The Old Mill Pond
1936 film by Hugh Harman
The Old Mill Pond is a 1936 American animated short film in the Happy Harmonies series, directed by Hugh Harman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The short was nominated at the 1936 Academy Awards for Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film but lost to Disney's Silly Symphony short, The Country Cousin.
Summary
Fish and frogs gather at a pond. The performers are caricatures of Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Stepin Fetchit, Ethel Waters and The Mills Brothers.
Sequel
The Old Mill Pond was followed by sequel, Swing Wedding in 1937.
Reception
The Film Daily (May 13, 1936): "This musical comedy cartoon is a knockout. Following the opening, which is the song "Down by the Old Mill Stream", the impersonations are Cab Calloway and his band doing "Minnie the Moocher" routine, "Fats" Waller doing his piano number, Bill Robinson his taps, the Mills Bros. their "Hold That Tiger", Stepin Fechit is presented, and a dancing chorus does "Jungle Rhythm". The Technicolor is beautiful, especially in the water numbers. This short is just one load of entertainment all the way through".
“The Old Mill Pond” enters the record as 1936 film by Hugh Harman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mill, Pond and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Old Mill Pond” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mill, Pond and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2413189. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936 and 1937.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Old Mill Pond” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.