Lady, Play Your Mandolin! (1931)

Lady, Play Your Mandolin! Review

 Lady, Play Your Mandolin! is a 1931 animated short film that is the first ever Merry Melody. It is a flawed short with great music.

This is the first appearance of Foxy and his girlfriend Roxy. Now I admittedly liked these characters here as they were fun, but of course their looks are basically rehashes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse which is mildly put troublesome. The plot here is standard and the action is also pretty uninspired and typical. I liked that moment where the horse was annoyed by all of the singing. That was hilarious. But other than that, the film isn’t particularly funny.

However, Lady, Play Your Mandolin! succeeds as a solid opening for Merry Melodies mainly because of the music which is just phenomenal. The titular song is fantastic and I know that they milked it a lot here and that it was repeated throughout the whole running time plus the fact that it isn’t the original property of the series but the studio isn’t helping, but it is such a great, incredibly catchy and entertaining song that it doesn’t matter.

Lady, Play Your Mandolin! has solid characters and a standard plot, but the titular song lifted the movie and made it very memorable.

 My Rating – 3.7