The Skeleton Dance is a 1929 Silly Symphony animated short subject with a comedy horror theme.

[1] In 1993, to coincide with the opening of Mickey's Toontown in Disneyland, a shortened cover of the cartoon's music was arranged to be featured in the land's background ambiance.

[5][6] The strokes of midnight echo throughout a spooky moonlit cemetery, a group of living skeletons soon rise from their graves and start dancing.

The short film begins with an owl perched on a branch, in front of the full moon, then shows an empty graveyard with a church in the background.

During a stopover in Kansas City, Disney paid a visit to his old acquaintance Carl Stalling, then an organist at the Isis Theatre, to compose scores for his first two Mickey shorts, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho.

[7] The soundtrack was recorded at Pat Powers' Cinephone studio in New York in the following month, along with that of the Mickey Mouse short The Opry House.

[1] Variety (July 17, 1929): "Title tells the story, but not the number of laughs included in this sounded cartoon short.

Peak is reached when one skeleton plays the spine of another in xylophone fashion, using a pair of thigh bones as hammers.

All takes place in a graveyard, and it is a howl from start to finish, with an owl and a rooster brought in for atmosphere.

[15] The Skeleton Dance appears in the 2012 video game Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two as an unlockable short.