Alaska Sweepstakes (1930) - Short, dumb, and very fun

If you have five minutes and love old, rubbery cartoons where physics goes completely out the window, Alaska Sweepstakes is absolutely worth your time. Anyone who hates black-and-white slapstick or expects a real plot will probably hate this immediately.

It is a 1930 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short. He is racing in a dog sled race with this huge, goofy mastiff who looks like he has absolutely no bones in his body.

The race is just one disaster after another. At one point, Oswald's sled hits a bump and he flies through the air, and the dog just kind of catches him like a sack of wet laundry. 🐕

I noticed the background keeps looping the exact same three pine trees. It is so lazy but it actually makes the whole thing feel more charming.

Some of the gags are incredibly weird. Like, the dog gets hungry so he literally chews up part of the wooden sled, which makes no sense even for a cartoon.

The weird, floaty physics reminds me of other early shorts from the era, like Bosko's Mechanical Man, where characters just stretch like rubber bands.

Anyway, the whole climax is just them getting rolled into a giant snowball. It rolls down a massive hill, picking up speed until it looks like a runaway boulder.

They cross the finish line and the snowball cracks open like a giant egg. Oswald is just sitting there, totally dizzy, but he wins anyway. 🏆

The print I watched had that grainy, shaky quality where you can see the dust on the original cell. I really love that look.

It's not a masterpiece. But it gets noticeably better once you stop trying to make sense of the dog's anatomy.