A Wintry Lineup of Early Disney Stars
Walt Disney’s Ski-Jump Target Game was produced in the late 1930s by the American Toy Works of New York under license from Walt Disney Enterprises. The game pairs a lithographed target board with a set of die-cut, stand-up figures, each Disney character rendered as a skier in winter dress. Its design is credited to Arthur Dritz, a New York game inventor whose name was printed on the box itself, an unusual credit for a toy of the period.
What makes the Ski-Jump game such a vivid time capsule is its cast. Alongside the studio’s marquee names, Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Donald Duck, Pluto, and Dopey of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, stand several characters who have since faded from the Disney spotlight: Peter Pig, Toby Tortoise, and Max Hare. Seeing them gathered on one board is a snapshot of exactly who counted as a Disney “star” before the war.
The Silly Symphonies and Disney’s First Licensing Wave
Most of those now-obscure faces came from the Silly Symphonies, the series of 75 musical animated shorts Walt Disney Productions made from 1929 to 1939. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons, the Symphonies usually had no recurring lead, which freed the studio to introduce fresh characters film by film, and to showcase Technicolor and the multiplane camera.
Peter Pig debuted in the 1934 Silly Symphony The Wise Little Hen, the same short that introduced Donald Duck; the two play layabouts who feign stomachaches to dodge work. Toby Tortoise and Max Hare came from The Tortoise and the Hare (1935), a Symphony based on Aesop’s fable that had already taken the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) for 1934. Max, “The Blue Streak,” is all cocky speed; Toby, “Slow But Sure,” plods to victory. The pair were popular enough to return in a 1936 sequel, Toby Tortoise Returns.
Their presence on a 1937 to 1939 toy reflects Disney’s first great merchandising boom. After Walt and Roy Disney signed Herman “Kay” Kamen as the studio’s sole licensing agent in the early 1930s, Disney characters spread across an enormous range of consumer goods, a story told in our profile of the licensing genius who made Mickey Mouse merchandise a global business. The Ski-Jump game arrived right at the moment Snow White (1937), Disney’s first feature, was reshaping that catalog, the same creative era surveyed in our look at golden-age animation cels of 1937 to 1950.
American Toy Works and Arthur Dritz
American Toy Works produced a string of Disney-licensed games in this period, and Arthur Dritz (1905 to 1986) was the designer behind several of them. He devised the company’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Target Game and later its Pinocchio Target Game, both licensed from Walt Disney Enterprises. The Ski-Jump game sits within this same family of dart-and-target toys.
The studio’s pre-war games extended well beyond targets. Earlier Disney board-and-table titles include Walt Disney’s Game Parade and the Silly Symphony tie-in Walt Disney’s Own Game: The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Dritz left American Toy Works in March 1942 to open his own studio, closing out a brief but productive run that left the Ski-Jump game as a small, snow-covered roster of Disney’s earliest cartoon ensemble.
