Milton Gray, a leading Hollywood animator for many years, was also my indispensable collaborator when I was editing Funnyworld and writing Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. He has been an occasional contributor to this Web site and others—the "Flip Book" in the right-hand column is his—and now he has launched a site of his own, a continuing comic strip. "Ms. Viagri Ampleten" is a spy spoof with a spectacularly endowed amazon as its title character. The strip will be updated every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, starting Wednesday of this week. To start reading with the first installment, click on this link.
UNHAPPY TRAILS: Six years ago, I wrote about my visit to the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri. I said then that walking through the museum was "a little like having Roy say to you, 'Come into my den and let me show you my collection of autographed baseballs.' I was hoping for a series of exhibits that would embrace the lives and careers of both stars and place them in the context of movie westerns and Hollywood in general, but what the museum offers instead is amiable clutter, much of it better left in the attic." A lot of other people must have agreed, because the museum, suffering from declining attendance, closed late last year. This month, its contents—including Roy's stuffed horse, Trigger, as well as a few animation-related items—went up for auction at Christie's in New York. Many if not most of the auction prices exceeded estimates, sometimes by wide margins; Trigger went for $266,500, Roy's saddle for almost $400,000. Evidence, perhaps, that Roy and Dale still have a lot of fans, even if they didn't want to visit Branson to pay homage to their heroes.
The copy of Roy Rogers Comics No. 1 at right is from own collection; I don't recall seeing any comic books at the museum or listed for the auction. Odd.
MICKEY'S THE WORD: I posted an item on May 31 about the use of "Mickey Mouse" as a password for a meeting of naval officers that preceded the D-Day invasion in 1944. At that point, I knew of three U.S. newspapers that had published a brief United Press item about the meeting. Now more such reports have come to light, thanks to a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous and, indirectly, the Disney archivist Dave Smith. A UP story was published in the New York Herald Tribune on June 8, 1944, and a somewhat longer and more detailed story, evidently not originating with UP, was published in the Johannesburg (South Africa) Sunday Times for June 11, 1944. It seems likely to me that all these stories originated with some as yet unidentified source, possibly a British newspaper. And where did that meeting of naval officers take place? So far there's no more specific location than a "southern port."
HARVEY PEKAR: The passing earlier this month of Harvey Pekar, the writer and proprietor of the American Splendor comic books, was marked by full-length obituaries and essays in major newspapers. I can't think of any other true comic-book person, except possibly Carl Barks, who received such respectful attention upon his death. The best of the pieces I've read is Jeet Heer's appreciation in the Canadian National Post, which benefits immensely from Heer's very extensive knowledge of the comics. I once followed closely everything Pekar did, starting in the '70s with American Splendor No. 2 (I still don't have No. 1, which is no doubt out of my price range), and I'm a little sorry now that I let my attention fade in recent years. Pekar and I corresponded in the early '70s, pre-American Splendor, and he wrote a piece about his friend R. Crumb for Funnyworld No. 13, in 1971; you can read it by clicking on this link. My own extended consideration of Pekar's work took the form of a review of the movie version of American Splendor, in 2003; I think that piece holds up very well, and you can find it at this link.
FACEBOOK: I still haven't gotten into gear as far as Facebook is concerned, and I think my unanswered "friend requests" total in the many dozens. If you've asked to be my friend, and I haven't responded, don't take it personally.
Back in the late '80s and early '90s, when I worked for a magazine called Nation's Business, my job for several years was to travel around the country and interview interesting small-business people, or, occasionally, interesting people who had owned a small business at some earlier point in their lives. Those few years were easily the most enjoyable of my sixteen years with the magazine, since I got to spend hours or even days with people as varied as Sam Walton, Julia Child, Dick Clark, and Charles Schulz. Then and later, even after my formal duties with the magazine had changed, I seized opportunities to interview and write about small-business people with animation and comics connections. Bill Melendez was one, and he was, predictably, a lot of fun; Will Vinton was another, and I remember him as cold and suspicious.
When I was in Los Angeles in November 1997, I interviewed John Kricfalusi at his studio, which was then on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. My story was eventually published in the June 1998 issue, on the page called "Free-Spirited Enterprise." I recently ran across that story when I was going through some old files, and that's it just above. To call up a much larger and therefore more readable version, click on the page or on this link. You can also hear an audio clip from the interview by clicking on this link (MP3 player required); in it, Kricfalusi acts out what was planned to be a downloadable
"Christmas card" starring his characters George Liquor
and Jimmy the Idiot Boy.
John K. was in 1997 near the end of what might be called the Charming Young Eccentric phase of his life, and I think it's interesting—and more than a little sad—to measure what he said then against the wreckage of the ensuing years, the wretched Adult Cartoon Party in particular. It's too bad he didn't continue making cartoons for ten-year-old boys instead of cartoons whose intended audience seems to have been hopelessly degenerate sixty-year-old men.
Speaking of reprints of my earlier work: Michael Sporn, whose "Splog" is essential reading/viewing, has posted (with my approval) a piece I wrote for Millimeter magazine late in 1976 about the films of John and Faith Hubley. It was published just before John's death in February 1977, and just a couple of months after I'd interviewed him in New York. I remember writing that piece in a hurry, and it has rough edges that make me wince now, but I think it holds up pretty well overall.
On September 3, 2009, I posted an item headed "The Curious Case of Mortimer Mouse," which I illustrated with an image from the Walt Disney Family Museum's Facebook page. That image was a sheet of sketches identified as "The Earliest Known Drawings of Mickey Mouse." The oddest of those drawings was of a mouse of the general Johnny Gruelle kind, fussier in clothing and in physical attributes—that is, a little more like a real mouse—than the Mickey who appeared for the first time, in the spring of 1928, in Plane Crazy. This "Little Lord Fauntleroy Mouse," as I called him, never appeared on the screen but turned up repeatedly in print in later years (as evidenced by my September 4 and September 10, 2009, posts) to show what Mickey had supposedly evolved from.
Back on May 5, Didier Ghez wrote on his Disney History blog about a precursor of that "Fauntleroy mouse":
I was working this weekend on an interview with Ub Iwerks conducted by Bob Thomas in the mid-'50s (and which will appear in Walt's People - Volume 10) in which Ub recalls the creation of Mickey Mouse as follows:
"Walt came back discouraged to Hollywood [from his meeting with Mintz in New York] and set-up a meeting with Roy and I to discuss possibilities for a new character. I tried some sketches of dogs and cats, but there were too many cats (like Krazy Kat). Then I went through a batch of magazines. In Life or Judge I ran into cartoons of animals by [Clifton] Meek and got an idea for a mouse. We weren’t artists. There were almost none in the field. We worked out the character: Lilly gave it a name, then we cooked up a story sitting around."
What Didier was doing with that Thomas interview (as he explained in a subsequent post) was translating Thomas's very rough typewritten notes into something readable. Here's what the typewritten notes actually look like:
Someone on the Archives staff made my photocopy of the notes during one of my research visits in 1994 and accidentally lopped off the right side of the page, but I don't think anything critical was lost.
Bob Thomas's notes referred originally to "Nofziger"—presumably Ed Nofziger, a magazine and newspaper cartoonist who specialized in animals—but that reference was corrected by someone—I can't identify the handwriting—to "Meeker." Although Leslie Iwerks, in her heavily slanted biography of her grandfather, takes that reference to "Meeker" literally, there seems to be no question but that Iwerks was thinking of Clifton Meek, who drew mouse cartoons in the teens and twenties. Meek himself wrote about his Disney connection in "A Tribute to the Late Walt Disney," in the Norwalk (Connecticut) Hour, on February 23, 1967; there's a link to that article in Didier's post, but it's also available through this link at the English-language Google News site.
In that article, Meek referred to an interview with Walt in the June 30, 1944, New York Post. I located that interview on microfilm, and I've already cited it once before, in my May 31 item about the use of "Mickey Mouse" as a D-Day password. In the interview (which took place about two weeks before it was published), the reporter, Mary Braggiotti, quotes Walt as citing Meek as an influence in his choice of a mouse as his cartoon star: "There was a man named Clifton Meek who used to draw cute little mice and I grew up with those drawings. They were different mice from ours—but they had cute ears." (Meek in his tribute left off that last sentence, perhaps because it diluted the connection between his mice and Walt's mouse.)
Didier reproduced some of Meek's drawings (which can also be found on the page for Meek at the Lambiek Comiclopedia) with his post, and I'll borrow one of them here; you can see what Walt may have meant by "cute ears," and it's in those ears, if nowhere else, that you can see a possible connection with the early Mickey.
Or was Walt referring to Meek's earlier and more schematic mice in his "Johnny Mouse" cartoons, an example of which you can see in the accompanying 1914 cartoons from the Pittsburgh Press? Gunnar Andreassen included that cartoon in a message that Didier posted on May 13. Meek says in his article that he was drawing "Johnny Mouse" as early as 1912, in San Francisco, and apparently it was syndicated (by, Meek says in that 1967 article, the Scripps-McRae syndicate) for several years at least.
The questions here are many: When and how did Walt see Meek's cartoons? He "grew up with those drawings," so he must have seen them in the teens. But did he see both kinds of mice? Did a Kansas City newspaper carry Meek's "Johnny Mouse"? (I haven't checked yet, on microfilm or otherwise.) Or was Walt thinking of Meek's cartoons published a little later, in humor magazines like Life? Presumably he saw Meek's mouse cartoons before Meek began devoting himself to the comic strip called "Grindstone George," which the Lambiek Comiclopedia dates to 1916-1919.
Along the same lines, is the drawing of "Fauntleroy Mouse" on that early sheet a recollection of Meek's Gruelle-like mice, or was it inspired by Gruelle's own subsequent drawings of similar characters? Meek and Gruelle were friends, and it was at Gruelle's urging that Meek moved to New York, almost a hundred years ago. There's no reason to believe that Meek took umbrage at Gruelle's use of fully clothed animal characters similar to Meek's in the 1920s, in books like Johnny Mouse and the Wishing Stick (1922) and in the 1920-21 Good Housekeeping feature called "The Dwarfies." I've reproduced below a "Dwarfies" page from the April 1921 Good Housekeeping; the story's cast includes three mice named Mickie, Minnie, and Maurice.
Then again, maybe all these questions about influences are a little beside the point. Walt and his colleagues admired some cartoonists' work more than others, but when it came to designing characters, intensely practical considerations were most important. In the crisis precipitated by the loss of most of the Disney animators, having a workable design at hand had to count for more than any aesthetic preferences.
When George Sherman of the Disney staff interviewed Ub Iwerks on July 30, 1970, what Iwerks said about Mickey's origins, according to Sherman's notes at the Disney Archives (I don't know that Iwerks was ever tape recorded), was significantly different from what he told Bob Thomas fifteen years earlier. Walt Disney was gone, and with him, perhaps, any lingering temptation to exaggerate Iwerks's own role in the creation of Mickey Mouse. "I don't recall any special meetings or discussions on how Mickey should look," the notes have Iwerks saying. "Back in 1925 Hugh Harmon [sic] did some sketches of Walt's characters, and they were photographed around Walt. A couple of little mice looked like Mickey. The only difference was in the shape of the nose. We decided to make Mickey the size of a little boy. We couldn't have him mouse-size because of scale problems. We asked ourselves, 'What are people gonna think?' The size we selected must have been right—people accepted him as a symbolic character, and though he looked like a mouse he was accepted as dashing and heroic."
I've reproduced part of that 1925 publicity photo/drawing at the left; it's on page 40 of the original 1973 edition of Christoper Finch's The Art of Walt Disney. Hugh Harman's mice are smaller than the Mickey of Plane Crazy—there was no need to be concerned about scale in such a drawing—but there's a strong general resemblance otherwise. The differences between these mice and the original Mickey may be even more telling, though—and more indicative of Walt's own contribution to the character—for reasons I wrote about in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. I think now that I probably gave Iwerks too much credit for designing Mickey (as opposed to making the earliest drawings of the character, which he almost certainly did), but otherwise what I wrote seems to me to be on target:
"There was nothing particularly innovative about Plane Crazy or its mouse star. He was a formulaic mouse of a kind that had long been plentiful in competitors' cartoons, and in some of Disney's own, too—Alice's Circus Daze, for instance. Like many of the mice in Paul Terry's Fables, the earlier Disney mice had simple faces—essentially white masks composed of eyes and muzzle—on otherwise black bodies, a characteristic that they shared with Felix and Oswald and many other animal characters of the twenties. ... Typically, though, the mice in Terry's Fables had pointed and downturned noses, fried-egg eyes, and long, skinny ears; in Mickey's design, the snout turned up, not down, and the ears were emphatic circles, rather than blown back. Mickey was a much more positive-looking character than the earlier mice, and although Ub Iwerks surely deserves most of the credit for Mickey's design, the cast of the character's features was very much in keeping with the emphatically optimistic tone that Disney himself adopted."
And there's something else. In 1940, Walt Disney said that as late as 1930, "my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop's Fables series." At least two silent cartoons in that series, released in the months just before Walt made his first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, had as lead characters a mouse couple roughly the size of Disney's Mickey and Minnie, and generally similar to them otherwise. Three years later, Disney sued Fables' producer, the Van Beuren Corporation, for imitating Mickey and Minnie too closely. Disney was successful, even though the Fables people had a ready-made defense in that Disney's cartoons resembled some of their silent cartoons about as closely as theirs resembled his. But Paul Terry, who made the cartoons with the mouse couple, had been fired by Fables, in the turmoil surrounding the transition to sound, and it may be that no one at the Fables studio in 1931 even remembered those old cartoons with the two mice. If Walt remembered them, he never let on. Better, and perhaps safer, to remember Clifton Meek's mice instead.
Thanks to Gunnar Andreassen and Peter Hale for their input into this post.
Yoe is a controversial figure in the small world of serious comics researchers and historians, as I learned early last year when I was helping Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly assemble the comic-book stories in their volume published as The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics. Spiegelman, Mouly, and their publisher, Abrams, were aware that Yoe was planning a similar book, and so they felt under tremendous pressure to get their Toon Treasury completed and on sale by last fall. They made it—the book was published September 1, beating Yoe's into print by more than six months.
The big difference between the two books is that Yoe made his selection entirely from comics in the public domain, whereas Spiegelman and Mouly cast their net much wider, to include a high percentage of stories still under copyright. Obviously, working only with PD material offers considerable advantages to the compiler, whose principal task in assembling a book will be to locate copies of the comics he wants to reproduce. As I learned in gathering the stories reproduced in A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, and as Spiegelman and Mouly experienced with their book, negotiating with copyright holders can be tiresome and frustrating.
But if those negotiations are successful, the result can be a better book, as is certainly true in this case. Yoe includes one story each by Carl Barks and John Stanley, but there's none of Barks's Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge, or Stanley's Little Lulu, since those stories are still under copyright; Spiegelman and Mouly offer healthy samplings of both. There's PD material in the Spiegelman-Mouly book, too, and their selection of stories is open to question on several grounds, but the overwhelming sense in the The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics is of a serious effort to include only stories that really deserve to be read by today's children, whether they're under copyright or not.
I don't think it's possible to interpret the selection of comics in Yoe's book in quite the same way, even though Yoe does his best, in his introduction and in the presentation of his material, to make the case for what a cover blurb calls "this stunning collection of the greatest kids comics." Most of the stories in the book, like most comic-book stories of every kind, are simply not very good. Well, no, worse than that, they're bad, by any reasonable measure. They were obviously written and drawn in haste, usually by young men who needed money fast, to be read by children who had few other diversions to choose from when television was still in its infancy. Like most of my friends, I turned up my nose at such comics when I was a kid—I had much more appealing alternatives available, like Barks, Stanley, and Walt Kelly, all in their prime, and I knew the difference—and they don't look any better now.
Which doesn't make Yoe's book any the less fascinating because it contains so much really odd stuff.There's some overlap in artists with the Spiegelman-Mouly volume, but less than you might expect (and no overlap in stories), and the overall feeling of the two books is remarkably different. Yoe offers a couple of hypnotically terrible funny-animal stories by Jack Kirby, for example, and a cheerfully ugly one by the great Terrytoons animator Jim Tyer. There's the complete Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, from the mid-nineteenth century, which Yoe describes (inaccurately, I think, but it's still worth a look) as "the earliest known American comic book for kids," and "Pigtales," a story about a couple of porcine characters by that nice Jewish boy Harvey Kurtzman. Familiar names (not just Kirby but also Frank Frazetta, Steve Ditko, and Dr. Seuss) turn up in unfamiliar roles.
Not everything is Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Komics is peculiar—there's a Walt Kelly fairy tale, and Dan Gordon's genial "Superkatt," and nicely drawn if generally tame stories by George Carlson, Ken Hultgren, Wallace Wood, and Jack Bradbury—but the prevailing atmosphere is more than a little strange. If you want to experience what it was like to be an omnivorous young comic-book reader circa 1950, you could do worse than immerse yourself in Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Komics. Just imagine you're in your pediatrician's waiting room and there's a big stack of comics on the table, comics the doctor or his nurse bought without caring what was in them as long as they were "funny," and you're there.
I said earlier that Craig Yoe is a controversial figure in the comics-reprint world, and if you want to know why, a good place to start is with Jeet Heer's piece on Yoe's Complete Milt Gross Comic Book Stories. The rap on Yoe, basically, is that he assembles his public-domain projects too hastily, and so makes too many errors, and that his books soak up sales and attention that should go to researchers who are taking the time to do the job right, and whose books are therefore slower to get into print. I spent decades writing Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, during which time I was beat to market by Leonard Maltin and any number of other writers, so I can't help but sympathize with such complaints. Ultimately, though, I don't think they're persuasive.
What matters most in the case of Yoe's Gross volume is not whether it's "complete" (evidently it's not), or that there are a few errors in the biographical introduction (evidently there are), but that the book reproduces a lot of Gross comics that we would be unlikely ever to see otherwise. When more comprehensive and carefully researched books about Gross are finally published—Mark Newgarden and Dan Nadel are at work on one—I can't imagine that they will include more than a few of the comic-book pages in Yoe's book. (The Complete Milt Gross Comic BookStories and The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics have one Gross story in common; it looks better in the Spiegelman-Mouly book, but I'm not sure if that's owing to superior printing or to better source material.) This is not a case, as with Neal Gabler's Walt Disney biography or David Michaelis's Charles Schulz biography, in which a seriously deficient book has made it impossible for better books to get attention or even be published at all.
As for those Gross comic-book stories in Yoe's book, I think they're less-than-prime Gross (they were published circa 1947, soon after Gross suffered a heart attack) but still very much worth reading. They're distinguished especially by cartoon drawing that's wonderfully free and energetic but always under control. Nothing in cartoons of any kind—comic strip, comic book, animated cartoon—is more attractive than lines so full of energy that they seem to rocket across the page of their own volition, and Gross' drawings always had that kind of energy.
But if you want to read Gross at his absolute best, you need to read He Done Her Wrong, from 1930, his "great American novel (with no words)," where the drawings have just as much energy but more graphic variety (and are funny as hell besides). I've owned for many years the 1963 Dell paperback edition of that book, with the drawings reproduced too small, and it was only recently that I discovered the full-size (I assume) Fantagraphics reissue of four years ago. I wouldn't care to be without Yoe's Gross collection, but if you could own only one Gross book He Done Her Wrong would be the one to have. Besides Gross' inimitable drawings, the Fantagraphics edition offers an astute appreciation by Paul Karasik and an introduction by—what do you know! Craig Yoe! As I said, it's a small world.
Dave Smith, the Disney studio's archivist since he founded the Walt Disney Archives in 1970, wrote yesterday with this announcement:
As you may have read in the media, after 40 years with Disney I have announced my retirement to coincide with my 70th birthday in October 2010. Of course, Disney has been a major part of my life for the past four decades, so it will be difficult tearing myself away. I am very proud of the Walt Disney Archives, which I have lovingly built up, at first by myself alone and then with the help of an ever-growing and knowledgeable staff. From a glimmer of an idea, the Archives has turned into a department which continually proves itself invaluable to The Walt Disney Company. I have been privileged to work with some of the most wonderful people in the world—my fellow employees and cast members throughout the entire Disney organization. While it will be hard saying good-bye, I am sure that I will continue to work with the Archives and D23 in my retirement.
Dave's reference to "media" was to this story about the Archives in yesterday's Los Angeles Times (the photo above is from the Times). Disney's CEO Robert Iger talks in that story about possibly housing the Archives' holdings in a museum of some kind, saying, "It could be that we end up in partnership with an existing museum. ... It also could be that we create our own." The Times story doesn't mention the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, but obviously that museum would be affected in some way by any Walt Disney Company decision to proceed with its own museum. Fortunately, there's no reason a new Disney museum couldn't complement the Family Museum rather than compete with it, since the Walt Disney Company now has a longer history without Walt (43 years 6 months) than it did with him (43 years 2 months).
Even before Dave Smith retires, his second-in-command for twenty-two years, Robert Tieman, will also be leaving, as revealed yesterday in Didier Ghez's Disney History blog. Their twin retirements will be a huge loss of invaluable experience, but happily, Dave's successor as archivist will be Becky Cline, who has been an increasingly important member of the Archives staff for many years. I spent weeks at a time in the Archives in the 1990s, and I remember overhearing Becky field hundreds of phone calls from the public, most of them asking what were obviously idiotic questions (there must be an awful lot of Cinderella watches out there, and everyone who owns one must want to sell it for a huge sum). Having survived that searing challenge with aplomb, Becky is surely prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I look forward to dropping by the Archives occasionally in the future (it's now closed to outside researchers, but so far not to social callers), but it will certainly not be the same without Robert Tieman and, especially, Dave Smith. Dave and I began corresponding in 1968, before he went to work for Disney, and we first met in 1969, when he passed through Little Rock on a cross-country driving trip. In the years since, we have been in touch frequently. Dave has been a good friend to me, Funnyworld, my books, and this Web site. I wish him all the best in his new life.
Very little new information has surfaced about Dumbo's pre-history since I posted my revised piece called "The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book" early last month. I did hear from Eric Pearl, grandson of Hal Pearl, co-author with Helen Aberson of the original story, but Hal Pearl died when Eric was only four, and he could offer only confirmation that Hal was married to Helen Aberson, briefly, before he married the woman who became Eric's grandmother.
A new Blu-ray edition of Dumbo has been released in Europe, but it won't be released here until 2011, presumably as a seventieth-anniversary tie-in (Europe was consumed by war seventy years ago, of course, and the seventieth anniversary of Dumbo's release there is presumably a few years away.) The making-of documentary on the disc includes John Canemaker's summary of the story's origins, which Gunnar Andreassen transcribed:
The book was written in 1938 by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. It was the only published children's book that the couple ever did. They sold their story to a company called Roll-A-Book—where the book would be on a scroll and you’d read through it. I don’t think there are any copies of it that exist anymore. There were about sixteen illustrations that were done by a local circus artist and those still exist. They are in the collection up in Syracuse. So Disney locked up the rights and then gave the project to two of his top writers, and [they] were Joe Grant and Dick Huemer.
Pretty close, although I don't know of any basis for calling Helen R. Durney a "circus artist." The "sixteen illustrations" can only refer to the sketches, with varying degrees of finish, that have survived in the Durney collection at Syracuse University; the actual illustrations for the Roll-A-Book, whatever their number, have probably disappeared. The Dumbo disc includes shots of two of Durney's sketches, which accompany John Canemaker's comments, and Gunnar Andreassen has sent me frame grabs of them; they're what you see accompanying this item, along with a frame grab of an ad for the first (and for practical purposes only) Roll-A-Book, The Lost Stone of Agog.
This is an exceptionally bountiful period on the Web for people who feel affection and enthusiasm for Dumbo akin to my own. Hans Perk has published the complete draft—the Disney studio's own record of who animated which scenes in the film—on his immensely valuable blog; unfortunately, I haven't figured out to get to the earliest installments, but a full page of later posts of the draft comes up when you click on the label "Dumbo."
[A June 27, 2010, update: On his blog, Hans Perk has posted this guidance on accessing his earlier posts of the Dumbo draft: "If you look to the right column, there you find the 'Archives' links. In the case of Dumbo, the first posts are from April 2010, so pressing that link will show them.
This should give you access to most of the 630 earlier postings. Whenever there are too many posts to be able to be shown within a month, this can cause the last ones to 'drop off,' which has annoyed me for quite some time. In this Blogger template, I do not know how to add an 'Older posts link, and I tried updating to the newer template, but I had problems running the Javascript necessary for the conversions.
John V. wrote a very helpful comment: 'As I eventually discovered, if some of the posts drop off,' then go to the last post displayed (this can only be done, I think, by clicking on the 'comments' link, then on the title of the post) and on the right hand side of the page there will be links to the previous few posts. Then you can just continue to follow the posts back by clicking on each individual post title.'"]
(Hans has posted many other drafts—which are pure gold for research into Disney animation—and is now posting the one for Melody Time.) Mark Mayerson has been publishing one of his fabulous mosaics for Dumbo, breaking down the film into a frame grab for each scene, with credits from the draft and illuminating comments on each installment. The most recent installment, the ninth, covers scenes of Timothy the mouse animated by Woolie Reitherman; click here to go to the first installment. Michael Sporn has posted a wealth of Dumbo-related material on his ever-bountiful "Splog"; to call it up, simply enter "Dumbo" in the search box. Robert Cowan, even though recovering from a heart attack, has been posting model sheets and other Dumbo items at his Cowan Collection site.
Considering how much Dumbo material has come to light on the Web, it's remarkable how little we still know about the history of this wonderful movie. Not only are there holes in our knowledge of how the story came to be written and to pass into Walt Disney's hands, as I've documented in my Roll-A-Book piece, but the production of the film itself is skimpily documented compared with the other early Disney features. The voluminous transcripts of story meetings, so plentiful for Snow White and Pinocchio and Fantasia and Bambi, simply don't exist for Dumbo. As Hans Perk has noted, even the draft credits no one for a number of scenes. No doubt answers to some of the questions about Dumbo could be found in Disney's "main files" and its Animation Research Library, but whether such material will ever become available for public inspection is highly doubtful, so research will necessarily proceed in other ways.
I was floored yesterday when I opened Cartoon Brew and found there a generous birthday tribute by Amid Amidi. I turned seventy on June 15, and my plans for a quiet sort of celebration were upended by Amid's post and the comments and emails that followed. Quite a day, topped off by Mark Mayerson's equally generous response to Amid's post. I hope that everyone involved will accept my heartfelt thanks.
Amid's post probably brought a few new visitors to my site, and I'm a little embarrassed that I've posted so little recently. I've been spending most of my time re-reading Carl Barks stories, thinking about them, and trying to reduce my thoughts to the words that will make up a couple of chapters, at least, in my next book, on comic books. Spending so much time with Barks is tremendously stimulating and enjoyable, but it does get in the way of posting very much here. I'll remedy that soon, I hope, with a substantial piece on Walt Disney's several visits to Atlanta and a number of other things—the piece I wrote for a business magazine after I interviewed John Kricfalusi in 1998, for one, and Roger Armstrong's highly evocative memories of working at the Lantz studio in 1944, for another. Stay tuned!
Joseph Smith writes: "Thought you may be interested in—and perhaps could shed some light on—this t-shirt I picked up at the Uniqlo store in Soho, New York. Disney merchandise, including Mickey Mouse underwear for adults, has taken over the front of this very popular store, the Japanese company's flagship in the United States. While searching through the many items available, the name 'Carl Barks' caught my eye. I decided that for $10.50, I had to pick up this shirt. How often does anyone ever see the name Carl Barks on a Disney product?
I'm guessing this design comes from a 'how-to' or 'behind the scenes' book or article describing the creation of a comic strip. Any idea where they picked this up?"
I'd guess that the source was my April 12 item, but if anyone has a better idea, let me know.
Thanks to the Little Rock Film Festival, I've finally seen Don Hahn's documentary about the rebirth of the Disney animation department in 1984-94. It's a fascinating film, not least because so much of what we see and hear—a great deal of it on video—is contemporary with the events.
The outline of the story is familiar to anyone who paid the least attention to Disney animation in those years, but Waking Sleeping Beauty tells that familiar story with a gripping immediacy.
As I watched, though, I felt more and more as if I were watching a strange new version of the "Rite of Spring" sequence from Fantasia, with Michael Eisner as the tyrannosaurus rex, Jeffrey Katzenberg the triceratops, and Roy E. Disney the grumpy brontosaurus who thinks he doesn't get enough credit for his pivotal evolutionary role. The actual directors and writers and animators, when they popped up on the screen, were like scurrying mammalian life forms trying not to be crushed by the gargantuan egos locked in battle above them.
Waking did nothing to ease my skepticism about the Disney features it was celebrating, but instead renewed it. My central problem with those movies has always been that they have no authors—there's no dominant artistic intelligence behind them, as there is with the great Disney features, the best Warner and MGM shorts, The Incredibles, and all the other animated shorts and features worth watching, down to How to Train Your Dragon. Instead, the films are corporate products, born of constant compromise and exhausting internal struggle. (Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Katzenberg comes across in Waking Sleeping Beauty as a clueless maniac, but he has lots of company.)
The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (which Don Hahn produced) did have a real author of sorts, the late lyricist Howard Ashman, as Hahn's narration acknowledges. It was unquestionably the example of those two films, and the momentum provided by their success, that made Aladdin and The Lion King such huge hits after Ashman's early death from AIDS. Ashman was a product of Broadway, and while watching Beauty and the Beast again, two days before I saw Waking Sleeping Beauty, I found myself regretting that I haven't yet seen it on the stage. That's where a Sondheim-flavored musical like Beauty belongs, surely, especially because on the stage there needn't be the tremendous gulf between the film's best drawing and animation, like Glen Keane's of the Beast, and the crudely oversimplified—let's please not say "cartoony"—drawing and animation of so many of the supporting characters.
I could mention other things about Beauty and the Beast that bother me, but I'll refrain, since those things obviously don't bother most people (and certainly not the three little girls who watched the movie with me last week). I'll only say that I much prefer another version of Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau's brilliant live-action film from 1946. That's a movie whose authorship is, happily, not in the slightest doubt.
I recently read (on microfilm) an interview with Walt Disney in the New York Post for June 30, 1944. That piece, by Mary Braggiotti, begins as follows:
"Dear Mickey Mouse:
"How are you, old boy? How I'd like to see you again!"
"That's all the letter said," concluded Walt Disney, "just that. It was from an American prisoner in Germany."
To Mr. Disney, sipping a scotch-and-soda at "21" before his departure for Hollywood the other day, this letter in a recent batch of Mickey's fan mail seemed to mean more than the news item that, on June 6, naval officers gathering for an invasion briefing at a port in southern England had to whisper "Mickey Mouse!" into the ear of the sentry before they could receive their orders.
That last sentence made me sit up, because it promised a solution to one of the more curious little mysteries associated with Disney animation—or maybe I should say, one of the more persistent Disney urban legends.
The notion has long been widespread that "Mickey Mouse" was the code name for the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. For instance, Neal Gabler writes in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination that "at Allied headquarters the code name for the operation was 'Mickey Mouse.'" Gabler cites no source for that statement, and although many other books and Web sites say essentially the same thing, all of them are obviously peddling secondhand information. David Lesjak, proprietor of the Toons at War blog, who almost certainly knows more about the Disney studio's history in World War II than anyone else, told me some time ago: "Disney staff did a search of the Archives and of all internal Disney Company computer databases and found no reference anywhere to Mickey Mouse being the codeword for the D-Day Normandy landings. The Pentagon and the Eisenhower Presidential Library were also consulted and the results at both institutions were also negative. There is speculation that 'Mickey Mouse' may possibly have been used at the lower unit level as a codeword, but even then there is no supporting documentation."
"Supporting documentation" has finally turned up, but what it supports is another matter. I haven't yet checked the Post microfilm for the "news item" that Braggiotti mentions, but a quick online check of other newspapers turned up three that published a very brief United Press item, datelined London, on June 8, 1944. Here's that item as it appeared in the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail:
Mickey Mouse played a part in the invasion of northern France, it was revealed today.
Naval officers gathering for invasion briefing at a southern port approached the sentry at the door and furtively whispered into his ear the password of admission: "Mickey Mouse."
That surely is the tiny incident that was ultimately inflated, by Neal Gabler among many others, into something much grander, so that "Mickey Mouse" became the password not just for one meeting, but for the entire Allied invasion. I've updated my page devoted to errors in Gabler's book to take this new information into account; the D-Day entry is for page 411.
This particular legend will no doubt continue to thrive, even though it's false. It's strange how many such falsehoods have attached themselves to Walt Disney and his creations, even though Walt himself was exceptionally accurate and straightforward in responding to interviewers' questions.
Thad Komorowski wrote to me earlier this month, while I was in Russia: "Brad Bird is directing Mission: Impossible IV for Paramount. So long chances of Pixar ever making a decent movie again." I agree that the prospects for good Pixar movies are very dim, but the possibility of Bird's directing again for Pixar had surely evaporated by the time, a couple of years ago, he was announced as the director of 1906, a very expensive live-action movie about the San Francisco earthquake. Production of that film has stalled in the weak economy; it's because of 1906's troubles that Bird became available to direct M:IIV. (To read one of the many reports confirming that Bird has been signed for that Tom Cruise movie, click on this link.)
John Lasseter runs Pixar; if, like him, you were also the director of Cars, would you really want to have the director of The Incredibles at your elbow? Bird's continuing presence at Pixar would have been an uncomfortable reminder of just how much better a director he is than his longer-tenured colleagues, not just Lasseter but also Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter. I've heard or read nothing to suggest that Lasseter pushed Bird out the door, as he did with Chris Sanders, another gifted director, at Disney Feature Animation, but neither have I heard or read anything to suggest that Bird was ever part of Pixar's long-term plans.
The theaters are full of animated features these days, but is it conceivable that anyone, Brad Bird included, could ever build a career as a Hollywood animation director at all comparable to the careers of the most successful directors in live action? Surely not; the directors at Disney and DreamWorks and elsewhere are submerged in all-but-anonymous teams, and at Pixar, the remaining directors work deep inside a cloying, crudely manipulative house style. Even at Pixar, Andrew Stanton is turning to live action, to direct John Carter of Mars. Under those circumstances, it's no surprise that Bird has moved into live action, almost certainly for good. His departure is a stark reminder of just how limited is the future of almost anyone working in Hollywood animation today.
It's curious, given that reality, that there's what seems to me an over-abundance of student animated shorts on the Web. Most such films are exactly that: student films, exercises for learning, and as such almost always of interest only to the student filmmaker, the instructor, and perhaps the filmmaker's peers. They should be exposed to the wider world only when the student filmmaker is exceptionally precocious or when the student has gone on to a distinguished professional career whose roots are worth examining. The student films I sample on the Web almost never meet either test, especially the first one.
Cartoon Brew, in particular, has been posting many such films, especially from CalArts, even while ignoring Brad Bird's decision to leave animation behind (Bird is of course one of the most famous CalArts alumni). The rationale in both cases, I suppose, is that animation students should be encouraged, or at least not discouraged—but encouraged to do what? To prepare for creative careers that can't happen? To be proud of work that isn't worth a minute of an adult audience's time? Is the idea to build the students' self-esteem? I seem to recall that Bird had something to say about such thinking in The Incredibles.
From Børge Ring, the renowned Danish animator, these memories of the Disney director Jack Kinney (seen above at the right, with Pinto Colvig, in front of a storyboard for the 1945 Goofy cartoon African Diary):
Director Jack Kinney of Goofy fame had a hobby. He was a jazz drummer. On a gig in San Francisco he was driving uphill when the rear end of his car sprang open end sent his big bassdrum into the arms of Mother Gravity, who gave the instrument a roll down the long. long Francisco slope. Jack turned and pursued the instrument. The drum swerved and rolled fullspeed on to a terrace with people at covered tables and straight into the cafe where it made a boom sound against the bar and fell on its side like a shot elephant. Mother Nature's energy was spent. A redfaced Kinney entered and retrieved his property.
Kinney seems to have remembered the incident when he directed the jazz short "After You've Gone" in Make Mine Music. "I have always had a hand in the story of any film I directed", he said, "Not for ego reasons but to make sure I never got saddled with weak material. I did not get story credit because Walt never credited a man for more than one thing at a time." I asked him: "When you recorded Benny Goodman's quartet for 'After You've Gone,' did you have the fun of sitting in with them on drums?" "Oh, no. To Benny Goodman that was unthinkable. But I have spent a lovely afternoon in the sound studio in the company of Hoagy Carmichael, who was a friendly, unsnobbish man."
Kinney was shy and evasive about his time as an animator. "I was just beginning to get the hang of it when Walt shunted me to the story department", he wrote. I think Kinney's animation of Horace Horsecollar in The Band Concert is excellent. He once wrote, "The value of animation is overrated." I was studying The Wind in the Willows [much of which Kinney directed] when Jack wrote, "Did you really think that was a good film? The animation is fabulous, but nobody outside the business can see that."
Phyllis and I returned Sunday from a nine-day visit to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, an exceptionally interesting trip with almost no animation- or comics-related dimensions. At the urging of the American friends living in Moscow who served as our guides, we timed our visit to include Sunday, May 9—Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. That was sixty-five years ago, and so the number of surviving veterans of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War has dwindled sharply. Dozens of them came to Gorky Park on Victory Day, though, wearing their uniforms and their medals, as they do every year, to receive flowers and chocolate bars from their grateful countrymen. I took pictures of many of them—they were happy to pose—including the gentleman in the photo above, with Phyllis (at left) and our friend and traveling companion Mary Kay Burton. (The cups held kvas, a low-alcohol drink.) We met many memorable characters, like a nurse who survived the Nazis' siege of Leningrad and a bewhiskered mariner—his picture is below—who spoke warmly of America and especially of American submarines; they were much better than Soviet ships, he said, because the American government cared about its sailors.
Victory Day has a resonance in Russia that V-E Day could never have in the United States, because Russia suffered so much more terribly in the war, losing millions of its people to bullets and starvation. The Russians thus celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary on a very large scale. The very idea of the Great Patriotic War has become more complicated in recent years, though, since that war was fought in defense of a country, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. The Soviet Union's constituent parts have for almost twenty years been independent countries, some at odds with what is now called the Russian Federation, to the point that one (Georgia) fought a brief war with Russia in 2008. Under those circumstances, all the banners and posters celebrating the victory of the "CCCP" (the Russian-language initials for the USSR) had both a nostalgic flavor and, underlying that, the strong suggestion that maybe the breakup of the Soviet Union was not irreversible. It will be interesting to see how Victory Day is celebrated a few years from now, when the remaining veterans have left the stage.
I said the trip had nothing to do with animation or the comics, but I did notice some generally dreadful-looking and presumably Russian-produced animation as we flipped through the channels on our way to the BBC or CNN. I wasn't aware of any sort of Disney presence—surely Robert Iger has plans to remedy that—and I doubt that many Russians have ever heard of Bob Clampett or his Looney Tune whose title I borrowed for this post. A few inflatable American cartoon characters did find their way onto vendors' stands in Gorky Park, as you can see in the accompanying photo. Look closely and you'll spot Spider-man and Tom Cat. I have no idea if these were authorized versions.
A couple of words of advice, if you're thinking about a trip to Russia yourself. Don't be intimidated by the visa process, which is an expensive pain but not as bad as it first appears; and learn the Cyrillic alphabet, which is really very easy to master. When you can read street signs and make your way around in the Metro, you will feel much more comfortable in Moscow. Otherwise, a trip to Russia is self-recommending, especially if, like me, you're old enough to remember when the very word "Kremlin" had an ominous sound. Now I think of the Kremlin as an old fortress full of gold-domed churches and beautiful tulip gardens.
Just back from Russia, I received this message from Cathy Freeman about her father, a man whom I knew and liked very much:
My father, George R. Sherman, was head of foreign relations and then publications for Walt Disney Productions from the late '50s until the mid-'70s, when he died of a very rare cancer. I'd sit on the floor of his office at the studios in Burbank, a block from our house, and read through typewritten manuscripts about which he wanted a child's opinion (I was ages 6-12). My father also traveled the world to book fairs to promote Disney publications, and we went with him on one trip when I was eight years old. Three months traveling through Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia promoting the new (at the time) feature, The Jungle Book.
Dad also said that if we came up with a comic book story he would give us $150 for a Mickey Mouse or Uncle Scrooge and $75 for a Chip and Dale or lesser character (this was around 1968). We considered the studio to be family, and even this year, shortly before Roy Edward Disney died, I got a handwritten Christmas note from him (I didn't know he had cancer).
My father was a writer at heart but worked for Disney as a day job. It made for a magical childhood as we became little ambassadors for any foreign representatives that came to town. We'd go with the visitors to Disneyland quite often. My father found that the best way to communicate with the numerous representatives, who all spoke different languages, was to sponsor a poker game at our house. He'd let me stay up and be "banker," exchanging their currency for poker chips. He'd then write my teacher at school, "Please excuse Cathy's absence, she was up late playing poker."
He once tried to name a cow "Lolita" in a comic story but got censored by the "higher ups."
Because of the recession, I have just put my Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge oil painting up for sale. The painting was given to my father by Carl Barks. My dad secured the rights for Carl to paint Disney characters after Carl left Disney, and I think the painting I own was a thank-you present to my dad. My father died in 1974, when I was sixteen, and I had the Scrooge painting on my graphic studio wall up until last month, when I decided to let Heritage Auction Galleries auction it this May 20-22. I've cherished this painting, and I hate to see it go, but it might buy me three years of health insurance deductibles. The auction site is at this link.
George Sherman's portrait of Scrooge was one of a small number of such paintings—all of them similar but not identical—that Carl Barks never sold but instead gave to friends. Carl and his wife, Garé, gave one such painting to Phyllis and me (as a belated wedding present, they said—they wanted to make sure we were going to stick together) when we had Thanksgiving dinner with them in 1973; it's hanging a few feet away from me as I write this. Have any others of these gift paintings gone on the market since Barks's death? None that I know of, and surely such sales are extraordinarily rare if they have occurred at all.
Bidding on the Scrooge painting ends on Thursday, May 20, at 10 p.m. CDT. Again, the auction page is at this link.
I'll be tied up for the next few weeks—making a brief visit to Russia, among other things—so the site will be quiet. Before I take my leave, though, I need to clean off my desk, as follows:
RSS: If you've given up on my RSS feeds, which were worse than usual for a while, give them another try. I haven't been able to automate my feeds completely, as my Dreamfeeder program promised, but I've figured out how to update my feeds without an intolerable amount of manual labor.
FACEBOOK: I don't think I'm alone in not quite having figured out Facebook. I'm sure I need to be posting more there, if only to alert my "friends" to good stuff on this site. As it is, I have something like thirty "friend" requests that I haven't responded to yet, simply because I spend almost no time on Facebook. I will try to mend my ways. I think I'm going to pass on Twitter, though.
FOR THE BARKS FANCIER: Some of us can't get enough information about our favorite cartoonist, and if you're one of that group, you should check out my page devoted to corrections, additions, etc., to my book called Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book. David Neebe has come up with some more information about the obscure kite safety giveaway that Barks illustrated and that was published in a yet-to-be-determined-with-any-finality number of editions. You can find the additional information at the entry for pages 124-25 and 226.
LUCKY LINKS: There are too many good blogs today, all deserving of extended mention, but I can't leave without a bow to a couple of particularly enjoyable Disney-related sites. 2719 Hyperion, Jeff Pepper and George Taylor's blog, is a consistent source of well-researched, intelligently written, and beautifully presented historical material, but I want to call your attention specifically to Jeff's two-part series on the neighborhood surrounding the Disney studio at that Hyperion address as it existed in the 1930s. "Bringing the past to life" is an overused phrase, but it most definitely applies here. You can go directly to the first installment by clicking on this link. Another Disney-inspired site that I've been enjoying is Vincent Randle's Drawn to Illusion. Let me recommend particularly Vince's illuminating post on an unjustly neglected Disney short, The Little House.
WALT'S PEOPLE VOL. 9: The ninth volume of Didier Ghez's remarkable series devoted to interviews with Disney veterans (plus a few historical essays and excerpts from correspondence) and has just been released. You can order it from Xlibris ($23.99, for 541 pages) at this link. Here's a rundown of the contents:
Foreword: John Culhane
Dave Smith: Thurston Harper
Ray Pointer: Berny Wolf
John Canemaker: Fanny Rabin about Art Babbitt
John Culhane: Art Babbitt
Tom Sito: Bill Melendez
Mark Langer: Ken O’Connor
John Canemaker: Thor Putman
John Culhane: Art Scott
Dave Smith: Ken Anderson
Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz: Ken Anderson
Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz: Les Clark
Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz: Jack Cutting
Robin Allan: Jack Cutting
Robin Allan: Bob Jones
Robin Allan: Joe and Jennie Grant
Floyd Norman: Three Disney Story Guys (Pete Young, Fred Lucky and Vance Gerry)
Jim Korkis: Margaret Kerry
Paul F. Anderson: Jack Ferges
Paul F. Anderson: Fred Joerger
Jim Korkis: The Secret Walt Disney Commercials
Michael Mallory: Paul Carlson
Didier Ghez: Paul Carlson
Floyd Norman: Just Finish that Darned Thing!
Didier Ghez: Victor Haboush
Julie Svendsen: Walt Peregoy
Floyd Norman: Disney’s “B” Movie
Alberto Becattini: Frank McSavage
Klaus Strzyz: Jack Bradbury + Mary Jim Carp
Klaus Strzyz: Bob Foster
Alberto Becattini: Bob Foster
Didier Ghez: Julie Svendsen
Göran Broling: Correspondence with Ollie Johnston
Clay Kaytis: Burny Mattinson
Didier Ghez: Tom Sito
As always, the entries vary in quality, but the average is consistently high enough that I can recommend this volume, and every other volume in the Walt's People series, without qualification to anyone who cares at all about Disney history. This volume stands apart because it includes a few of the interviews recorded by John Culhane forty years or so ago, when he was writing an animation history to be called Magic Mirror: The First World History of the Animated Film and published by Viking. Parts of that book, at least, were in manuscript in the '70s, and the publisher was rounding up illustrations as early as 1972, but then the book simply vanished. I last saw it mentioned in a 1975 trade-paper item. It seems a shame that Culhane doesn't say anything about that lost book in his very long introduction to the new volume of Walt's People.
[A May 5, 2009, update: I've done a little more tinkering with my Dumbo Roll-A-Book piece, to add some information about Helen R. Durney, Dumbo's original illustrator, and to remove a few rough edges.]
I've greatly revised and expanded my essay called "The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book," to incorporate a great deal of new information I've gleaned from a variety of sources: the galley proofs for the original version of the story at Syracuse University, New York state corporate records, obscure newspaper stories, census forms, and so on. Putting together all the pieces, I've also been able to eliminate some of the guesswork in the original version. There are still unanswered questions—I'd love to see a complete copy of the contract between Disney, on one side, and Dumbo's original authors and publisher, on the other, and I want to know more about Helen Aberson and Hal Pearl, the authors—but what you'll get from my revised version is a much fuller picture of how the story evolved and how it came to be a Disney property. At least half the piece is new or heavily reworked, so I don't think you'll be wasting your time if you take another look at it.
Speaking of Dumbo: anyone who cares about that film as much as I do should be spending some time at Hans Perk's wonderful blog, where he's posting the draft, the Disney studio's record of who animated what in each scene in that film. This is the sort of bedrock information that's easy to overlook on the Web, but it's far more substantial, far more important, than almost anything else that's being posted. After all, intelligent people will still be talking about Dumbo fifty or a hundred years from now, after the brayings of today's whiny hacks and hysterical has-beens have vanished into the ether.
I've also done some further tinkering with my essay called "Walt's Adventures in the Ivy League," just making it a little more specific about some of the people and places involved, and providing, for instance, a fuller version of William Lyon Phelps' charming tribute to Walt at Yale.
I don't plan to return to either piece any time soon, but I do expect to write some more essays of this kind before long; they're a lot of fun to work on. I have in mind a piece on Walt's visits to Atlanta, for example. But first I'm overdue to put up a few more interviews.
My review of How to Train Your Dragon says that the film, which I liked overall, "becomes much more ordinary its last 45 minutes or so, when it descends into the sort of overwrought spectacle that seems to be required now for any CGI feature... I have no idea if what I've described as Dragon's unfortunate second half is the way it is because Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois wanted it that way, or because Jeffrey Katzenberg or some other powerful person at DreamWorks decided it had to be that way. Perhaps Sanders and DeBlois merely anticipated what they were sure was already coming."
Andrew Osmond has called my attention to an interview with DeBlois, the film's co-director, at this link, that essentially answers my questions. DeBlois says in that interview:
[DreamWorks] had acquired the book mostly on the promise of the premises which was Vikings and dragons in far off northern destination and all of the adventure that might yield. But the story itself is very whimsically written but it’s [also] a little bit small. It’s a small story that has small stakes and it’s all about the relationship between Hiccup and his little runt dragon, in the book the dragon is about the size of an iguana. So the runt dragon is adopted by the runt Viking and together by simply being kind [Hiccup] gets it to do tricks that the other kids’ dragons can’t do. Then, at the end of the [earlier scripts], a big dragon ends up on their shores and it’s a problem they have to take care of.
Every version of that yielded a very young feeling film, and one thing Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks are allergic to is anything that feels juvenile... What [was] thrown upon us was that we had this world largely constructed, these characters already designed and this title we had to keep but otherwise [our] objective was to expand upon this. How do you make a fantasy-adventure that has heightened stakes that feels bold and exciting and has epic elements to it, capitalizing on that world? So we jumped in without any real restrictions and the real freedom to veer away from the book.
Sanders and DeBlois made the film under an unusually tight deadline—"there was just over a year to re-conceive the story, storyboard it, edit that together, animate it and get it done in time for it all to be lit, score put in place and prints made"—which meant that DreamWorks had no choice but to give them greater leeway than the directors of its other features have had. As DeBlois says:
We definitely benefited from our situation because this has probably been the most hands-off production DreamWorks has ever generated. There was no time left for second-guessing decisions. We were just given a lot of trust and pushed forward to make the best movie we could make within our personal sensibilities. That said, there has been a lot of reaction within the studio about how there have been some unspoken rules that were broken. We don’t have a lot of pop culture references because that’s just not our brand of comedy, we like the comedy to come out of the situations. As such it isn’t a big knee-slapper of a movie. There is some comedy in it but it’s not a back-to-back comedy, it’s much more adventure driven. But that was the tone we were given. When we came on Jeffrey said he wanted this to be more Harry Potter than Madagascar. He wanted us to go for the promise of that world.
The punishing schedule forced DreamWorks to leave Sanders and DeBlois pretty much alone, but it also encouraged, if that's not too mild a word, the co-directors to save time by resorting to what have become CGI-feature conventions. DeBlois puts the best face on what may have been inevitable:
In talking about How to Train Your Dragon we [asked], “What is this story about?” When we stripped it all away it’s really a story about a father and a son. Even though there is this kid and there is his dragon the ultimate story that yields it all is a father and son story. So we stripped it down and asked what [were] the basic beats and found that it was the external tensions as created by the conflicts between a father and a son. The son wants to live up to his father’s expectations but he’s ill-equipped to do so. He ends up creating a bond with the enemy—dragons—and thereby discovers a key to resolving the initial conflict except his deed is uncovered which destroys [the new] father-son bond and he’s rejected. Then, in spite of his father’s rejection, he returns to not only save the day but to also put his father in a place of humility where he can apologize.
To me, though, the father-son conflict is just a flimsy pretext (Chicken Little, anyone?). It's what was closest to hand when something was needed to set into motion all the mandatory crashing and banging at the end of the movie. I found it impossible to believe that Stoick, who has been presented as a loving if disappointed father, would become the grim fanatic of the closing scenes.
I was most intrigued by what DeBlois says about DreamWorks' abhorrence of the "juvenile." I've always thought of the DreamWorks features as jejune, but they're not so much juvenile as adolescent. There is a much greater gulf between the juvenile and the adolescent than there is between the juvenile and the adult. Good children's films and books deal with serious subjects as seriously as good adult films and books, but from a different perspective (particularly where relations between the sexes are concerned). Films that pander to the adolescent sensibility, like most of the DreamWorks features and all too many of today's other movies, can't afford to take anything seriously, except the panic that's always threatening to erupt in the adolescent mind and that the movies treat with the soothing balm of a pervasive flipness. Carl Barks said that he thought of his readers as being around twelve years old—on the cusp of adolescence, but still children. Once children enter adolescence, with its anxieties and insecurities and consuming self-consciousness, they pass beyond the reach of artists like Barks; they're incapable of hearing what those artists are saying until the glandular din subsides and they become adults.
The sad thing, of course, is that our culture insists on pushing the threshold of adolescence to an ever lower age. Today's twelve-year-olds are like the fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds of the past, and children under ten are as sexualized and knowing (they think) as the teenagers of a few decades ago. Given those circumstances, it's probably best to be grateful for what is real and honestly felt in How to Train Your Dragon, and to accept the phony bluster at the end as the price that must be paid for the remarkable few minutes when Hiccup and Toothless bridge the gap between their species.
I saw it over the weekend, in Imax 3-D, and I enjoyed it. You can read my thoughts about it by clicking on this link. I've been pleased to see that Dragon reclaimed the top box-office position this week, benefiting from good word of mouth (didn't happen with Bolt or The Princess and the Frog, did it?).
I learned Carl Barks's name in the spring of 1965, at a used-book store in Chicago, when the proprietor casually showed me the fifth issue of Don and Maggie Thompson's legendary mimeographed fanzine, Comic Art, where Carl was mentioned in passing. The Thompsons gave me his address, but it took me a full nine months to work up the nerve to write him. When I finally did, I sent him several copies of the hectographed comic book I'd self-published as a teen, a Dell-funny-animal imitation generally similar to what the Crumb brothers were doing around the same time. To my astonishment, Carl replied favorably about my adolescent effort: "I like your humor style in your 'Arkansas Magazine and Comics', except for the tendency to use puns, it reads very much like professional. I think you should work at writing. You're 3/4 of the way to beging good at it. ... Your drawing style is clear and crisp, but don't compel yourself to be a cartoonist. Cartoonists are as thick as locusts in Hollywood, but writers are as rare as virgins."
Carl suggested I get in touch with Del Connell at Western Publishing's Los Angeles office, and I did. I also sent some story ideas to Carl for his appraisal (he even paid me a few dollars for a one-line idea that became a script called "Pawns of the Loup Garou"). In the midst of all this activity, Carl sent me a nine-inch by twelve-inch sheet, cut from one corner of his company-provided drawing paper, that he described this way: "About drawing finished art, I'll enclose a sample of the paper we use and pen sizes, etc.)" Below you'll see a scan of most of that sheet, which may be Barks's most complete statement of the practicalities of producing one of his comic-book pages. Unfortunately, neither my budget nor my work space can accommodate a large stand-alone scanner, and I had more difficulty than I expected in finding a commercial shop that could do the job. So here's the best I can do with my home scanner; what's cut off on the right is Carl's lettering showing the height of a panel.
I'd given up my dream of being a working cartoonist by the time I went to college, having concluded by then that I lacked the native ability ever to be outstanding in the field. My old dreams had struggled back to life while I suffered through law school, and so Carl's letters were tremendously encouraging. I submitted a trial script to Del Connell, and I wrote and drew a twenty-page story called "Captain Egg" for Bill Spicer's Fantasy Illustrated. It was not, however, the best time to aspire to funny-animal greatness. Comic books of the Disney sort had been on a downhill slide since the mid-'50s, in both circulation and content, and despite Del Connell's kind words, I couldn't convince myself that I would find much in the way of satisfaction (or money) by writing for Western Publishing. "Captain Egg" was in some ways a respectable effort—reading it now, I'm not at all embarrassed by the writing or the staging—but there was no denying that my drawing and especially my inking were still well below professional standards. I penciled one more story, a few John Stanleyish pages with a character called Terry Tiger, but I shelved it when I couldn't find someone to ink it. After that, I drew a few pages with a character called Fearless Fang for Funnyworld, but if you're to be any good at all at cartooning, you have to draw a lot, and it became clear after a few issues that I was backsliding rapidly. I draw very seldom now, and never for public consumption.
I did go back to writing for comic books, though, if only briefly. Many years later, I turned one of the ideas I'd sent to Carl Barks and Del Connell into a Donald Duck script for Egmont, the Danish Disney licensee, and it was eventually published in Europe and the U.S. The money was good, but the editing was irritating, I had to wait a year for my check, and I didn't like the way the story was drawn. There was nothing in that experience to make me regret I'd not pursued a career as a comic-book writer. That's just as well, obviously, since it's bit late in life for me to be changing my mind.
Bill Benzon has written more about Fantasia at The Valve, this time on The Rite of Spring. The title of his post is "Disney Does Darwin,"and it is, like the Benzon essays I mentioned on April 1, a thoughtful piece that is well worth your time. Bill's focus is on how tightly and subtly music and image are interwined in this sequence. He doesn't make the point, but one effect of his analysis was to make me more accepting of the film's reworking of Stravinsky's music: Walt had his reasons.
Reading the Benzon piece, I wondered again how Disney's Rite of Spring, and Fantasia as a whole, managed to escape the condemnation of the religious fundamentalists who believe, against all the evidence, that the world was created a few thousand years ago. Disney's Rite unquestionably embraces the theory of evolution, but Bill Benzon suggests that it has eluded the fundamentalists' ire because it doesn't show human beings as the products of evolution.
There's no question but that Walt and his colleagues originally intended to depict humans as part of prehistoric life. Walt heard Stravinsky's music for the first time in a meeting on September 13, 1938. He said then: "This is marvelous! It would be perfect for prehistoric animals, cave-men, etc. The possibilities are unlimited. We could parallel modern situations, with the cave-men having these prehistoric monsters for pets. ... We could base our picture on fact, but we don't have to be too accurate with it. It could be dramatic, but with comic moments. We could get comedy from the young of these animals."
Thoughts of comedy vanished quickly. By September 29, thinking about the segment had jelled into something close to the evolutionary pageant that wound up on the screen. That day, recordings of all the compositions then envisioned for Fantasia were played for a studio audience. The notes describing each composition said, in regard to Rite of Spring: "The music, which has no story of its own, thunders with the feel of primordial forces and in it Walt hears the Story of Evolution." As the notes described that story, it would have extended through man's conquest of fire.
The next day, September 30, in one of the first story meetings on Rite of Spring,Walt spoke of showing primitive man "trying to survive against heavy odds," specifically a saber-toothed tiger. But it's obvious from the transcription of the meeting that everyone was having trouble figuring out how to present this struggle, and especially how to relate it to Stravinsky's music. Such difficulties very quickly led Walt to drop primitive man from the plan. In a meeting just three days later, on October 3, 1938, he said, "We have taken man clear out"—he had decided not to carry the action through the age of mammals, but to end it with the dinosaurs.
So there you have it, evolutionary serendipity: Walt decides not to put primitive man into The Rite of Spring, for his own reasons, and as a happy byproduct the fundamentalist loonies don't have an excuse to picket and boycott his film. But Bill Benzon says something else was going on: "Disney had originally intended to present evolution from the beginning to the dawn of humankind, but pressure from Christian fundamentalists led him to abandon that idea."
Presumably Bill relied on Neal Gabler, who says on page 312 of his Disney biography that "one associate said [Walt] didn't want to antagonize Christian fundamentalists." Gabler cites his source in an endnote: "John Hubley quoted in [John] Culhane, [Walt] Disney's Fantasia, p. 126." But, as is so often the case—see my page devoted to errors and distortions in his book—Gabler is misleading when he is not simply wrong. Culhane doesn't "quote" Hubley, offering only this woolly paraphrase: "But the fundamentalists, according to John Hubley, threatened to make trouble for Fantasia if Walt connected evolution with human beings."
Really? I never came across a hint of such threats in the weeks I spent going through Fantasia-related documents at the Walt Disney Archives; and, as I've already said, Walt decided very quickly not to show human beings in The Rite, for reasons unconnected with any fundamentalist objections. By the time most fundamentalists could have heard anything about The Rite, humans would have long since been excised from the story.
Beyond that, how would John Hubley have known what Walt was thinking? He was a layout man (or, if you prefer, art director) on Fantasia, not one of its movers and shakers, not a story man, not yet involved with the film when critical story decisions about The Rite of Spring were being made in the fall of 1938. His name doesn't turn up in the notes from the story meetings. What Culhane says would be a little more persuasive if we had a real quotation from Hubley, something like, "Walt told me..." or "I heard Walt say..." but there is none such. I suspect that what Hubley actually said to Culhane was more general and speculative, but—who knows.
There is, I'm afraid, no end in sight to careless junk writing about Walt Disney and his films. It's a pity when a Bill Benzon gets victimized by some of it.
I've been dealing for the last few days with a variety of distractions (including a computer monitor that died suddenly), and so I have some unfinished business.
That's Gross! Thanks to Craig Yoe, I now own a copy of The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story (Yoe Books/IDW Publishing). I haven't done much more so far than page through this book, but I'm impressed by everything about it.
Milt Gross is, of course, a great cartoonist everyone who cares about cartooning has heard of, but he isn't as well known, or as often read, as any number of lesser talents. For one thing, his name isn't associated with a long-running strip or comic book, or with a famous character. He's a distinctly "ethnic" cartoonist, too, his comedy even more firmly rooted in the Jewish New York of a century ago than the comedy of his contemporaries the Marx Brothers. I have two of his books on my shelves, Nize Baby and He Done Her Wrong, and I have scattered samples of his work in other books, but I've never sought out his work in the way I've known I should have. I'm sure I've had lots of company.
Now Craig Yoe has rescued me and the rest of us from our sloth by collecting all of Gross' comic-book stories, more than 300 pages of them, in a spectacular volume, beautifully designed and printed, that also includes a richly illustrated 35-page biographical introduction. I'll have more to say about this book, probably a good bit more, as soon as I've given it the attentive reading that I know it deserves. In the meantime, buy the book yourself. From the little time I've spent with it so far, I feel completely safe in saying that you'll be very glad that you did, especially at amazon.com's deeply discounted price.
Disney and Tolkien, Cont'd: As I noted in a February 25 item, there was never any serious possibility that Walt Disney would make an animated version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. But as Gunnar Andreassen has noticed, the idea of a Disney-studio film based on Tolkien's stories was alive in the early seventies, a few years after Walt's death. Some drawings and documents exploring the possibilities in the characters and the story of The Hobbit were recently sold through Howard Lowery's auction site. The auction has closed, but as of today that page is still up, with reproductions of some of the items; it's at this link. I doubt that Tolkien—who was consistently hostile to the Disney films over the years—would have been swayed, by the drawings in particular.
The Hyperion Studio in Technicolor, 1934: Also from Gunnar Andreassen, a link to this YouTube video:
Gunnar explains: "This is a MGM short about Los Angeles, released in 1935, March 16.The footage of the visit at the Disney Studio has been shown (or most of it) in the bonus material for the Snow White Blue-ray disk and possibly on a couple of others.I earlier guessed that the Studio shot this footage themselves, but this was not the case.The producer of this short—and hundreds of others—was James A. Fitzpatrick. He is probably the one meeting and shaking hands with Walt.There are quite a few well-known artists seen among the employees walking out of the Studio: Al Taliaferro, Dave Hand, Jack Kinney, Albert Hurter, Roy and Dick Williams, and possibly Emil Flohri. I believe I have also identified Ted Thwaites (a rather old man) and Fred Spencer (the last one going out, on our left, before Walt takes over). I'd guess that this is the only documentary in color from the Hyperion Studio. I hoped to hear Walt speaking, but at least it’s fun to watch his facial expressions.It was probably shot in 1934—this is what I estimated from the size of the palm tree outside Walt’s office."
The Disney footage is only a small part of this short, which is fascinating for its glimpses of the Los Angeles in which Walt and so many other famous animators lived more than 75 years ago.
Benzon on Fantasia: Bill Benzon has contributed pieces to this site on Dumbo and Fantasia, and he recently posted another Fantasia entry, examining The Nutcracker Suite and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, on The Valve. Bill's pieces are always stimulating reading—they differ completely from the usual superficial fan stuff. Bill has also been posting on The Valve some of Nina Paley's "Mimi and Eunice," minimalist (and copyright-free) comic strips, a complete run of which you can read at this link.
I took the photo above on June 16, 2005, when Phyllis and I visited Los Olivos, California, as the guests of Fess Parker at his Wine Country Inn. Phyllis was on her way to the hotel's spa, across the street; Fess and I were about to get into his Hummer and drive cross-country through some of his real-estate holdings in the Santa Ynez Valley, near Santa Barbara.
By the time Fess died last week at the age of 85, he was widely known as the proprietor of an excellent winery and as an ambitious land developer, but it was, of course, his earlier life as an actor, especially for Walt Disney, that was of the greatest interest to me. I met Fess in 1988, when I interviewed him for Nation's Business, the magazine where I worked at the time. He was then the owner of a large waterfront hotel in Santa Barbara, California—his winery was still just a gleam in his eye—and I interviewed and wrote about him in his role as a businessman.
In 1988 we talked about Walt and about Fess' career in show business, but it was not until 2003, when I visited Los Olivos and interviewed Fess for The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, that we talked about Walt at length. A couple of long phone interviews in January and February 2004 followed that in-person interview, and I've posted the complete composite interview at this link.
In the summer of 2004, Fess approached me about collaborating with him on an as-told-to autobiography. Off and on for well over a year, we talked on the phone as he and I worked on a proposal to submit to publishers.
Fess was, as a real-life personality, very similar to the frontier heroes he portrayed, especially in his dry sense of humor; Phyllis said she could always tell when I was talking to him on the phone, because I laughed so much. He was also as strong-willed as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in his determination to realize his vision for the land he owned in Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez Valley. "Development" is a fighting word in much of California, but even in his eighties, Fess did not hesitate to rile his neighbors when he thought he was in the right. One store just down the street from the Wine Country Inn had stopped carrying his wines in protest when Phyllis and I were in Los Olivos in 2005, but Fess ate lunch there with us, anyway.
I filled four cassette tapes as Fess and I talked during that visit, but there was time for more: Fess showed us his home, which overlooked the valley, and I photographed his boots, near the front door, and also took a picture of him with a huge seascape by his friend Peter Ellenshaw, the famous Disney matte painter (that photo is just below). We had dinner that evening in the hotel's wine cellar with Fess and his wife, Marcy, and a few other guests, all of them more colorful by far than Phyllis and me; I recall a baroness and a gentleman who claimed he was related in some manner to Jackie Kennedy. Then we adjourned to the hotel's lobby for the customary Thursday-night songs by Fess and Marcy and any guests who wished to perform. Fess is at the mike in the photo at left, with their long-time accompanist (whose name I'm sorry to say I can't remember) at the piano.
Ultimately, and sadly, nothing came of our book proposal. The proposal got high marks, but we ran into a wall of skepticism where Fess himself was concerned. His celebrity, it seemed, was too far in the past, his career too fragmented to permit targeting the book at Disney fans or oenophiles or business readers, despite its obvious appeal to all three audiences. He and I finally agreed to abandon the effort. I saw Fess for the last time when Phyllis and I visited Los Olivos in April 2007 with our friends Tony and Margie Skogen. I had offered to take Fess and Marcy to dinner anywhere they chose, and Fess chose the Wine Country Inn, naturally enough (he provided the wine). It was a delightful evening—Fess rolled out one story after another—and I was especially pleased that our friends could know that one of their childhood heroes really deserved the adulation they and so many others had given him.
I would never claim to have been Fess Parker's friend or confidant or anything of the sort, but I did have the opportunity to know him better than many other people did. I'll always be grateful for that.
I've greatly revised and expanded an Essay I posted last May about the honorary degrees Walt Disney received in June 1938 from Harvard and Yale Universities. What was originally a "Day in the Life" posting, centering on a half dozen photos of Walt taken at the Harvard commencement on June 23, 1938, has become a much longer piece describing the circumstances surrounding the award of both of Walt's degrees, with reproductions of several of his letters to officers of Harvard and Yale. Accordingly, I've retitled that piece "Walt's Adventures in the Ivy League."
I'm afraid that many people—well, actually, most people—will regard the detail in the revised piece as excessive, but I can't apologize for it. I found as I pursued one lead after another, while making my revisions, that Walt himself came into a little clearer focus for me, and in a positive way. I was impressed by his ethical scrupulousness in his correspondence with the two schools, and, as always, I was struck by his capacity for enjoying himself. Walt was a remarkably active and interesting man; that's why researching and writing about him has been fun for me, and why I keep doing it.
I've explored Dumbo's curious origins as a Roll-A-Book in postings on February 4 and March 1, and I've now ordered copies of all the Dumbo and Roll-A-Book materials in the Helen Durney Collection at Syracuse University. When I have those materials in hand, along with a few other bits and pieces I'm tracking down, it should be possible for me to revise my piece called "The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book" so as to provide a reasonably complete picture of how the story of Dumbo made its way from an obscure publisher, in an unlikely city, to the Disney studio and lasting glory on the screen.
Dave Smith, the Disney archivist, told me a few weeks ago that Disney's royalty records show sales of only 1,430 copies of a 1941 Whitman book called Dumbo the Flying Elephant. That book bears the names of Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl on its cover, as the story's authors, but not the name of Walt Disney. The Disney name appears only on the copyright page, along with a separate copyright line for Roll-A-Book Publishers. The Disney royalty records for the book include this notation: "This book was made to comply with contract." I've suggested that Dumbo the Flying Elephant was published with a tiny print run solely in order that Aberson and Pearl might have the story in print in something like its original form (their book's story differs considerably from the film's).
The Durney materials, which include galley proofs, will permit comparing the story for the original Roll-A-Book (which was probably never published, and was certainly not generally available) with the 1941 Aberson-Pearl book. I now own a copy of the 1941 book, and like the copy that Alyssa Manley owns, scans of which I've posted here, it includes advertising on its back cover.
Dave Smith has pointed out that Dumbo appeared in several other book incarnations in 1941, all of them with much larger sales than the Aberson-Pearl book. Here are some of the figures from the Disney royalty cards:
Dumbo of the Circus (Garden City) - 83,590
Dumbo of the Circus (K.K. Pubs.) - 402,179
Dumbo the Flying Elephant (Dell Fast Action) - 125,475
Dumbo (Whitman #710) - 209,000
Dumbo Big Little Book – 120,000
Dumbo Song Book (giveaway for Parker Pen) [Dave notes: "number given is the same as for the K.K. Pub. book, so an error somewhere"; the two books are not the same]
The exact meaning of those figures is open to question. The Disney royalty cards, Dave Smith says, show "the number of copies for which the publisher paid royalties. ... There is no way for me to tell whether the numbers sold corresponded to the numbers printed (or if some copies were unsold and thrown away)." In later years, when Western Printing & Lithographing Company published comic books, including the Disney titles, through Dell Publishing (an independent company), it paid a royalty—a very small one—on each copy it printed, rather than on each copy it sold. I don't know when that practice began, and I don't know if it extended to publications other than comic books, but I would guess that it did. In the early '60s, with comic-book sales down sharply, Western began paying royalties on copies sold, rather than copies printed.
When Western signed contracts for comic books in the early '50s, it paid an advance based on a print run of at least 400,000 copies for each issue, and paid additional royalties on any copies printed above that figure. I don't know if that threshold was in effect in 1941 when Dell published Dumbo the Flying Elephant as No. 17 in what later came to be called the Dell Color series, but, in any case, the Disney card shows royalties paid on 418,504 copies. (There was also a black-and-white Dumbo comic book in 1941, called Dumbo Comic Paint Book, No. 19, with royalties paid on 247,925 copies.) The sales of Disney comic books rose steadily in the 1940s, and by 1949, when Dell published a comic book in its Four Color series called Dumbo in Sky Voyage, No. 234, it yielded royalties to Disney from 1,675,066 copies. By then, a Disney comic book with a press run as low as the 1941 Dumbo comic books would have been a flop.
At my request, Dave Smith provided a sampling of the sales figures for other Disney publications from the '40s, '50s, and '60s (no figures are available for the '30s). The figures are often remarkably large, especially taking into account that they're for the initial editions and don't cover reprints with different numbers. For example, one of my favorite books from my childhood, the original edition of Uncle Remus Stories, Giant Golden Book No. 554, with a striking Mary Blair cover, sold 543,555 copies. As Dave says, "it was kept in print for many years after that, with different numbers."
Likewise, he says, "Little Golden Books often sold in the millions; the list does not include later reprints with different numbers. It is interesting that of the Heath books, the Dumbo book had much fewer quantities than any of the other titles. The larger, more expensive books naturally sold fewer copies than the inexpensive ones."So, with those guidelines in mind, here are the quantities of assorted publications on which Disney's royalties were based, with, in most cases, the publishers:
Adventure in Disneyland (Richfield comic): 1,260,450
Adventures of Mr. Toad (Big Golden Book): 155,715
Alice in Wonderland (BGB 426): 549,470
Alice in Wonderland (Cozy Corner Book 2074): 653,000
Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit (Little Golden Book D19): 1,041,290
Animal Adventures in Lands of Ice and Snow (Whitman): 25,800
Annette in the Desert Inn Mystery (Whitman): 696,000
Ave Maria (Random House): 30,843
Baby Weems (Doubleday Doran): 16,032
Bambi (Grosset & Dunlap): 359,190
Bambi (LGB D7): 2,926,493
Beaver Valley (Whitman Tell-a-Tale): 859,000
Ben and Me (Cozy Corner Book 2403): 305,000
Ben and Me (LGB D37): 618,796
Bongo (BGB): 303,645
Brer Rabbit Rides the Fox (Grosset & Dunlap): 101,312
Casey Jr. (Garden City Pub.): 33,597
Cold-Blooded Penguin (Simon & Schuster): 401,920
Dance of the Hours (Harper & Bros.): 16,372
Disneyland Stamp Book (Simon & Schuster): 150,300
Donald Duck and His Friends (Heath): 337,056
Donald Duck in the High Andes (Grosset & Dunlap): 30,407
Donald Duck in Volcano Valley (Whitman BLB): 205,000
Donald Duck March of Comics No. 20: 278,200
Donald Duck March of Comics No. 56: 572,450
Donald Duck Sees South America (Heath): 167,810
Donald Duck Tells About Kites (premium comic): 830,000
Donald’s Penguin (Garden City Pub.): 16,278
Dumbo (Heath): 47,359
Fantasia (by Deems Taylor, Simon & Schuster): 15,619
Fantasia (Whitman cut-out book): 50,000
Gremlins (Random House): 24,565
Hans Brinker (Whitman): 208,500
Johnny Appleseed (LGB D11): 812,436
Life of Donald Duck (Random House): 15,777
Little Man of Disneyland (LGB D46): 837,871
Little Pigs Picnic (Heath): 318,557
Magnificent Mr. Toad (Grosset & Dunlap): 103,784
Mickey and the Beanstalk (Grosset & Dunlap): 63,868
Mickey Mouse and the Magic Lamp (Whitman BLB): 150,000
Mickey Mouse March of Comics No. 27: 471,900
Mickey Sees the USA (Heath): 226,752
Nutcracker Suite (Little Brown): 18,136
People and Places (Golden Press): 72,062
Peter and the Wolf (LGB D5): 1,889,071
Pinocchio (Heath): 302,812
Pinocchio (Whitman BLB): 299,000
Pinocchio Learns About Kites (premium comic): 276,500
Practical Pig (Garden City Pub.): 15,960
Reluctant Dragon (Garden City Pub.): 21,260
Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Grosset & Dunlap): 17,136
Story of Timothy’s House (Garden City Pub.): 33,557
Surprise Package (Simon & Schuster): 433,842
Three Caballeros (Random House): 25,258
Through the Picture Frame (S&S Little Library): 253,116
Thumper (Grosset & Dunlap): 292,347
Treasure Chest (Simon & Schuster): 129,192
Uncle Scrooge the Lemonade King (Whitman): 296,500
Victory March (Random House): 53,444
Walt Disney Parade (Garden City Pub.): 31,569
And then, of course, there are the Disney publications for which sales figures don't exist because those publications weren't sold but were given away by Walt Disney Productions itself (unlike the March of Comics giveaways, which K.K. Publications sold to retailers to give to the children of customers).
At least one 1941 Dumbo tie-in appears to be of that type. Called on its title page Walt Disney's Dumbo The Story of the Little Elephant with the Big Ears, it's a booklet consisting of sixteen pages, counting covers, with publicity photos of Walt and staff filling the inside front and back covers; the front cover is at left. No publisher is indicated, and there's no suggestion of a price.
I can't even guess the circumstances under which this booklet would have been given away, but perhaps someone among my visitors knows. The cover of my copy of the booklet is at left.
My code name is Overkill, so brace yourself for a few more Dumbo items over the next week or two, in addition to my postings about the Dumbo Roll-A-Book.
You may recall an item I posted a year ago about Dumbo's New York premiere, on October 23, 1941. I mentioned in that item that among those attending the premiere were "eighteen soldiers stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, all of whom had worked at the Disney studio." Some of those soldiers are in the photo above, which was taken the night of the premiere. According to the "snipe" attached to my copy of the photo, "each soldier had a beauteous Conover model to help him celebrate the occasion!" (Wait a minute...were none of those guys married? Well, maybe not.) I don't have identifications, unfortunately.
Back in the summer of 1967, when the historic World Retrospective of Animation Cinema was held as part of the Expo 67 world's fair in Montréal, La Cinématheque canadienne published a huge chart called the "Family Tree of the Origin and Golden Age of the American Cartoon Film 1906-1941." That chart, devised by André Martin, is roughly three feet tall and four feet wide. It's divided vertically by years and horizontally by "life-lines" for each of the studios included. The Family Tree shows when and how, in Martin's view, the various U.S. cartoon studios originated and grew out of one another, so that—to take the most obvious example—the Harman-Ising and Iwerks studios are shown branching out from the Disney studio, in 1928 and 1930, respectively, to form new vertical life-lines. The chart is filled with detail, like the names of studio personnel and principal characters and cartoon titles, and the life-lines are color-coded to indicate in which part of the country the studios were located.
Milt Gray and I had been corresponding then for less than a year. I didn't get to Montréal, but he did, and he bought a copy of the Family Tree for me. I soon had it mounted on a board, for easy reference, but in the course of several moves the chart was so badly damaged that I finally decided I had no choice but to scrap it. And that was that, until, a few weeks ago, John Benson wrote to ask if I'd like to have the copy of the Family Tree he'd uncovered in his files. I said yes, without hesitation. John's package arrived this week, and that's my newly acquired copy of the Family Tree in the photo above.
I remember how fascinated I was by the Family Tree when I first studied it more than forty years ago. It was extraordinarily difficult then to see most of the cartoons from the years the Family Tree covered—I had still seen almost no black-and-white cartoons from the '30s—and to have so much information about all those mysterious films laid out so clearly was an astonishing gift. Time has brought us cartoons on video and a flood of books, but it hasn't quite rendered the Family Tree superfluous. Glancing over it now, I'm impressed by how largely accurate it seems to be, even though it was compiled when reliable information about animation's history was much scarcer than it is today. Even the whole idea of a "family tree," which once aroused my skepticism, seems a little more plausible now.
So I'm very glad to have a copy of the Family Tree again. This time I'll leave it folded, however tempted I might be to find a space for it on my walls.
Speaking of the 1967 retrospective, I can't resist sharing this paragraph from a letter Milt Gray wrote to me that August, just after he returned to L.A. from Montréal:
I am thrilled to be able to say that I met Bob Clampett while at the Expo! He was very pleasant to talk with. He mentioned that back in the old days when he was directing at Warners, people used to talk about cartoons as freely as they talk about popular records today, and on Sundays after each of his cartoons was released (they were always released in Los Angeles on a Saturday) he used to go to the beach where the UCLA kids hung out and pretend to be just sunbathing while he eavesdropped on their conversations as they discussed what they liked or didn't like about his latest cartoon.
Not only was Clampett at Montréal, but so were many others of the most famous names in American animation's history. On the retrospective's opening night, someone took a picture of Bob with a few of his fellow pioneers. From the left are Dave Fleischer, Paul Terry, John Randolph Bray, Walter Lantz, Bob Clampett (with Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent), and Otto Messmer. An extraordinary occasion, one that never was, and never could be, repeated.
A couple of weeks ago, in a post called "Parlor Games," I wrote about the animation/comics people I wished I'd been able to meet, Walt Disney naturally being at the top of the list. Milt Gray has come up with an extension of that idea:
If you could go
back in time and meet Walt Disney, what questions would you like to
ask him? Or is it enough just to gauge how congenial he is? In view
of how much you already know about Walt, and my own comment under Parlor Games about how tricky it is to really find out what one really
wants to know about one's heroes, what kinds of questions would you try to prepare to ask?
Let's see...the questions would vary, depending on when my time machine deposited me in Walt's office, but let's say it's the early '40s, when the Disney studio had already enjoyed its greatest triumph (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and suffered through its greatest disaster (the 1941 strike). The publicity photo of Walt at right was taken around that time; RKO Radio distributed the photo in 1944. Here are a few of the questions I might ask Walt; his answers would of course suggest followup questions:
What do you think you could have done differently that might have averted the strike? Do you think you shared enough information with your employees about the studio's financial situation?
You spoke on a number of occasions in the late 1930s about animation's being a "caricature of life," but a couple of years later, you spoke of some of your animators, the ones working on Dumbo, as "caricaturists" whose work was in your estimation a notch or two below that of the animators who were doing illustration-style work on Bambi. What led to your change in thinking about the importance of caricature in animation?
What are the lessons you've drawn from the disappointing box-office performance of Fantasia? Do you think you've run up against the limits of what audiences will accept in animated films?
Looking back to your beginnings in Hollywood, were you ever really serious about becoming a director in live action, or was animation always foremost in your mind, as your brother Roy believed? What do you think led you to commit yourself so strongly to animation and to its development as an art form?
Last month, I posted an Essay page about the origins of Dumbo in a mysterious object called a Roll-A-Book, a "book" that was apparently never published, or at least not generally available, since a copy of the Dumbo Roll-A-Book has never surfaced, not even at the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank.
Happily, my post caught the eye of Alyssa Manley, who owns a copy of the 1941 paperback book that was Dumbo's first real appearance in print. Alyssa wrote to me about how she found her copy of the book, and she also provided me with scans of the complete Dumbo the Flying Elephant, which you can view by either clicking on the book's front cover, at left, or by clicking here. Either link will take you to the first index page, from which you can navigate to individual pages in the book.
You can also go straight to Alyssa's comment by clicking on this link. Alyssa's message allowed me to frame the right questions for Dave Smith, the Disney archivist. Dave provided even more pertinent information than I was hoping for, as you can see by reading my response that immediately follows Alyssa's message.
I think the essential elements of the Dumbo Roll-A-Book story are now almost all in hand, and so in the next few days I'll revise and correct my Essay page to take the new information into account. One great virtue of the internet is that it permits such revisions and updatings, and I try to take advantage of that capacity on my Essay pages, in particular. I think of those pages—and, for that matter, most of the rest of the site—not as standard-issue blog postings, but more like chapters in an ever-changing book.
In case you're as interested in Dumbo as I am, I'll alert you on this home page when the revised Essay page goes up. Likewise for my revised Essay page on the successive days in June 1938 when Walt Disney received honorary degrees at Harvard and Yale universities, two days that were the high-water mark for Walt's (and animation's) acceptance by America's intellectual establishment. The New Haven Free Public Library is sending me the last bits of information about the Yale ceremony that I've been seeking, so posting that revised page should be just days away.
About a year ago, Jeff Pepper, co-proprietor with George Taylor of the outstanding Disney fan site 2719 Hyperion, published an excellent piece examining (and demolishing) the persistent rumor that "Walt Disney held the film rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy for a period of ten years beginning sometime in the late 1950s, and was frustrated in his inability to bring a movie version to realization." Never happened, and was never at all likely to happen.
Jeff quotes one of Tolkien's letters (published in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981) in which Tolkien, writing about illustrations for the American edition of The Hobbit, vows "to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)." What's remarkable is that Tolkien expressed that loathing in May 1937, when the only filmed works available as targets were Disney's short cartoons—films that had by that time reached a state approaching perfection, and were almost universally praised. For someone to dislike such marvelous films was unusual, to "loathe" them all but inconceivable. (What had Tolkien actually seen of the Disney output, I wonder?)
The few remaining references to Disney among Tolkien's published letters are brief but also dismissive. Gunnar Andreassen has pointed me toward another Tolkien letter, this one from 1964, that shows clearly that Tolkien's opinion of Walt did not mellow over the years. It was sold at auction by Sotheby's in London in 2001, for £17,500. Only part of the handwritten letter is reproduced on Sotheby's Web page, but the auction house's rather rough-and-ready description includes these paragraphs:
...I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the 'pictures' proceding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea...
he also accuses Disney of being in his business practices "simply a cheat: willing and even eager to defraud the less experienced by trickery sufficiently 'legal' to keep him out of jail"; he adds that his own affairs are in the hands of Allen & Unwin ("a firm with the highest repute"); that he is "not innocent of the profit-motive" himself (although "I should not have given any proposal from Disney any consideration at all. I am not all that poor..."
I can't imagine what Tolkien heard about Walt's business practices, and from whom, although presumably some disgruntled British author was the source. In any case, what he wrote is at odds with everything we know about how Walt and Roy Disney dealt with authors. Perhaps by this time Tolkien was getting a little resentful that Walt had not shown any interest in buying the screen rights to The Lord of the Rings. After all, there's no fun in saying "no" to an offer that hasn't been made.
John Benson has submitted an exceptionally interesting comment about my November 17 item titled "When Fantasia Spread Out." Since you'd likely miss it otherwise, I'm providing a direct link here.
Geoff Blum and I were exchanging emails recently on Carl Barks-related matters, as we often do, when Geoff wrote:
I realize on the whole how lucky I’ve been in being able to meet my heroes, at least the ones whose lives have overlapped mine: Carl Barks, Eyvind Earle, Ross Martin, Leif Ove Andsnes, a slew of modern writers—cripes, I even had a minute to talk with Borges about Flann O’Brien. Aubrey Menen I never had a chance at, and I think we might have found things to talk about. As for the people whose lives haven’t overlapped mine—James Stephens, Dvorak, W.S. Gilbert, William Beckford—well, I can’t do anything about that. If only one could reincarnate backward in time.
That set me to thinking about the people I've met, or didn't meet, or never could have met, who might fall into the "hero" category. I'll limit my lists to comics and animation people; otherwise they would go on forever, and who wouldn't want to have met Dickens and Mark Twain, anyway?
Barks is at the top of my comics list, and I feel tremendously grateful to have spent many hours with him. I got to spend a few hours each with Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Charles Schulz, but I never met Walt Kelly, my greatest comics hero alongside Barks, or John Stanley. Probably I could have met both Kelly and Stanley if I'd made the effort, and I wish very much that I had.
Walt Disney is of course the animation hero I most wish I could have met, and I would love to have known other great Disney names like Bill Tytla, Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, and Ham Luske. Among the Warner Bros. people I never met, I think first of Rod Scribner. But the list of heroes that I did meet, and often interviewed, is, happily, quite long, beginning with Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Marc Davis, Bill Peet, Art Babbitt, Preston Blair, Frank Tashlin...there are quite a few more names that come to mind, even when I limit myself to people who were my heroes based on what I knew of their work before I ever met them. Other people, if not quite my heroes before I met them, quickly became such after I did—I think immediately of Rudy Ising, Wilfred Jackson, and Dick Huemer. And then there were a few people who were my heroes until I met them, but not afterwards. I won't mention any names in the latter category.
In the parlor-game vein...I've been re-reading a great many Barks stories lately, as I've immersed myself in comic books in preparation for my next book, and it occurred to me that it's at least a little strange that no one has ever tried to make a live-action feature with characters based on Barks's ducks and their supporting characters. Not that the actors would be walking around without pants, but Barks's ducks are so intensely human that I can't believe they couldn't be translated into live action. As for casting, let's see...maybe Vince Vaughn as Donald Duck, Owen Wilson as Gladstone Gander, Ian McKellen as Uncle Scrooge, Jack Nicholson as Grandpa Beagle, Anjelica Huston as Magica De Spell...the possibilities are endless. There's got to be a role for Will Ferrell in there someplace.
If either of these parlor games makes you want to join in, feel free.
I can't recall ever paying much attention to either the Oscars or the Annies. I've always had trouble taking them seriously, the latter especially, but it doesn't surprise me that the Annies, ASIFA-Hollywood's awards in various animation categories, have become steadily more prominent over the years. Hollywood loves awards of all kinds and, especially, the opportunities they bring for publicizing not just the winning films but those that are nominated. (Years ago, the Los Angeles Times, I think it was, published a devastating report on the Golden Globes, documenting just how ridiculously phony those awards were. Didn't make a bit of difference.)
The Oscar race is unusual this year, because there are five nominees for best animated feature, not just three, and one of the five, Pixar's Up, is also one of ten nominees for best picture. Up has already won the Annie for best animated feature, and it's the front runner for the Oscar in that category. I'd be delighted if Up snuck through and won for best picture—not because I think it was the best movie of 2010, or even a good movie at all, but because the shock value of such an award might encourage at least a few people to look at Pixar and its films with a less indulgent eye.
In the past year, I've been struck not just by the uniformly adoring reviews for Up (The New Yorker's review comes first to mind, probably because that magazine's reviewers are so much tougher on most films), but also by such cultural signifiers as a long and completely uncritical piece about Pixar—titled "Pixar Genius"—in the October 8, 2009, issue of The New York Review of Books, probably the leading American literary/intellectual journal. I've read NYR for many years, and its Pixar piece was, I believe, its first article about animation of any kind since Robert Craft's dismissive review of Christopher Finch's book The Art of Walt Disney, more than thirty-five years ago.
There's scant evidence in the Pixar article that its author, Christian Caryl, has seen many other animated films, or knows anything about animation other than what's in the three books listed at the head of his piece: Amid Amidi's The Art of Pixar Short Films, Karen Paik's authorized history, To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, and David A. Price's The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. But Caryl, whose expertise is in foreign policy, does mention his five-year-old daughter, twice. (It seems she "had no trouble at all following the story" of WALL•E.) Caryl also says, ludicrously, that Pixar's films have been "attacked" by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. What I've read about Pixar in both newspapers could be construed as attacks only by the most thin-skinned (which the Pixar people quite likely are).
Pixar's films are often mentioned in the same breath as the great Disney shorts and features of the late '30s and early '40s, but I think a more accurate comparison would be with the MGM live-action features of the same period. There were some good MGM movies then—although at the moment I'm struggling to think of one (OK, yes, The Philadelphia Story)—but the representative features were smug, well-upholstered, and manipulative; that is, cold, sleek industrial products like Test Pilot andMrs. Miniver. When I glance back over Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Cars,WALL•E, and Up, and the shorts released alongside them—all of the Pixar films of the last ten years or so, setting aside Monsters, Inc. and Brad Bird's two features—they look to me like films that might have emerged from a miniature version of the MGM factory.
Like Pixar, MGM won lots of Academy Awards, and its big movies still have their fans, but does anyone take very many of those movies seriously? Not any more; and I think that will be Pixar's ultimate fate. Not that it matters to John Lasseter and Pete Docter and their colleagues, and not that it should, given the priorities in today's Hollywood and especially at today's Disney, where there is not a trace left of Walt Disney's kind of seriousness. (The Disney studio's current proprietors are very serious, of course, but only about money.)
For the record: I haven't seen The Book of Kells, but of the four nominated animated features that I have seen, I'd vote without hesitation for Coraline.
An afterthought: Perhaps the tide is turning at The New York Review insofar as Walt Disney himself is concerned. In the December 3, 2009, issue, in a review of Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Depression, Robert Gottlieb criticized that book's failure to mention Walt, "the most revolutionary film talent of his time." I can't imagine such a remark appearing in an NYR review even a few years ago, and it's good to see Walt recognized in that way now.
I was putting together what I thought would be a short item on the mysterious Roll-A-Book version of Dumbo—the original version of the story that became the famous Disney film—when it mushroomed into a full-blown Essay page. You can read it by clicking on this link.
Last month I noted the death of Richard Todd, the fine British actor who was Walt Disney's first adult live-action star and his good friend. Todd's second movie for Walt (after The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men) was The Sword and the Rose, which was filmed in England in 1952 and released in the U.S. in July 1953. I recently acquired this publicity photo for Sword and the Rose that shows Walt with Todd, and with Glynis Johns, Todd's co-star, around the start of the shooting of that film at the Pinewood Studios. The occasion, according to the "snipe" attached to the photo, was the filming of costume tests.
The photo is undated, but it most likely was taken early in July 1952. Walt and Lillian Disney, their daughters, Sharon and Diane (the latter's name misspelled "Diana" on the official British list of incoming "alien passengers"), and Lillian's niece, Marjorie Sewell Bowers, sailed from New York on the Queen Elizabeth on Tuesday, July 1, 1952. They arrived at Southampton on Sunday, July 6, and proceeded to the Dorchester Hotel in London. The Hollywood Reporter for July 17, 1952, in a dispatch from London dated Friday, July 11, reported:
Walt Disney arrived in town this week and got right down to work on his new British picture, "The Sword and the Rose." Already he has visited Pinewood studios and had conferences with producer Perce Pearce and writer Lawrence Watkin, inspected art director Carmen Dillon's set designs and given artists' and make-up tests the once-over. After expressing his complete satisfaction with the pre-production planning and progress to date, he took a quick look at the sound stage where the first set is being built in readiness for interior shooting to start Aug. 5. This set, on which the opening scenes will be filmed, depicts part of the grounds and battlements of Windsor Castle in 1515 during the early years of Henry VIII's reign. Location shooting will be done by a second unit at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield, about 20 miles out of London, and will start next Monday.
The Disneys and Marjorie Bowers left Europe on Monday, August 25, 1952, sailing from Naples, Italy, aboard the Independence, and arrived in New York on Wednesday, September 3. I don't know if they flew or took the train to Los Angeles, but, in any case, Walt was back in his Burbank office the following Tuesday, September 9, the day after Labor Day.
Muriel Marjorie Sewell Bowers, daughter of Lillian Disney's sister Hazel Sewell and the stepdaughter of Walt's longtime employee Bill Cottrell, married Marvin Davis, one of Disneyland's key designers, in 1955. He died in 1998. Marjorie Davis died in December 1999, at the age of 83.
[A January 26 update:
Tom Carr has posted at his PilsnersPicks page two decidedly pre-Pinocchio and pre-Dumbo songs by Cliff Edwards, "When I Was a Son of Bee" (1927) and "I'm Going to Give It to Mary" (1931), the latter the cleanest dirty song you've ever heard, or maybe the dirtiest clean song, I'll let you decide. Tom has also posted the two-sided "Victor Minstrel Show of 1929," which makes for an interesting comparison with the Moran and Mack routine mentioned below. The name of one of the performers, Billy Murray, may be familiar, since he provided voices for early Fleischer sound cartoons.]
In his comment on my January 14 item about the crow sequence in Dumbo, Tom Carr mentioned early recordings by Moran and Mack, the duo billed as The Two Black Crows. Tom suggested that the film's crow dialogue had much in common with the routines of Moran and Mack, white performers who, like Amos 'n' Andy's Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, portrayed black characters in comedy routines.
Moran and Mack appeared on the vaudeville stage, on records, in revues like the Ziegeld Follies (1924) and Earl Carroll's Follies (1927), and even in a few movies. Their most famous routine was "The Early Bird Catches the Worm," which filled two sides of a Columbia record released in 1927. You can hear that routine, and others, at this link and judge for yourself how closely the banter of Dumbo's crows resembles what Moran and Mack were doing more than ten years earlier.
My own response is, racial considerations aside, what is it about the "Early Bird" routine that anyone ever considered so terribly funny that it became a big hit? Maybe you had to see it performed on stage to get the full effect? But then you'd have had to look at Moran and Mack, who in their stage garb appeared as in the photo at the right (which I've borrowed from Anthony Slide's invaluable reference The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers, published by Arlington House in 1981).
Pretty scary—but the costumes and makeup are so abstract, really, that it's hard to accept either man as the "shiftless darky" he was supposed to be. The connection with real black people is remarkably tenuous, and not just in the men's appearance but in how they sound in the routine itself. Gosden and Correll seem to have worked harder to make their voices sound "black." Moran and Mack are much closer to the minstrel show, in the way they look and sound, than to Amos 'n' Andy.
(Things were different back then, and not just where African Americans were concerned, as I was reminded when I ran across an item in the June 13, 1928, Variety about a popular Jewish vaudevillian: "Lou Holtz ... has been censured by Chicago's Catholic organizations because of a religious gag which he refused to eliminate until forced to do so by Balaban & Katz. The story ... concerned a boastful Hebe who bragged about meeting everyone of importance while in Europe. He wound up with a remark he liked the Pope all right, but his wife—!"And oh, yes, Holtz appeared in blackface early in his career.)
If Moran and Mack's "Early Bird" routine sounds naggingly familiar, that may be because it's generally similar to the vocal track for the 1932 Van Beuren cartoon Plane Dumb, in which the white characters Tom and Jerry (not the MGM cat and mouse) put on blackface in Africa. That track was recorded not by Moran and Mack, but by a duo called Miller and Lyles—comedians who were themselves black, but who performed a blackface routine imitative of the two white comedians. For some background on Plane Dumb see this page at Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research site.
There is at least one other cartoon connection: The two black crows in The Early Bird and the Worm, a 1936 MGM Happy Harmony directed by Rudolf Ising, are unmistakably modeled on Moran and Mack. Wikipedia's page on Moran and Mack cites a line in Friz Freleng's Warner cartoon The Wacky Worm it says was picked up from the team's "Early Bird" routine, but I haven't looked at the cartoon again to confirm that attribution.
As I noted here last November 5, my book The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney has been published in Italy, as Vita di Walt Disney: Uomo, Sognatore e Genio (Life of Walt Disney: Man, Dreamer and Genius). It seems to be attracting considerable interest there, and even some controversy. La Repubblica, the country's second largest newspaper, devoted a full page to the book on December 28. That's a compact version of the page above, sent to me by my Italian publisher; click on this link to go to a larger version.
I don't have a clear idea of what's being said about the book, in La Repubblica or elsewhere in print and online. Despite several visits to Italy, a country that I love, my knowledge of the language still doesn't extend much beyond bongiorno and arrivederci. But I'm a little irked by La Repubblica's headline, which I believe says, "The dark [or maybe the unknown] side of Walt Disney—he was a tyrant with his employees." That's certainly not what the book says (and I'm not at all sure that's what the article itself says), but I suppose, given how different labor relations tend to be in Western Europe from those in the U.S., he might be seen as a tyrant in Italian terms. Maybe.
My impression from some other Italian sources is that my biography is being perceived as a positive counterweight to Marc Eliot's hatchet job. That's a judgment I'd welcome.
And speaking of The Animated Man: I wrote last May 26 that the Walt Disney Company had concluded that my book was in fact eligible for sale at the Disney theme parks. "Questions about the copyright status of a few of the book's illustrations had prevented the parks from placing any new orders," I said then, "since Disney did not want its stores selling The Animated Man if any of the illustrations infringed on its copyrights. ... Whether the book actually goes back on sale will be up to the parks' buyers, of course, but at least that possibility is now open."
I was being circumspect. The complaint of copyright infringement was never much more than frivolous—it was based, I'm sure, on The Animated Man's status as an unauthorized biography, rather than any legitimate concern about the illustrations—but I felt obliged to hold my tongue while there was any chance of the book's reappearing at the Disney parks' stores. My apprehensions were well founded: The Animated Man has never gone back on sale at the parks. The book is doing just fine—it's still one of University of California Press' bestsellers, almost three years after it was published—but I regret that it's not available to park visitors, many of whom will never know of it otherwise.
The Animated Man isn't being sold at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, either, and presumably won't be, although the museum has for months declined to give UC Press an answer one way or the other. Neal Gabler's Disney biography, a dreadful misrepresentation of the man, is is being sold at the parks, and one of my correspondents told me he had seen it for sale at the Family Museum in November. Given Diane Disney Disney Miller's frequent and well-founded criticism of the Gabler book, I must assume someone made a mistake. An understandable one, perhaps, since, as the New York Times pointed out in an article about the museum, "Mr. Gabler’s work benefited from full cooperation with the family and the Walt Disney Company." As I have reason to know, that sort of official blessing can make all the difference.
Cliff Edwards, Ward Kimball, Jack Kinney, and the Crows
Jim Korkis wrote in response to my January 10 item mentioning the voices of the crows in Dumbo, and specifically criticizing Cliff Edwards's performance as the leader of the five crows. That's Edwards wearing a derby in the publicity photo just above, with Jack Kinney, who worked on story for the crow sequence and then directed it. Here's what Jim Korkis said:
Interestingly, I am just finishing up an article on Cliff Edwards, who is best known today for his vocal work on Jiminy Cricket. Here's some background:
For a brief time around 1922, Edwards teamed up with Lou Clayton doing a blackface act (that while grossly inappropriate and insensistive today was common practice for entertainment at the time) and received some recognition for achieving what one reviewer called a faithful degree of black speech nuances.
That was one of the reasons that animator Ward Kimball cast Edwards as Jim Crow in Dumbo (1941). As Kimball remembered, "Cliff Edwards doing the voice of Jim Crow really made the whole sequence, because he was quite adept at doing kazoo solos on his old records, and he could vocally imitate other instruments. Many of the instrumental effects on the track were done by Edwards. Voice-wise, he really sounded more black than the blacks [from the Hall Johnson Choir] we had backing him up... The development and differentiation of the (crow) characters really began on the night that we started recording. I decided that Jim Crow would be the big, dominating boss crow with the derby... By the time the voices were set, you have a pretty good idea how they would individually look, react and even function in the sequence."
That Kimball quotation is from an interview by Ross Care in Millimeter for July-August 1976. Jim's message led me to wonder how much more of the story behind the crow sequence could be reconstructed at this late date.
Dumbo is the least documented of all the early Disney features—in particular, there are no notes from the many story meetings—but I have to doubt that it was Kimball who "cast" Edwards as Jim Crow, however much he may have approved or even recommended the casting. Also, Kimball may have been exaggerating a bit when he said, "I decided that Jim Crow would be the big, dominating boss crow with the derby." Such a character was always envisioned as a member of the cast.
In the original Joe Grant-Dick Huemer treatment of the story, which they fed to Walt Disney piecemeal during January-March 1940, Timothy Mouse has an indignant confrontation in Chapter XVIII with "a large, rusty-looking crow"; there's an audience of undifferentiated birds in attendance. The crow isn't described as wearing a derby, and there's none of Dumbo's clever business, but the general shape of the sequence is the same in the treatment as in the film.
Ralph Wright, who worked on the storyboards for the crow sequence with Kinney, told Milt Gray in 1977, in one of the interviews for Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, that the sequence as it came from Grant and Huemer "was pretty much outlined." (The 102-page Grant-Huemer treatment is, by the way, yet another of those written documents that so often started story work at the Disney studio, but that, as I noted last December 15, various mountebanks and gulls like to pretend never existed.)
In a 1972 interview with Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkranz for Finch's book The Art of Walt Disney, Kimball remembered that the recording session for the crow sequence took place the night of election day, November 5, 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Wendell Wilkie. Everyone at the session was supporting FDR, Kimball said, except for the recording engineer Sam Slyfield. This was the session at which "When I See an Elephant Fly" was recorded; Kimball remembered that Oliver Wallace, that song's composer, was in charge.
Dumbo's supervising director Ben Sharpsteen, in a 1974 interview with Don Peri (which Peri incorporated into the Sharpsteen section of his book Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Artists), said of the recording session:
During the production of Dumbo, we had considerable problems between the story and the direction, and as a result it became necessary to have some new songs written that applied themselves better to the picture. When it came to recording these songs, one particular lyric writer [Ned Washington] wanted to be present.
This writer had written the lyrics to a song sung by the crows, which was an outstanding sequence in Dumbo. The singers suggested a change in the lyrics that seemed to be in character and to fit what we were trying to do, so we improvised the change. [In the original transcript, a copy of which is in the Disney Archives, Sharpsteen said that the black singers' leader "opposed some of the lyrics in it," for reasons that can now only be guessed at.] The lyric writer was greatly upset. One of our musicians [most likely Ollie Wallace] said, "Now take it easy. This isn't as serious as you think it is. You've got to realize how we do things here at Disney's. Everybody has his opportunity to say something. In other words, everybody chips in ten cents, and somehow it all seems to add up to a dollar."
I was particularly intrigued by Sharpsteen's characteristically oblique reference to "considerable problems between the story and the direction," which I suspect meant in this case that the crow sequence had been planned without a song, but as the treatment was translated into storyboards it became clear that it needed one.
On Friday, November 22, a little over two weeks after the recording session, Sharpsteen sent a memo to Walt Disney telling him: "Kinney is finishing sketches and we are going to go into a leica reel presentation of this and can probably have it complete during the coming week." Leica reels were film strips made up of photos of story sketches, with a synchronized sound accompaniment, no doubt in this case using recordings from the November 5 session.
Kimball presumably began animation of the crow sequence not long after that—I would guess in early 1941—and he had live-action footage to help him, as I wrote in this note I made in March 1997, during one of my numerous trips to Los Angeles around that time:
Scott MacQueen's show of "Disney's Unseen Treasures" at the World Animation Celebration at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium included footage of two black dancers shot as reference material for Kimball's animation of the crow sequence. The two dancers are obviously improvising to the pre-recorded song, and there's almost nothing that suggests the animated sequence, except possibly for a few gestures—shoulder shrugs, foot shuffling—that are themselves so general that Kimball could easily have picked them up from his own observations, or simply been reminded by the dancers of what he already knew.
In our 1976 interview, I asked Kimball about what it was like to work with Jack Kinney as his director on that sequence:
Barrier: On Dumbo, you were paired with Jack Kinney on the crow sequence, and you have animation credit for virtually everything in that sequence. [An overstatement: Timothy and Dumbo were animated by other hands, notably Fred Moore and Don Towsley, and, for one scene, Bill Tytla; Walt Kelly also animated a few scenes of the crows.] In a case like that, where you have this one-on-one pairing, the director seems almost like a superfluous character.
Kimball: Jack did his work; he took care of the loose ends. He took care of making out the sheets. I liked him, because he'd say, "Do whatever you want here."He'd just rip off a pile of sheets, and I'd say, "I'll phone up the timing." I did that all the time. Jack was flexible about that; he didn't try to push his weight around. He was open, and he was good in that respect. He did exactly what he should have done with an animator. He set up the recording sessions, and we were invited to it. He talked over story points, and we made our suggestions, and we'd argue now and then. It was sort of a good relationship.
Barrier: It sounds almost as if he were an assistant, taking care of certain details.
Kimball: In a way, but all of these situations were quite different than any other studio.
(I seem not to have talked with Kinney about Dumbo, which surprises me greatly; or it may be that he didn't say anything substantial enough to warrant a cross-reference in my files.There's almost nothing about his work on that cartoon in his autobiography, and what's there is not particularly accurate. But when Milt Gray talked with Kinney in November 1976— this was not a recorded interview—Jack said, in Milt's paraphrase, "Kimball did a great job, but he had to be kept on a tight rein to achieve it." Given the the relative importance that Walt Disney assigned to directors and animators, I'd guess that Kinney's "tight rein" would have counted as a rather loose rein at places like Warner Bros. and MGM.)
Even though Kimball liked Kinney, he had told me in our 1969 interview that he and Ben Sharpsteen clashed over his animation of the crows:
I wanted to try something different, I wanted to make each crow a definite, separate character. One example was the little crow with the big horn-rimmed glasses. When he rolled his eyes, the eyes went out beyond the head mass, they rolled around inside the rims of the big glasses. Ben objected to that, and we had a hell of a fight. I said, "Look, Ben, some people wear magnifying glasses; they distort things." He couldn't quite see it. This was how dense he was about caricature in graphics. I refused to change my animation. Finally, Walt saw the sequence and thought it was great. He was the final Supreme Court.
The crow sequence (or, if you prefer, sequences, numbered 19, 19.1, and 19.2 on the drafts) was apparently one of the last to be completed, perhaps because of the story difficulties that Sharpsteen mentioned, or maybe even because of his clashes with Kimball. The drafts (that was the term used on the Disney studio's charts describing each scene, identifying its animators, and listing its footage) are dated June 23, 25, and 26, 1941—that is, during the strike, and later than the drafts for any other sequences.
To return to Cliff Edwards: As I said in my earlier post, I can't buy his imitation-black dialect for Jim Crow; it simply sounds phony to me—not insincere, necessarily, but unconvincing. As Jim Korkis mentions, Edwards did a blackface act in the '20s, and part of that act may have been preserved in a five-minute Metro short released in 1929. Variety said of it: "Cliff Edwards blacks up for this short and is in front of a silk drop, singing 'Half Way to Heaven" and 'Good Little Baby,' splitting the two with a half-minute gag that scores. Practically the entire short is taken in close-up, with Edwards photographing well and putting over his numbers with [ukulele] accompaniment in a very showmanlike manner." It would be interesting to see that short—well, interesting may not be the right word, but a comparison with Edwards's Jim Crow might be illuminating.
That short-lived (eleven issues) satire magazine has been revived in a meticulously assembled two-volume set from Fantagraphics, more than a half century after Humbug's demise. I've written a review that you can read by clicking on this link.
We are in the midst of a modest Kurtzman boom: not only is Humbug back with us, but another Kurtzman magazine, Trump, will be published in a single volume in March (it lasted only two issues). Abrams Comic Art published The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, last year. I recently acquired that lavishly illustrated volume, and I hope to post a review sometime soon; but no guarantees.
If the name "John Donaldson" rings a bell, that's because he has on a number of occasions provided answers to perplexing questions I've raised here about Walt Disney and the people who worked for him. John writes now to say that he will soon be putting his expertise between the covers of a new book:
If you've ever wondered as to my ability to identify a photo you have posted, or another particular of Disney history, it comes from having had a thirty-year friendship, of family, with Herbert Ryman.
My memoir biography, Warp and Weft: Life Canvas of Herbert Ryman is about to be published.
As you know, there is a great deal of important personal Walt Disney history that has never been known, going back to Kansas City. This book—400 pages, with 46 pages of notes—will finally help fill in those gaps. A website about it can be found at this link.
There have been so many Disney-related books published in recent years that it can be hard to get excited about any of them, but I'm excited about this one. I'm looking forward to reading it and reporting on the revelations it contains. I'm sure there will be quite a few.
[A March 17, 2010, update: I've now read John's book, and I'm sorry to say that I cannot recommend it. In my view, he presents a great deal of speculation as fact, and he devotes far too much space to redressing personal grievances. A pity.]
Disney's The Princess and the Frog has been limping toward $100 million in boxoffice receipts, overwhelmed not just by Avatar but also by the part-CGI Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. That's a shame; Princess is by no means a good movie, but as you know if you've read my review, I think there are enough good things in it to make it well worth your time if you have any feelings at all for that wonderful medium, hand-drawn animation.
Although fewer people have seen Princess than one might wish, it has stirred up more discussion than many movies do, such discussion centering most often not on its animation but on its racial and religious dimensions. I mentioned one such article in my December 29 post. A more substantial piece appeared in last Friday's Wall Street Journal: "What Walt Wrought" by Mark I. Pinsky; it's online for free (unlike most of the Journal) at opinionjournal.com. Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, is the author of The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (2004); his Journal piece is in some respects a highly condensed version of that book.
Pinsky's focus is on the complaints raised by conservative evangelical Christians about Princess' voodoo practitioners, but he also recalls attacks from the same quarters on earlier Disney films. I have always had trouble taking such complaints seriously, since they most often are the products of either a cynical play for media attention (pick a big target, make a ridiculous charge, get a headline) or the sort of credulous mind that thinks the Bible should be read as literally as a telephone directory. Some self-proclaimed Christians do seem to be convinced, though, that their children will be warped for life by a few minutes' exposure to Mama Odie. If Princess and the Frog were bigger at the box office, perhaps it might be the target of something as spectacularly foolish as the unsuccessful 1996 Southern Baptist boycott of all things Disney, but the prospects for such a lucky break for the film are pretty dim.
There are actually two books titled The Gospel According to Disney, the earlier of which, now out of print, boasts an introduction by the revered Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. I haven't seen that book yet, but I hope to do so soon.
There was a lot of pushing and shoving while The Princess and the Frog was in production, as various people tried to influence the film's portrayal of its black characters, but since it was released there has been less complaining and congratulating than might have been expected. Probably the film simply hasn't been a big enough success to make grasping its coattails seem worth the bother. It was, however, the subject of a New Year's Day interview on National Public Radio with Scott Foundas, film critic for L.A. Weekly, the gist of which was that Disney was so deeply stained by its sins in regard to race that making one semi-enlightened film couldn't come close to making up for the past. You can read a summary of the interview (and listen to it) at this link, where there's also a link to the Village Voice article by Foundas that led to the interview.
In his interview, although not in the Voice piece, Foundas cited the crows in Dumbo as yet another instance of Disney's racial insensitivity. I was reminded that Dumbo most often gets a pass, or at best a mild spanking, in such discussions. That's curious, really, because there is something about it that I think is genuinely offensive, and that is Cliff Edwards's vocal portrayal of Jim Crow, the crows' leader. The other four crows are voiced, wonderfully well, by blacks, members of the Hall Johnson Choir; Edwards's Jim Crow is, by comparison, much cruder, straight out of Amos 'n' Andy. A pity, really, because there were undoubtedly plenty of outstanding black singers who could have provided a more persuasive voice.
Even with Edwards's unfortunate participation, the crows are, as a group, among Dumbo's very few sympathetic and likable characters. Literally all of the film's white characters—the ringmaster, the boys who taunt Dumbo, the clowns, and, by extension, the unmistakably "white" female elephants—are cruel or, at best, cold and unfeeling. They're stereotypical white people, one might be tempted to say if Dumbo had been made by African Americans rather than by artists who were themselves white and governed not by any racial agenda but by what they saw as the requirements of their story.
Stereotypes are tricky. The problem usually isn't that they're false, but that they tell only a small part of the truth, even as they pretend to tell all of it. Here is the saving grace of Dumbo's crows: these characters are, the film makes clear, far more interesting and complex than their superficial characteristics—which are undeniably stereotypical—might suggest. The crows' voices, Cliff Edwards's aside, do not sound like second-hand imitations, but like sly caricatures of the Southern black speech the singers had heard all their lives; they are the voices of real people. In Ward Kimball's endlessly inventive animation, the crows have the sort of individuality that can't be reconciled with stereotypes' leveling of differences.
There is nothing in The Princess and the Frog—which tiptoes so timidly in its handling of racial questions that it asks its audience to accept one absurdity after another—that is nearly as good as Dumbo's sequence with the crows. Could one problem have been that the people making the film were simply too far removed from its subject matter to ever get comfortable in their handling of it? There's one possible answer in an amusing post by Mark Liberman at Language Log, stimulated by Princess heroine Tiana's use of "y'all" as a singular form of address. Liberman writes:
Both the Wikipedia article for the movie and the IMDb page give screenwriting credit to Ron Clements (born in Sioux City, Iowa), John Musker (from Chicago, Illinois), and Rob Edwards (origins unclear). The character of Tiana is acted by Anika Noni Rose, who "was born in Bloomfield, Connecticut to Claudia and John Rose, Jr., a corporate counsel for the city of Hartford". Thus it's not clear whether anyone associated with writing or acting that scene has native intuitions about the likely distribution of y'all in the speech of a young African-American woman from New Orleans. So it's a reasonable guess that the sprinkling of y'alls in Tiana's speech is a bit of southern spice added by northern chefs.
Thanks to Bill Benzon for the link; and for more on the role of race in Dumbo, see Bill's piece on this Essay page.
December 2009:The Princess and the Frog and Fantastic Mr. Fox, a cel fire at the Mintz studio, Richard Todd, Roy Edward Disney, Hal Sintzenich's diaries, more hot air from an "archivist."
November 2009: On the sidewalk with Charlie Mintz, a visit to Saint Louis, when Fantasia spread out, on the barricades with Art Babbitt.
October 2009: "Sincerity," Ward Kimball photographs R. Crumb, Walt Kelly writes to Walt Disney, losing illusions in today's Hollywood animation business, more on Walt Disney at Harvard (and Yale), Art Spiegelman in Arkansas, the Walt Disney Family Museum opens its doors.
September 2009: What Walt Disney was doing in London in 1935 and New York in 1940, George Winkler and Andrew Stone and Charlie Mintz, Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss' advertising films, Li'l Eight Ball's disappearance from comic books, shipboard with Walt and family in 1949, the curious case of Mortimer Mouse.
August 2009: Carl Barks on exhibit in Baltimore, the mystery of Barks's Donald Duck, Lillian Disney speaks in public, early omens on The Princess and the Frog, Classic Children's Comics, Walt Disney in Ireland, home again from a long summer journey.
June 2009: Taking a summer break, Egghead and Elmer, more on Sita Sings the Blues, Pixar's Up, the role of words and drawings in early Disney story work.
May 2009: Reading the funnies in bulk, Keith Lango's ideas about "visual harmony," Walt Disney goes to Harvard, John Canemaker goes to Kansas City, Sita Sings the Blues, Disney and Columbia, fictitious "Walt Disneys" on stage and screen, David Gerstein's blog, Monsters vs. Aliens, more on Dave Hand, Milt Kahl as "the animation Michelangelo."
April 2009: Easter greetings from Warner Bros. Cartoons, Børge Ring on David Hand, Ken Annakin, Dick Huemer, Floyd Norman, Ferguson's flypaper sequence revisited, Disney's walled garden, Don Bluth, the Walt Disney Family Museum, Bob Clampett's secret life.
March 2009: Walt Kelly comics from Fairy Tale Parade, Chuck Jones on TCM, Walt Disney at Dumbo's premiere, Emil Flohri, Coraline, Watchmen, in the Disney music rooms in 1931, a case of mistaken identity, ten years of Hollywood Cartoons.
February 2009: Acting in animation, with a riveting memory of Bill Tytla, Coraline, 3-D pro and con, cartoon cocktails, the first Disney annual report, Marceline faces from Walt Disney's time, a Marceline myth.
January 2009: "The Three Little Pigs" as drawn by Walt Kelly, Ted Eshbaugh's studio in 1931, "card check" in 1941 and 2009, The Tale of Despereaux, Walt Disney sails from Chile to New York on the Santa Clara.
December 2008:The Spirit on the screen, cartoon directors' Christmas cards, trying to identify a mystery man, books: Spirited Away, Popeye, and The Animated Man, Bolt and Madagascar 2, Dave Hilberman's FBI file.
November 2008: Back from Italy, live-action Disney on Turner Classic Movies.
October 2008:The Wall Street Journal on Pixar and Disney,Walt at the keyboard, Chuck Jones and Eddie Selzer, Chuck at MGM, "Directors and Directions," salvaging Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney's attitude toward women, "Of Cabbages and Kleins," The Perfect American as novel and opera, on the set of Invitation to the Dance.
September 2008: Visiting J. R. Bray, Ben Sharpsteen and his museum, Elias Disney in his own words, the ancestral Disney lands in Ontario, a book ban in Burbank.
August 2008: Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising remembered, Michael Sporn's role on The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, more on Wertham, Sporn DVDs.
July 2008: More Looney Tunes on DVD, WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda, Walt Disney's stump, Bill Tytla's voice, Disney anniversaries, Wertham's locked vault, Schulz and Peanuts demolished, more on Walt and Dolores.
May-June 2008: Walt Disney's Kansas City building, Walt and polo (and polo-related deaths), Japanese features, Walt and Dolores Del Rio, late-period Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett in Canada, Walt Disney meets Robert Taylor in 1938 and visits Marceline and Saint Louis in 1946, the post-modern Goofy, The Colored Cartoon.
April 2008: The Jones-Avery letter, what Walt Disney really thought about Goofy, the "Censored 11," Borge Ring on Hans Perk, remembering Ollie Johnston, Two Days in the Life: Kansas City, 1922, more on Walt Disney's 1922 want ads, Walt's skeptical supervisor at Kansas City Film Ad, Bob Clampett and Ollie Johnston share a table, the Schulz kidnaping, Nick Cross and The Waif of Persephone.
March 2008: Walt Disney's want ads in 1922, Dick Huemer's Buck O'Rue, A Day in the Life: Disney, January 1930 and February 1927, A Day in the Life: Walt Kelly, 1955, The Animated Man in trade paper, Walt Disney meets Yma Sumac and visits Atlanta, responding to complaints about negative criticism, Bob Clampett at work, "What Would Bob Do?"
February 2008: Walt Disney and Joan Bennett in 1942, an interview with Elias and Flora Disney, debate about Buckaroo Bugs, Emery Hawkins at Lantz, Walt Disney in England, Carl Barks's first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Jim Bodrero interview, photos of Warner story man Lloyd Turner, remembering Roger Armstrong.
January 2008: Dell comic books, Ward Kimball, Chuck Jones, Joe Grant and hero worship, more on writing for animation (and why some people spread falsehoods about it), Walt Disney's 1934 trip to Hawaii, Hanna-Barbera celebrated in a book, Bob Clampett, Satoshi Kon, more on the voices of Walt's Alice.
December 2007: Writing for animation, Margaret O'Brien and Walt Disney's Alice, Jack Zander, more on UPA, Rod Scribner at work, Borge Ring, a "mystery studio," Byron Haskin and Disney's Treasure Island, more on Coal Black, Walt and Lillian on the town, revisiting Raggedy Ann & Andy and Wizards, Satoshi Kon's budgets.
November 2007:Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, Mickey's birthplace in New York, the UPA book, the Michael Sporn retrospective at MoMA, the ideas that interviews can stimulate.
October 2007: Carl Stalling interviewed, Dick Huemer remembered, more on Walt Disney and Zorro, the controversy over the Schulz biography, Joe Penner and the "Agony, agony!" catchphrase, Walt and The Art Spirit, Walt in Hawaii, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, The Jungle Book revisited.
August 2007: Walt and the librarians, independent animators, the mystery of Walt's Goldwater button solved, Diane Disney Miller blasts Neal Gabler, Paprika, interviews with Clarence Nash, Jim Macdonald, and Billy Bletcher, Pete Emslie's guidelines for animal characters, Ratatouille.
July 2007: More on Harry Reichenbach, Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky, Surf'sUp, Walt at Smoke Tree Ranch, Dave Hilberman, The Iron Giant revisited, Michael Sporn and Walter Lantz on DVD, Ratatouille.
June 2007: More on Walt Disney's Goldwater button, more on the flypaper sequence, Roger Armstrong, Disney in Deutschland, Ratatouille, Walt and Zorro, more on Walt and T. H. White, Harry Reichenbach and Steamboat Willie, the auctioning of Carl Barks's estate.
May 2007: UPA wars on the blogs, Ferguson's flypaper sequence, Walt Disney's employment contract, Harry Reichenbach, Disney art at Montreal, Walt writes to T. H. White, selling The Animated Man in L.A.
April 2007:The Animated Man, Fergy ruffs, Meet the Robinsons.
March 2007:The Animated Man, Cartoon Brew Films, a Cock Robin mosaic and documents, a Dumbo essay, the Goldwater button again, Walt and the space program.
February 2007: More on writing v. drawing, Paul Hindemith meets Walt Disney, Fantasia, Van Beuren dolls, Bob Clampett and Edgar Bergen.
January 2007: Walt's Goldwater button, Neal Gabler's errors, writing v. drawing cartoon stories, a Disney exhibition at Paris, Happy Feet.
November
2004: SpongeBob SquarePants, the illusion of spontaneity in
computer animation, The Incredibles.
October
2004: Roy Rogers in Branson, The Polar Express, Richard
Todd, "ViewMaster Animation."
September
2004: Frank Thomas, the Barrier-Kricfalusi debate continues.
July-August
2004: The Barrier-Kricfalusi debate, John Fawcett, Walt Kelly.
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UNHAPPY TRAILS: Six years ago, I wrote about 
HARVEY PEKAR: The passing earlier this month of Harvey Pekar, the writer and proprietor of the American Splendor comic books, was marked by full-length obituaries and essays in major newspapers. I can't think of any other true comic-book person, except possibly Carl Barks, who received such respectful attention upon his death. The best of the pieces I've read is 
Bob Thomas's notes referred originally to "Nofziger"—presumably Ed Nofziger, a magazine and newspaper cartoonist who specialized in animals—but that reference was corrected by someone—I can't identify the handwriting—to "Meeker." Although Leslie Iwerks, in her heavily slanted biography of her grandfather, takes that reference to "Meeker" literally, there seems to be no question but that Iwerks was thinking of Clifton Meek, who drew mouse cartoons in the teens and twenties. Meek himself wrote about his Disney connection in "A Tribute to the Late Walt Disney," in the Norwalk (Connecticut) Hour, on February 23, 1967; there's a link to that article in Didier's post, but it's also available through 
Or was Walt referring to Meek's earlier and more schematic mice in his "Johnny Mouse" cartoons, an example of which you can see in the accompanying 1914 cartoons from the Pittsburgh Press? Gunnar Andreassen included that cartoon in a message that Didier posted on May 13. Meek says in his article that he was drawing "Johnny Mouse" as early as 1912, in San Francisco, and apparently it was syndicated (by, Meek says in that 1967 article, the Scripps-McRae syndicate) for several years at least.
Then again, maybe all these questions about influences are a little beside the point. Walt and his colleagues admired some cartoonists' work more than others, but when it came to designing characters, intensely practical considerations were most important. In the crisis precipitated by the loss of most of the Disney animators, having a workable design at hand had to count for more than any aesthetic preferences. 
I've reproduced part of that 1925 publicity photo/drawing at the left; it's on page 40 of the original 1973 edition of Christoper Finch's The Art of Walt Disney. Hugh Harman's mice are smaller than the Mickey of Plane Crazy—there was no need to be concerned about scale in such a drawing—but there's a strong general resemblance otherwise. The differences between these mice and the original Mickey may be even more telling, though—and more indicative of Walt's own contribution to the character—for reasons I wrote about in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. I think now that I probably gave Iwerks too much credit for designing Mickey (as opposed to making the earliest drawings of the character, which he almost certainly did), but otherwise what I wrote seems to me to be on target: 
Craig Yoe, whose 
Very little new information has surfaced about Dumbo's pre-history since I posted my revised piece called 
Pretty close, although I don't know of any basis for calling Helen R. Durney a "circus artist." The "sixteen illustrations" can only refer to the sketches, with varying degrees of finish, that have survived in the Durney collection at Syracuse University; the actual illustrations for the Roll-A-Book, whatever their number, have probably disappeared. The Dumbo disc includes shots of two of Durney's sketches, which accompany John Canemaker's comments, and Gunnar Andreassen has sent me frame grabs of them; they're what you see accompanying this item, along with a frame grab of an ad for the first (and for practical purposes only) Roll-A-Book, The Lost Stone of Agog. 
Considering how much Dumbo material has come to light on the Web, it's remarkable how little we still know about the history of this wonderful movie. Not only are there holes in our knowledge of how the story came to be written and to pass into Walt Disney's hands, as I've documented in my Roll-A-Book piece, but the production of the film itself is skimpily documented compared with the other early Disney features. The voluminous transcripts of story meetings, so plentiful for Snow White and Pinocchio and Fantasia and Bambi, simply don't exist for Dumbo. As Hans Perk has noted, even the draft credits no one for a number of scenes. No doubt answers to some of the questions about Dumbo could be found in Disney's "main files" and its Animation Research Library, but whether such material will ever become available for public inspection is highly doubtful, so research will necessarily proceed in other ways.
Thanks to the Little Rock Film Festival, I've finally seen Don Hahn's documentary about the rebirth of the Disney animation department in 1984-94. It's a fascinating film, not least because so much of what we see and hear—a great deal of it on video—is contemporary with the events.
The outline of the story is familiar to anyone who paid the least attention to Disney animation in those years, but Waking Sleeping Beauty tells that familiar story with a gripping immediacy.
"
John Lasseter runs Pixar; if, like him, you were also the director of Cars, would you really want to have the director of The Incredibles at your elbow? Bird's continuing presence at Pixar would have been an uncomfortable reminder of just how much better a director he is than his longer-tenured colleagues, not just Lasseter but also Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter. I've heard or read nothing to suggest that Lasseter pushed Bird out the door, as he did with Chris Sanders, another gifted director, at Disney Feature Animation, but neither have I heard or read anything to suggest that Bird was ever part of Pixar's long-term plans.
Victory Day has a resonance in Russia that V-E Day could never have in the United States, because Russia suffered so much more terribly in the war, losing millions of its people to bullets and starvation. The Russians thus celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary on a very large scale. The very idea of the Great Patriotic War has become more complicated in recent years, though, since that war was fought in defense of a country, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. The Soviet Union's constituent parts have for almost twenty years been independent countries, some at odds with what is now called the Russian Federation, to the point that one (Georgia) fought a brief war with Russia in 2008. Under those circumstances, all the banners and posters celebrating the victory of the "CCCP" (the Russian-language initials for the USSR) had both a nostalgic flavor and, underlying that, the strong suggestion that maybe the breakup of the Soviet Union was not irreversible. It will be interesting to see how Victory Day is celebrated a few years from now, when the remaining veterans have left the stage.
Dad also said that if we came up with a comic book story he would give us $150 for a Mickey Mouse or Uncle Scrooge and $75 for a Chip and Dale or lesser character (this was around 1968). We considered the studio to be family, and even this year, shortly before Roy Edward Disney died, I got a handwritten Christmas note from him (I didn't know he had cancer).
WALT'S PEOPLE VOL. 9: The ninth volume of Didier Ghez's remarkable series devoted to interviews with Disney veterans (plus a few historical essays and excerpts from correspondence) and has just been released. You can order it from Xlibris ($23.99, for 541 pages) at
I've greatly revised and expanded my essay called 
So there you have it, evolutionary serendipity: Walt decides not to put primitive man into The Rite of Spring, for his own reasons, and as a happy byproduct the fundamentalist loonies don't have an excuse to picket and boycott his film. But Bill Benzon says something else was going on: "Disney had originally intended to present evolution from the beginning to the dawn of humankind, but pressure from Christian fundamentalists led him to abandon that idea."
In 1988 we talked about Walt and about Fess' career in show business, but it was not until 2003, when I visited Los Olivos and interviewed Fess for The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, that we talked about Walt at length. A couple of long phone interviews in January and February 2004 followed that in-person interview, and I've posted the complete composite interview at 
I filled four cassette tapes as Fess and I talked during that visit, but there was time for more: Fess showed us his home, which overlooked the valley, and I photographed his boots, near the front door, and also took a picture of him with a huge seascape by his friend Peter Ellenshaw, the famous Disney matte painter (that photo is just below). We had dinner that evening in the hotel's wine cellar with Fess and his wife, Marcy, and a few other guests, all of them more colorful by far than Phyllis and me; I recall a baroness and a gentleman who claimed he was related in some manner to Jackie Kennedy. Then we adjourned to the hotel's lobby for the customary Thursday-night songs by Fess and Marcy and any guests who wished to perform. Fess is at the mike in the photo at left, with their long-time accompanist (whose name I'm sorry to say I can't remember) at the piano. 
When Western signed contracts for comic books in the early '50s, it paid an advance based on a print run of at least 400,000 copies for each issue, and paid additional royalties on any copies printed above that figure. I don't know if that threshold was in effect in 1941 when Dell published Dumbo the Flying Elephant as No. 17 in what later came to be called the Dell Color series, but, in any case, the Disney card shows royalties paid on 418,504 copies. (There was also a black-and-white Dumbo comic book in 1941, called Dumbo Comic Paint Book, No. 19, with royalties paid on 247,925 copies.) The sales of Disney comic books rose steadily in the 1940s, and by 1949, when Dell published a comic book in its Four Color series called Dumbo in Sky Voyage, No. 234, it yielded royalties to Disney from 1,675,066 copies. By then, a Disney comic book with a press run as low as the 1941 Dumbo comic books would have been a flop.
And then, of course, there are the Disney publications for which sales figures don't exist because those publications weren't sold but were given away by Walt Disney Productions itself (unlike the March of Comics giveaways, which K.K. Publications sold to retailers to give to the children of customers).
Let's see...the questions would vary, depending on when my time machine deposited me in Walt's office, but let's say it's the early '40s, when the Disney studio had already enjoyed its greatest triumph (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and suffered through its greatest disaster (the 1941 strike). The publicity photo of Walt at right was taken around that time; RKO Radio distributed the photo in 1944. Here are a few of the questions I might ask Walt; his answers would of course suggest followup questions:
My own response is, racial considerations aside, what is it about the "Early Bird" routine that anyone ever considered so terribly funny that it became a big hit? Maybe you had to see it performed on stage to get the full effect? But then you'd have had to look at Moran and Mack, who in their stage garb appeared as in the photo at the right (which I've borrowed from Anthony Slide's invaluable reference The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers, published by Arlington House in 1981).
In the original Joe Grant-Dick Huemer treatment of the story, which they fed to Walt Disney piecemeal during January-March 1940, Timothy Mouse has an indignant confrontation in Chapter XVIII with "a large, rusty-looking crow"; there's an audience of undifferentiated birds in attendance. The crow isn't described as wearing a derby, and there's none of Dumbo's clever business, but the general shape of the sequence is the same in the treatment as in the film.
If the name "John Donaldson" rings a bell, that's because he has on a number of occasions provided answers to perplexing questions I've raised here about Walt Disney and the people who worked for him. John writes now to say that he will soon be putting his expertise between the covers of a new book:
Although fewer people have seen Princess than one might wish, it has stirred up more discussion than many movies do, such discussion centering most often not on its animation but on its racial and religious dimensions. I mentioned one such article in my 
In his interview, although not in the Voice piece, Foundas cited the crows in Dumbo as yet another instance of Disney's racial insensitivity. I was reminded that Dumbo most often gets a pass, or at best a mild spanking, in such discussions. That's curious, really, because there is something about it that I think is genuinely offensive, and that is Cliff Edwards's vocal portrayal of Jim Crow, the crows' leader. The other four crows are voiced, wonderfully well, by blacks, members of the Hall Johnson Choir; Edwards's Jim Crow is, by comparison, much cruder, straight out of Amos 'n' Andy. A pity, really, because there were undoubtedly plenty of outstanding black singers who could have provided a more persuasive voice.