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what would fit with some certain part of a piece of music, he expected his musician to just simply find some way or other to expand or shorten that part of his music.” 1
    Jackson remembered “a tremendous outburst of bickering” between Stalling and Disney “about whether some music should be changed; and it’s my recollection that a kind of compromise was arrived at, in that if Carl would make his damned music fit the action Walt wanted in this Mickey, Walt would make a whole series . . . where the music would have its way.” 2 The
Mickey Mouse
cartoon in question was almost certainly
The Opry House
, the first cartoon that Stalling scored in Los Angeles.
The Skeleton Dance
, the first cartoon in the new music-dominated series called
Silly Symphonies
, went into production next, before
The Opry House
was finished.
    Disney later spoke of the
Silly Symphonies
as if those cartoons had been more his own idea—“We wanted a series which would let us go in for more of the fantastic and fabulous and lyric stuff” 3 —but Stalling had suggested such a series months earlier, probably when Disney stopped in Kansas City around the first of September on his way to New York. Disney told Roy and Iwerks about three weeks later that there was “a damn good chance to put over a series of Musical novelties such as [Stalling] had in mind. . . . We will have to makeone and show it before we can talk business. . . . We have in mind something that will not cost much to make. . . . It would only be good in Sound Houses and the field is limited. . . . Therefore it would have to be inexpensive to make—What he has in mind sounds like it wouldn’t cost much to make.” 4
    (Disney’s words might seem to apply to
Steamboat Willie
, too, but he prepared a silent version of that cartoon that differed a little from the sound version. He also prepared silent versions of the next few
Mickey Mouse
cartoons.)
    Disney wrote to Roy on September 28: “Carl’s idea of the ‘Skeleton Dance’ for a Musical Novelty has been growing on me . . . I think it has dandy possibilities . . . It would be dandy with all the different effects in it.” The eccentric punctuation here is Disney’s. He used strings of dots freely, but not carelessly, as an aid to a kind of free associating. He let his mind roam as he thought about what might go into a “Skeleton Dance” short: “I think we could Cartoon the Skeletons—and double print over a real background . . . Also used Stuffed OWELS
[sic]
 . . .  BATS  . . . and other spooky things . . . Weird music . . . The Skeletons playing a tune on their ribs . . . Playing a tune on different sized Tombstones . . . Dancing and rattling of bones . . . Some of them playing instruments and all kinds of goofy gags. It wouldn’t be so terribly hard to make if we made use of repeats . . . and music is full of repeats.” 5
    He talked as well as wrote about story ideas in much the same way. There is abundant evidence of that in the transcripts from meetings later in his career.
    Disney and Stalling returned to New York late in January 1929 to record the sound for both
The Opry House
and
Skeleton Dance
. Iwerks animated almost the entire
Skeleton Dance
while they were gone. Thanks to the system that Disney and Jackson had devised for
Steamboat Willie
, there was no need to complete the animation before the music was recorded. All that was needed was for the musician’s bar sheet and the animator’s exposure sheet to align, so that music and drawings were synchronized when combined in the finished film. Disney left Iwerks a highly detailed, single-spaced, typewritten scenario for
The Skeleton Dance
that covered seven pages. 6
    While Disney was in