Trumpet player Edward Farley and trombonist Mike Riley were working at the Onyx club in New York with the singer Red McKenzie's five-piece band when, in September 1935, they happened to compose and record a novelty number for Decca Records (with lyrics supplied by Red Hodgson) called "The Music Goes 'Round and Around."
But the record was an overnight sensation, selling some hundred thousand copies and transforming the fledgling company into a major label.
At least it makes no pretense of being anything but a musical interlude dragged in by the scruff of its neck to illustrate the devastating effect upon the public of some anonymous young busybody's question about the workings of a three-valve sax horn.
Like the "March of Time," it preserves in film the stark record of a social phenomenon—in this case, the conversion of a song hit into a plague, like Japanese beetles or chain letters.
In 1992, the song was used as the soundtrack for a very popular, long-running stop-motion animated UK TV commercial for Weetabix Ltd's Weetos breakfast cereal.