Dinner Time (Cartoon, 1928)

Dinner Time is a 1928 American animated short film, produced by Amadee J. Van Beuren, directed by Paul Terry, and co-directed by John Foster at Van Beuren Studios. It’s part of the Aesop’s Fables series, featuring Terry’s recurring character Farmer Al Falfa. The cartoon is notable for being one of the first publicly shown sound-on-film cartoons, premiering at the Strand Theater in New York City in August 1928 and released by Pathé Exchange on October 14, 1928—about a month before Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie. Josiah Zuro arranged and conducted the synchronized musical score, using RCA’s Photophone system, a pioneering technology for embedding sound directly onto film.
The plot is a chaotic, gag-driven romp. It opens with a bird waking up, sliding down a spider’s web, and failing to catch a worm, which taunts it by tossing dirt on its head. The bird then perches on a clothesline, where a cat tries to catch it but ends up tangled and falls, humorously rushing to reclaim its “nine lives.” The scene shifts to a dog scavenging bones, only to be bullied by a bigger dog, who’s then outwitted by a smaller one in a quick power shuffle. Finally, we meet Farmer Al Falfa, here a butcher chopping meat outside his shop. A hungry dog distracts him to steal a steak, sparking a frenzy as a pack of dogs floods in, looting everything. Al calls a dogcatcher, who arrives but accidentally frees the pound’s dogs instead of corralling the thieves. In the mayhem, Al gets knocked out, stuffed into the dogcatcher’s wagon, and wakes up to pummel the hapless catcher. The cartoon ends with the dogs making off with Al’s shop as he chases them futilely.
The sound design is primitive but ambitious for its time—think animal barks, grunts, and clattering effects, though the synchronization is loose and lacks dialogue. The animation is fluid yet simple, typical of 1920s cartoons, with a raw, hand-drawn charm. While it’s fast-paced and packed with slapstick—like the cat’s clothesline fiasco or the escalating dog heist—it lacks a tight narrative or memorable characters, which is why it didn’t capture audiences like Steamboat Willie did. Walt Disney reportedly saw it and called it “one of the rottenest Fables” he’d ever seen, though it inspired him to refine his own sound cartoon efforts. Historically, Dinner Time is a milestone as an early sound experiment, but its crude execution and scattershot humor keep it more of a curiosity than a classic.