Jack and the Beanstalk

A phantasmal strip of nitrate, now little more than rumor and ember, once vaulted a Kansas City boy-king straight into the gullet of a sky-eclipsing beanstalk. In this vanished 1922 Laugh-O-Gram, Jack—rendered with the spindly, ink-blot grace of a youthful Disney—trades a braying cow for a fistful of vertiginous legumes that explode into a helical green tower, knotting earth to cloud like a living spinal column. Up that chlorophyll cathedral he clambers, past cumulus gargoyles and moon-bright finches, into a giant’s rococo fortress where harps chime of copper thunder and hens defecate nuggets of auriferous light. The ogre, sketched as a hulking ink-splattered shadow whose eyes burn sodium-orange, pursues Jack through corridors that elongate like nightmares, until the boy hacks the stalk clean away and plummets back into a sepia dust-kansas where poverty still waits to be abolished by mouse-eared miracles. Nothing remains but a brittle synopsis in a 1923 trade paper and the lingering suspicion that every subsequent Disney ascent—be it pixie-dust castle or roller-coaster space mountain—owes its DNA to this trembling vine.