An "Aesops Fable", from the cartoon studio of Paul Terry (which in later years, under the name "Terrytoons", would be notorious for the shamelessly cheap and formulaic nature of its product), with little to do with Aesop: it features a lazy farm cat (bearing a resemblance to Felix the Cat so close as to be doubtfully legal), who is also the farmer's barber.'

The Van Beuren Studios - undoubtedly Walt Disneys most obscure rival - licensed Otto Soglow's popular comic strip of the day, about a short king who delights in the fact nobody is in a position to talk him out of his eccentric behaviour, for a series of ten cartoons from 1933-34. In this one, The King takes a tour of the Royal Museum, where he proceeds to graffiti the art and pull pranks on other members of the tour group.'

Sidney Stratton (Guinness) invents a fabric that will not wear out and doesnt need to be cleaned - which is enough to unite everyone in the land against him. The entire clothing and textile industry (part of the joke of the film is how quickly the cigar-gnawing industrialists and the militant unionists find themselves manning the same barricades), the government, the press, the banks, the mob; all are baying for his blood. And some viewers of the film say they're right to do so. Stratton's invention will throw them out of work, after all... I think people who reason like this have something deeply wrong with them, but that's what they say.It goes without saying that Alec Guinness gives a dazzling performance, as the disinterested, socially clueless scientist; as always, you could use his sense of comic timing to slice carrots. The director, who would later leave for America to make one of the most cynical, abrasive films of the 1950s (Sweet Smell of Success), injects a dangerously high amount of quinine into what producer Michael Balcon no doubt hoped would be another charming, non-threatening Ealing comedy - enough to galvanise the film, without actually killing it.'

A field expedition in Egypt, led by the archaeologist Sir Joseph Whemple, unearths a wealth of treasures including the thousands of years old mummy of Im-Ho-Tep and a mysterious scroll. That scroll is the legendary Scroll of Toth, whose words have the power to resurrect the dead. Not knowing its powers, a young member of the expedition reads the scroll aloud and awakens Im-Ho-Tep. The ensuing horror drives him mad.Ten years later, in 1931, Sir Joseph Whemple returns to Egypt with another expedition party. Over the course of the preceding decade, the mummy has assumed a human identity. Now he longs to uncover his lost love, who has been reincarnated in the body of a beautiful woman, and is prepared to hijack Whemples expedition to reach his ends.The Mummy is arguably the best of Boris Karloff's Universal monster movies, though most would side with Frankenstein (the film that made him a household name only a year earlier - so much so that "Karloff" was more prominent than "The Mummy" on the film's poster). Even if you prefer Frankenstein, it would be difficult not to put The Mummy at #2. The film itself holds up remarkably well to this day (remarkably so for a movie that was quickly cobbled together to exploit its star). The costuming and special effects still appear surprisingly good. The plot holds up, both in terms of story and structure, to the point that it only really needed minor tweaking to drive the 1999 remake.'