Abstract

In Disney’s 1922 Laugh-O-Grams cartoon Puss in Boots, there’s a scene a third of the way through in
which the protagonist (named simply ‘The Boy’), despondent at the King’s disapproval of him as a
match for his daughter, is persuaded by his feline friend Puss to visit the local cinema. There, they
watch a cartoon billed ‘RODOLPH VASELINO In THROWING THE BULL In Six Parts’, the title of which
unmistakably alludes to Rudolph Valentino’s starring role in the silent version of Blood and Sand
(1922). Here, the cartoonalising of Valentino as Vaselino and the young boy’s emulation of this star
by becoming a masked matador who ends up having to rely on hypnotic help from Puss to defeat
the bull comically deflates this actor’s privileged status as human star by re-presenting him within a
form (animation) traditionally regarded as the poor relation to live action cinema. As such, this
cartoon skit of Valentino in Blood and Sand illustrates animation’s penchant for ‘import[ing] […] nonanimated movie star trappings to re-perform the artifice of stardom’, using ‘parody and creative reperformances of “straight” stardom’.