this actually WAS a forgery, it would’ve meant that someone somewhere would have had to have learned to draw and animate like the Fleischers, learn to draw and animate the Mayan figures, learned how to read and write Mayan, recorded the additional music, find the live-action footage, learned ancient video-editing techniques and then slap that onto a film reel!
And what for? To leave it to rot in an attic of some small town theatre?
This was very clearly real! But what was the point of all this? How did Max and Dave learn to read and write Mayan decades before it was found out by linguists and historians? And what was Walt’s part in all of this? This got my curiosity up and I started doing research on all of this. On Fleischer Studios, their relationship with Disney, the demise of the former and the rise of the latter – and the various myths, legends and rumors surrounding the Disney Corporation. And then it all made sense to me.
In 1940, Fleischer Studios was on the verge of closing its doors (they closed for good in 1942), but the Fleischers weren’t willing to leave without a fight. So they cursed their competitor and Disney’s family-friendly image became its burden. Everything it would produce from now on would be stained by or laced with an aura of cynicism. This is why you get these conspiracy theories and that’s why you read creepy stories upon creepy stories dedicated to the mouse and the “family-friendly image”.
The bishop’s “boner” in ‘Little Mermaid’, the unintentionally implied incest in ‘The Lion King’, the naughty test picture in ‘The Rescuers’, Miley Cyrus’s radical transformation from goody-goody to sitting ***** on a wrecking ball – all of these things are the result of being cursed almost a hundred years ago.
This is why everything the Disney Corporation does is regarded with cynicism.