When I was 5 years old I watched Bimbo's Initiation, and its psychedelic brilliance had an ever-lasting impression on me.
The animated short starring Bimbo the dog was made in 1931 by Fleischer Studios and depicts an early version of Betty Boop; Betty is part animal, with dog ears and a dog nose.
The story begins when Bimbo the dog is walking down the street and falls through a manhole. He finds himself in a strange underground house, where he's faced with a secret society of masked people who ask him repeatedly "Want to be a member? Want to be a member?"
In order to escape them, Bimbo has to navigate a house that has come alive with many nightmarish, funhouse-like traps. A knife with a chomping mouth full of teeth pokes out of the wall as the floor begins moving Bimbo closer to it like a conveyor belt, he gets swallowed by a tunnel after getting to the last door in a set of doors that are inside of each other like Russian nesting dolls, and his own shadow gets decapitated.
I'm always impressed by the psychedelic nature of this cartoon, as it was made decades before the psychedelic revolution. I credit this cartoon for inspiring the weirdness within my personal artwork and my interest in surrealism.
