Paul Terry returns with his current cast of supporting players to Davy Jones locker in this mildly fantastic and scary Halloween cartoon.
There's little doubt at in the four years since Terry had left Amadee van Beuren to form his own cartoon studio, his work had grown in sophistication and competence. With with equally old hand Frank Moser as his co-director -- both had credits going back to 1915; Terry with Bray and Moser with Raoul Barre -- they knew every trick in the animation book. However, they were never leaders in the field, largely content to offer better variations on works done ten years earlier. Other animation studios were anxious to lead: Disney, the Fleischers, Lantz and soon the young crew at Schlesinger's studio. Terry was happy to to keep up, to make a little money on his cartoons by keeping within budget. As a result, he turned out decent cartoons, but this one, like his other work, amuses without offering the audience anything that wasn't disposable. Soon enough he would turn out the same cartoon, perhaps with a different character in the lead, perhaps with color. And that one would be equally disposable, to be replaced in a couple of years by another slightly more advanced iteration.
It wasn't that Terry's studio lacked talent. It was that Terry lacked the ambition.