The title is a corruption of "melodrama", thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows, as a film short based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and stars Mickey Mouse and his friends who stage their own production of the novel.

[2] The cartoon shows Mickey Mouse and some other characters dressed in blackface with exaggerated lips, bushy sidewhiskers made out of cotton, and the usual white gloves.

[4] Henry Louis Gates Jr. wondered how the cartoon evaded censorship of miscegenation, given that Mickey and Minnie portray Tom and Eva, and are "as they say, an item, and unmistakably so".

[5] In the beginning of this short, Clarabelle Cow appears in her dressing room applying lantern soot to her face and leaving an exaggerated area around her lips white.

Mickey Mouse then takes a more "comical" approach to applying the makeup: he puts a firecracker in his mouth and lights it, which explodes, causing the ashes to paint his face black while leaving a large area around his lips white.