The Rarebit Fiend gorges on Welsh rarebit at a restaurant. When he leaves, he begins to get dizzy as he starts to hallucinate. He desperately tries to hang onto a lamppost as the world spins all around him. A man helps him get home. He falls into bed and begins having more hallucinatory dreams. During a dream sequence, the furniture begins moving around the room. Imps emerge from a floating Welsh rarebit container and begin poking his head as he sleeps. His bed then begins dancing and spinning wildly around the room before flying out the window with the Fiend in it. The bed floats across the city as the Fiend floats up and off the bed. He hangs off the back and eventually gets caught on a weathervane atop a steeple. His bedclothes tear and he falls from the sky, crashing through his bedroom ceiling. The Fiend awakens from the dream after falling out of his bed.
The Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend 1906
McCay first proposed a strip in which a tobacco fiend finds himself at the North Pole, unable to secure a cigarette and a light. In the last panel he awakens to find it a dream. The Herald asked McCay to make a series of the strip, but with a Welsh rarebit theme instead of tobacco, and McCay complied.[24] The strip appeared in a Herald subsidiary, the Evening Telegram, and the Herald's editor required McCay to use a pseudonym for the strip work to keep it separate from his other work. McCay signed Rarebit Fiend strips as "Silas", a name he borrowed from a neighborhood garbage cart driver.[24] After switching to William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work with his own name.[25]
Throw Edison, Porter, Winsor McCay and a massive meal of rarebit together with the fab accompaniment of the Alloy Orchestra and you get this marvellous fantasy film, bursting with photographic tricks as our hero has some pretty disturbing visions and dreams brought on by his over-indulgence.
He falls into bed and begins having more hallucinatory dreams. During a dream sequence, the furniture begins moving around the room. Imps emerge from a floating Welsh rarebit container and begin poking his head as he sleeps.
The consequences of heavy suppers found their greatest artistic expression in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). This early piece of cinema used the dream as the ideal device through which to exhibit the spectacular feats of the new medium, as the dreamer soars above the city after having gorged to excess on the titular dish. 2ff7e9595c
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