EVEREADY HARTON: The 1928 Animated Porno Of Your Dreams

In honor of Sausage Party, which you can buy tickets for here, we’re launching a week of articles focused on raunchy films in genres and formats typically reserved for cute little youngsters.

What’s weirder than watching an animated film about a hot dog trying to slip inside of a bun? Watching the 1928 animated porno Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure. Between the sexy comics of early cinema like Betty Boop and Red Hot Riding Hood to the exotic experimental animations of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan’s Sausage Party isn’t the first scandalous adult animation to be released.

Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is still a mystery to film historians. Though there are no credits attributed to the short film, besides the production company Climax and of course Eveready’s credit, people have claimed the film was a collaboration between three separate entities: Max Flieischer (Betty Boop), Budd Fisher (Mutt & Jeff) and Paul Terry (Terrytoons). Each anonymous animator would work on part of the film, send the last frame off to the next guy for consistency purposes, and continue the process until the film was complete. The whole thing is a bizarre adventure of one guy simply trying to get off. It begins semi normally, or as normally as an animated porno about a guy with a penis bigger than his legs can get, with Eveready stumbling upon a woman masturbating in broad daylight. From there the film gets uncomfortably weird; after the first minute it’s clear Eveready is willing to have sex with anything that moves. Mix that with 2D drawings and jazzy piano tunes and it may seem like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone of 1920s cinema. But if you can get over your initial shock, the beastiality, and the blatancy of Eveready’s desire, the film becomes less creepy and more humorous.

And lucky you, the whole thing is on YouTube right now! (This is, of course, NSFW)

Not much is said about the film between its completion and the 1970s. It was screened in San Francisco in the 1970s, released as part of The Good Old Naughty Days compilation with other silent pornographic short films, and screened again at Oddball Films, an awesome and wonky film archive/company up in San Francisco, as part of the Sex, Death and Cartoons program in 2015.

There’s clearly an audience for this weird, slightly uncomfortable shit. But the difference between 1928 and 2016 is that there’s no need to be anonymous. Viewers are far more open to provocative, suggestive takes on sex and sexuality whether they’re animated or not. And in regards to Sausage Party, it seems like audiences are less concerned about its phallic nature and more eager about seeing another Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg work. Though the phallic nature certainly doesn’t hurt.