The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Taking a look at a post on IMDbs Classic Film board featuring links to animated shorts from 1934,I was surprised to spot a pre-Disney version of Sleepy Hollow,which led to me thinking that this might be a good time to lose my head!The plot:Reading the mythical tale of the Headless Horseman to children at Sleepy Hollow School, Ichabod Crane receives an invitation to attend a ball being held at the town hall.Arriving at the ball,Crane catches the eye of Katrina Van Tassel.Furious that Crane is tempting his fiancée away, Brom Van Brunt decides that he must get "ahead" of Crane.View on the film: Toning down the Gothic Horror elements of the tale,director Ub Iwerks instead gives his version a handmade quality,with the animation having a rough sketch appearance,which sadly creates a feeling of Iwerks stopping heads from rolling in the aisle.Along with the films rough look,Iwerks also dips the film in 4th wall breaking pop culture,with Clark Gable nodding along to the Horseman myth,as Ichabod Crane discovers that some myths can become real.

Headless Horseman, The (1934) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Animated version of the classic story has a group of people meeting up at a party where the legend of Sleepy Hollow is told. Soon, a headless horseman is running loose but is he the real one or a fake? This is a pretty unique little film as it's pretty much told silent with the exception of a few sound effects. The animation itself is pretty vividly done and best of all are the night scenes with the horseman, which looks really good. The biggest problem is that the story itself takes quite a while to warm up and take off. The actual story doesn't take place until nearly the five-minute mark and the final gag doesn't work too well.

Who gets the girl: Icabod Crane or Bom Bones? They both are after Katrina Von Tassel in this famous tale, brought to cartoon life in this UB Iwerks production. This story had been done once in animation, back in 1922. This one offers up the story in color.As with a lot of these Celebrity Productions, made in "Cinecolor," the story takes precedence over the humor. At least, that's the way it appears today. Maybe people laughed a lot more 70 years ago at this kind of cartoon but I don't think it would happen today. Now, it's more of a curiosity piece and a quick, condensed (eight minutes, usually) version of a famous tale with new twists added sometimes.Not having read the novel, I can't tell you what's bogus in this cartoon story, only that it offers very little. The only clever animated scene was the grandfather clock going to sleep. The ending was a bit of a surprise and I did smile at the very last scene. Overall, however, this not recommended.

Ub Iwerks (his name was Dutch) was an early colleague of Walt Disney's, a prolific animator who was almost single-handedly responsible for such classic works as Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance. But after Iwerks had a falling-out with the boss he struck out on his own, and established a studio under his own name in 1930. There, for the next few years, he and his crew produced dozens of cartoons. The best of them are pretty good, and even the weaker entries always offer a nice moment or two, but Iwerks never recaptured the spark of inspiration that fired his earlier work with Disney, and his studio finally went under in 1936. A chastened Iwerks returned to the Disney factory as a technician and worked there for the rest of his career.The Headless Horseman was one of a series of "ComiColor" cartoons Iwerks produced, usually based on fairy or folk tales, not unlike Disney's concurrent Silly Symphonies. It's a decent cartoon with both good and bad elements, and serves as an exemplar of the strengths and weaknesses of the overall Iwerks output. On the plus side, the musical score by Carl Stalling (who left Disney's employ alongside Iwerks) is outstanding, extremely catchy and atmospheric, and really carries the viewer along. The color is nice, too, at least in the print I've seen; the Cinecolor process Iwerks was using was cheap, and not as dazzling as Disney's product at the time, but the blues and reds look strong here, and the backgrounds, such as sinister-looking trees against night skies, are especially atmospheric. Iwerks was also experimenting with an early version of the multi-plane camera in this cartoon, a device which would later be used to great effect at the Disney studio in The Old Mill, Pinocchio, etc. The gliding camera movement seen here during the climatic chase is the technical high point. This cartoon has no dialog but there are some amusing visual gags, and for classic era Hollywood buffs there's a cute moment when Katrina imagines her beau Brom Bones as Clark Gable, who is amusingly caricatured.On the debit side, however, character design in The Headless Horseman is poor. Ichabod Crane is supposed to be ugly, at least he was described as homely in the original Washington Irving story, but everyone else in this cartoon is goofy-looking too, and we start to wonder if that was intentional. More significantly, not one of these characters is the least bit sympathetic, which is important even in a small-scale enterprise such as this one. The viewer has to care what happens to at least one character, or else why watch? We root for Bugs Bunny, we dig Betty Boop, and we might even root for Donald Duck if he isn't being too obnoxious, but there is no one in The Headless Horseman we can even like, much less root for, and this was too often the case in the Iwerks cartoons. Another debit: clownish racial caricatures of black servants, although Iwerks certainly wasn't the only offender in this area at the time.All in all, sort of a C-plus/B-minus experience, and although Iwerks made better cartoons than this one it's an indication of why he didn't succeed as an independent producer. But Carl Stalling's work is terrific, and he went on to do great things with the Termite Terrace gang at Warner Brothers. And eventually, a very good Headless Horseman cartoon was produced in 1949 -- by Disney, of course!