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 just last month, 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 wemade 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 Edwads 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.
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.
I wrote a couple of days ago in my review of The Princess and the Frogabout the caution and compromise that wrecked that otherwise promising film. Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News has identified one aspect of the film that I didn't discuss but that he sees as suffering from the same sort of clumsiness and confusion that I found so deadly:
The villain, Dr. Facilier, is a big, bad French Quarter voodoo daddy who tries to manipulate evil spirits to do his bidding. When Prince Naveen and Tiana fall victim to Dr. Facilier's spell, who do they turn to for help?
This being New Orleans, you might think that a representative of that city's other rich, venerable religious tradition, Roman Catholicism, would be called on. Anyone who has been to New Orleans knows the place is saturated in the myths and rituals of Catholicism. You have to work hard to avoid seeing what is in front of your face. Bizarrely, Disney creates—wait for it—a good voodoo priestess, Mama Odie, to serve as the film's avatar of white magic and the cursed pair's spiritual guide.
Right, you don't expect Disney films to preach the Gospel. But is the historical expression of New Orleans Christianity so offensive to Disney that they have to substitute a kooky Atchafalaya Oprah? My complaint is not religious, but artistic. Disney's politically correct aversion to Christianity hollows out the potential for spiritual grandeur that ought to have infused this lovely film—and made it something that could stand up against Pixar's best.
I can't believe that any overt references to Catholicism would have been a good idea—I cringe at the memory of the glowing cross at the end of the Prince's fight with the dragon in Sleeping Beauty—but the fact is that some of the most stirring moments in Disney features, like Snow White's awakening and the Beast's transformation, have had an unmistakable religious dimension, calling up as they do thoughts of death and resurrection, with no underlining necessary. The climax of The Princess and the Frog could have struck very much the same note. But, of course, it doesn't.
Reading the comments from the people who worked on the film in Jeff Kurtti's The Art of The Princess and the Frog (and from all the suckups and wannabes who descend on Cartoon Brew whenever a new Disney feature is released), I do have to wonder: Do these people really believe what they're saying? When a film like Princess and the Frog is in production, does anyone ever say, "Wait a minute..." Or is the atmosphere such that any "negative" thinking is discouraged, "positive" thinking being defined as endorsing whatever dumb decision someone in charge has made? And by the time the film is released, has everyone involved, on both sides of the screen, swallowed so much of the company line that they can't tell the difference between the good film that might have been and the bad film that actually exists? I'm afraid I know the answers to all those rhetorical questions.
I've seen both Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Princess and the Frog in recent days, and I've collected my thoughts about both. You can read my Commentary piece by clicking on this link. Sadly, Princess—a deeply flawed film, but one that's well worth the price of a ticket—seems to have lost the box-office battle not just to Avatar but also to the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. I will see that last one only at gunpoint.
From my friend Roger Webb, this link to a Slate story about the curious Swedish affection for the 1958 Walt Disney Presents episode called "From All of Us to All of You" (also known as "Jiminy Cricket's Christmas" in its VHS and laserdisc incarnations). I'm tempted to say something about the maddening effects of those long, long winter nights, but I don't want to risk insulting my Swedish visitors...
(That's Kalle Anka, better known in the U.S. as Donald Duck, at the right, with another Disney character that the Swedes supposedly confuse with Woody Woodpecker. But you know who it is, don't you?)
In my rush to put up my November 30 post of a photo I titled "On the Sidewalk with Charlie Mintz," I forgot about Mark Mayerson's 2006 post of three photos—provided by Paul Spector, Irv Spector's son and the proprietor of a blog about his father—that were also taken in front of Mintz's Screen Gems studio at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard. Comparing how some of the people in all these photos are dressed, like Irv Spector and Ed Rehberg, it seems highly likely that all four photos were taken within a few minutes of each other.
The photos must have been taken sometime between 1933 and 1936. Judging from the entries in the Film Daily Year Book, the Mintz studio moved from 1154 N. Western Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard in 1933; and according to Paul Spector, Irv Spector had left for the Schlesinger studio by '36.
As to what might have driven everyone out of the studio and onto the sidewalk, I suggested it could have been something like a cel fire, but Jenny Lerew has offered a more plausible suggestion: an earthquake, perhaps the very destructive Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933, or, more likely if that was the 'quake, an aftershock, since the Long Beach 'quake occurred just before 6 p.m. (I've experienced only one mild aftershock in all my visits to Los Angeles, but that was enough.) If the Long Beach 'quake was the cause, the Mintz studio must have moved to Santa Monica Boulevard by early in '33. A subject for further research.
Cel fires were certainly not unknown at the Mintz studio in the '30s. Here's a photo, lent to me by the late Mary Cain (who worked at Screen Gems for about ten years before becoming ink and paint supervisor at the new UPA studio), that shows a cel fire on April 26, 1938:
In 1940, after Charles Mintz's death, the Screen Gems studio—by then wholly owned by Columbia Pictures—moved from Santa Monica Boulevard to 861 Seward Street, occupying quarters that later housed the Walter Lantz studio, after Lantz moved off the Universal lot.
And on the subject of Mintz...no one with the slightest interest in that studio, or animation history generally, should miss Joe Campana's extraordinary post pinpointing where some photos of the Mintz staff were taken in the very early '30s, when the studio was still located on Western Avenue. There have been no Campana posts for more than a year; I hope we haven't seen the last of them, since they illuminate Hollywood animation history in the way no one else's blog does.
Richard Todd, the star of three of Walt Disney's first live-action films, died in England on December 3, at the age of 90; the New York Times obituary is at this link. He appeared in The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Rob Roy the Highland Rogue (1954). He appeared in many other films, too, and was nominated for a best-actor Oscar for his role in The Hasty Heart (1949). He was a true war hero, as one of the first British paratroopers to land in Normandy. He was, in short, a dashing and glamorous figure, and, as my wife and I learned on June 22, 2004—just a few weeks after Todd took part in ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day—a delightful luncheon companion.
We were in England during an extended research trip to Europe, for The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, that had already taken us to France, Switzerland, and Denmark. I had been in touch with Todd by mail and email for some months, and we had agreed to meet for lunch at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, about an hour's train trip north of London, near Little Humby, the village where Todd was living then. We'd had no confirmation from Todd of our plans in the days just before our scheduled meeting, and so Phyllis and I felt some apprehension when we got off the train at Grantham.
We needn't have worried. Waiting on the platform for us was a very dapper elderly man, using a cane but immediately recognizable as Richard Todd. As Phyllis said—she had become a fan as we watched a dozen or so Todd movies in preparation for the trip—he still had those twinkling blue eyes. His handsome necktie, he told us later, bore the insignia of his Royal Air Force unit.
Todd drove us in his Mercedes to the Angel and Royal, an 800-year-old Grantham hotel where King Richard III once held court in what was now the main dining room. It was closed for lunch, unfortunately, and so we would have lunch in the bar. As we waited for our table to be made ready, Todd suggested rather gingerly that perhaps we might have something to drink before lunch. When I proposed Bloody Marys, he readily assented.
We talked about Walt Disney and the Disney films over the excellent lunch that followed, Todd expanding on what he had already written about his Disney experiences in the two volumes of his autobiography, Caught in the Act and In Camera (neither of which was ever published in the U.S., although copies are available through used-book dealers). You'll find quotations from our interview in The Animated Man, along with a photo of Todd with Walt at Coney Island, which he sent me later.
As I listened to Todd at lunch, and a few weeks later on tape, the years fell away; his voice was still that of the strikingly handsome young actor who was easily the most successful Robin Hood on the screen, excepting only Errol Flynn (the publicity photo at left above is of Todd in that role). At 85 he was still very much a movie star, in other words, and in the best sense: not as an ego but as a presence. I'm grateful that I got to spend a couple of hours with him.
After lunch, Phyllis and I took photos of ourselves with Todd; that's her with him in the photo above. And then Todd drove us back to the Grantham station, for our return trip to Kings Cross station. A lovely day.
Of Todd's three Disney films, only The Story of Robin Hood has been released on a generally available DVD, in a disappointing transfer. Rob Roy is on a Disney Movie Club DVD (which can be bought used through amazon.com, but at an exorbitant price). The Sword and the Rose is available on DVD only as a Hong Kong import (again at an exorbitant price). It's a pity that the Walt Disney Treasures DVD series is winding down; a two-disc set of the Todd films, with appropriate extras (perhaps under a title like "Walt in Britain") would be an excellent tribute not just to Todd but also to the late Ken Annakin, who directed Robin Hood and Sword and the Rose, and might find an audience appreciative of the films' low-key charms.
I never met Roy Edward Disney, who died this week at the age of 79, and I never tried to meet him, even when I was writing books devoted in large part (Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age) or entirely (The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney) to the animation studio that his father, Roy O., and his uncle Walt founded and that bore the family name.
There were reasons for that. For one thing, as I wrote in my review of Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, "at the time I was conducting interviews for The Animated Man [Roy] was engrossed in the 'Save Disney' campaign, and he was using his Uncle Walt's memory as a weapon against the Walt Disney Company's CEO, Michael Eisner. Trying to collect illuminating anecdotes under those circumstances seemed like a fool's errand." And there was something else.
In all the research I did, Roy E. Disney was all but invisible. He worked at the Disney studio starting in the 1950s, but the many people I interviewed and the many documents I read said nothing about him. His name almost never came up even in the interviews conducted soon after Walt's death by Disney-blessed writers like Richard Hubler and Bob Thomas, who had access to family members and friends who rarely talked to anyone else. Ron Miller, Walt's son-in-law and chosen successor, was a much stronger presence in everything I read.
Perhaps Roy Edward's very low profile in those years was through his own choice. In later years, after Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney died, he achieved very high visibility through his two successful campaigns against its management—first Ron Miller, then Eisner—and his support of the studio's animation division.
I've never been sure how seriously I should regard Roy E. Disney as a champion of either the Disney legacy or Disney animation in particular. His pet project, Fantasia 2000, was not nearly as ambitious or successful, artistically, as the original Fantasia (itself a decidedly mixed bag, of course). The most provocative take I've read on Roy E.'s role at the Walt Disney Company is at this link, via Michael Sporn's "Splog." Future historians will no doubt sort it all out, if the Walt Disney Company lets them.
But I'm sorry now that I never asked Roy for an interview. When I've seen him on camera in the last few years, as in the wonderful DVD sets of the Disney True-Life Adventures, he has seemed remarkably frank and natural—still not someone who could have told me much that I wanted to know for my two books, but someone who would have been enjoyable and interesting to listen to. Most likely Roy would have turned down my interview request, since by the time I began work on The Animated Man Neal Gabler had already won his cooperation; but maybe not.
...more or less, although Christmas keeps getting in the way of my intention to write something here. I've seen the new Disney feature The Princess and the Frog since Phyllis and I returned from a short trip, and although I found in that film considerable food for thought, it'll be later this week before I can assemble a coherent review. (In brief: I liked it better than I expected).
The occasion for our visit to our old home town of Alexandria, Virginia, was the annual Scottish Christmas Walk, a parade filled with bagpipes and kilts and Scottish terriers and other reminders of the city's colonial origins as a seaport founded by Scottish merchants. This year's route, as in most years, brought the marchers past our former address on Saint Asaph Street, in Alexandria's Old Town, but the parade started in rain and continued in snow. Not as much fun as usual, even with the helpful warming provided by one of our former neighbors in the shape of a hot scotch toddy.
As always when I'm in the Washington, D.C., area, even for a few days, I find time for the Library of Congress. One of my targets this time was Hal Sintzenich's diaries, whose presence in the LC's manuscript division was pointed out to me by J. B. Kaufman.
I wrote about Sintzenich in a September 20 post, after my last visit to the LC, when I found his photo on the same page as Walt Disney's in an advertisement for Winkler Pictures in the 1927 Film Daily Year Book. Sintzenich and Andrew Stone were shown as directing two live-action "two-reel novelties" each for Winkler—that is, for Walt's old nemesis Charles Mintz, who ran the company that distributed the Disney "Alice Comedies." Those four live-action short subjects were to be released through Paramount, which was also releasing the Krazy Kat cartoons that Mintz produced in New York.
According to a press sheet filed when the four films were copyrighted, there were to have been ten Mintz-produced "novelties" altogether in Paramount's 1927-28 release schedule, half of them of "the heavy drama type" and half "in the lighter vein," but I know of only the four. Both of Sintzenich's films, A Short Tail and Toddles, were "in the lighter vein," with casts dominated by children and small animals; Stone's two films were of "the heavy drama type."
I was curious whether Sintzenich and Walt Disney ever crossed paths when both were making shorts for Mintz. The answer is, probably not. That was a question J. B. Kaufman hadn't explored, since he examined the diaries from the earlier period when Sintzenich was a cameraman for D. W. Griffith.
Sintzenich made A Short Tail in New York in 1926, then took the train west in January 1927 to make Toddles in California. During his first few weeks in Los Angeles he spent a great deal of time with Mintz's brother Nat and brother-in-law George Winkler, but I found no references to Walt in the diary pages for that period. (It was presumably Nat's involvement with the live-action shorts that earned him his title "manager of production.") That's not to say that a more careful examination of the diaries might not yield at least an oblique reference to Walt, but if it's there, I missed it.
What was obvious from the diaries, though, was that George Winkler vexed Hal Sintzenich in much the same way that he vexed Walt Disney and Hugh Harman and other people who made cartoons for Mintz over the years. George evidently considered himself a crackerjack film editor, and Charles Mintz supported that judgment. Sintzenich did not share it, as the diary entry for April 11, 1927, makes clear:
And speaking of the Library of Congress...there's a small but quite nice animation-related exhibit there now, in the Performing Arts Reading Room, called "Molto Animato: Music and Animation." It'll be up through March 28, 2010, and you should allow thirty minutes or so to see it. I didn't allow enough time, and I had to leave a little frustrated.
Because I was about to leave home, and then was gone, I missed an opportunity to post a comment in the online debate at Cartoon Brew between Stephen Worth and David Gerstein about whether "text documents" have ever played a creative role in animation production. (The Worth-Gerstein exchange is still available, but when a post slides off Cartoon Brew's front page it almost always ceases to be a live subject for discussion.) For the record: everything David Gerstein says is correct, and Stephen Worth is, as is so often the case, wrong in every particular.
Worth is no longer claiming, as he did for a long time, that scripts for animated cartoons didn’t even exist before 1960. But to say, as he does now, that “text documents did not serve a creative role in the development of story in animated films…they served an organizational role” is equally false.
This question of the role of “text documents” in work on golden-age Hollywood cartoons was hashed out on my Web site and others almost two years ago. If you want to read what was being said then, I’d suggest you go to my January 10, 2008, posting—and work your way forward or back or out to other blogs, as you see fit. I’ve also reproduced a number of documents from work on one cartoon, Disney’s Who Killed Cock Robin?, at this link.
Worth claims expertise from whatever it was he did in TV animation, but he's like a burger flipper offering himself as the second coming of Julia Child. The stale gossip he peddles, some of it ostensibly based on what he heard from Otto Englander's widow, Erna, is particularly offensive. He denigrates Dick Creedon, an important member of the Disney writing staff in the '30s, but can't even spell his name correctly. Over and over again, Worth shows that he simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
Worth presents himself as an "archivist," a custodian of animation's history, but his arguments are those of someone who is interested not in historical accuracy but in promoting himself and his patron, John Kricfalusi. John K. believes good cartoon stories cannot be written but must be drawn; the classic Hollywood cartoons are the best ever made; therefore, whatever the evidence to the contrary, those classic cartoons cannot have been written! To get new cartoons as good as the old ones, we must entrust the task to John K., the only director in contemporary animation who understands that text documents cannot play “a creative role in the development of story in animated films”! That is not an argument that everyone will find persuasive.
It sickens me that a few innocents have entrusted Worth and his "archive" with documents of genuine historical value. A while back, I speculated here about where I might eventually deposit my own research materials, which after more than forty years now include, among a great many other things, hundreds of tapes and transcripts, thousands of photos and letters, and tens of thousands of documents and clippings. I heard from someone named Bill Turner, with ASIFA-Hollywood, who suggested that I donate everything to Worth's "archive." I'd rather burn it all first.
Back on September 20, at the end of an item about the Winkler studio of the '20s—the studio that Charles Mintz and his wife, Margaret Winkler, owned, and that became Screen Gems in 1931—I wrote:
I find in my files a photo of Nat [Mintz] and more than a dozen Mintz staffers, taken in the middle 1930s on the sidewalk outside the Mintz studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. They had gathered there for some unknown reason—a fire drill, maybe? I'll forgo posting it unless some of you out there really want to see it.
No one has asked to see that photo except Jenny Lerew, but Jenny's wishes carry more weight with me than most people's. In addition, I'm getting ready to leave town for a week, and I want to tie up this loose end. So here's the picture, and here's who's in it, the identifications provided by Ben Shenkman, who lent the photo to Milt Gray for copying.
That's Charles Mintz, with the glasses and vest, in the center; his brother Nat Mintz—who wasn't working at the studio then but happened to be visiting that day—is at the far left, turned part way toward the camera. The man between the two Mintzes is Al Rose, who directed Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons. Immediately to Charles Mintz's left is Jimmy Bronis, the production manager; the man with the mustache to Bronis's left is the animator Ed Rehberg. Directly behind Rehberg, his head marked with ink on the photo for reasons I don't know, is Sid Davis, also an animator. The two young men directly behind Charles Mintz and Bronis and smiling at the camera are, from the left, Dave Treffman, animator, and Irv Spector, animator. The cigar smoker to Spector's left is Eddie Kilfeather, the studio's resident composer. The four men at the rear of the photo are, from left, Herb Rothwell, George Rose, Izzy Ellis, and Rex Cox, all animators. (A few of these names are not familiar to me, and corrections of any misspellings would be welcome; ditto for any misattributions of jobs.) [A December 16 update: I've fixed the incorrect identification of Irv Spector as a story man—as his son, Paul, has pointed out, Spector was an animator at the time. I've also eliminated my accidental duplication of Dave Treffman's name, and added the correct identification of Rex Cox.]
But I still can't tell you why everybody congregated on the sidewalk. A cel fire maybe?
That's not the saint at the left, I should hasten to say. To see a sculpture of the man after whom the city is named, you need to go to the excellent Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park, where an equestrian statue of King Louis IX of France stands guard at the museum's main entrance. The statue in my picture, called "Thinker on Rock," is a 1997 work by Barry Flanagan; it's on the beautiful campus of Washington University (across the street from Forest Park), where I spent several days last week. Needless to say, the sculptural rabbit suggested cartoon associations, which is why I cranked up my iPhone camera.
I was on the WU campus to talk about cartoons twice, once at Professor's Gerald Early's class called "Introduction to Children's Studies" and then at a public show Saturday evening that was simultaneously part of the Saint Louis International Film Festival and WU's annual Children's Film Symposium. I talked about the Disney cartoons of the '30s in the classroom and about Hollywood cartoons in general on Saturday evening. I showed a half dozen cartoons in both venues.
Technical problems dogged us in the classroom, but the Saturday show went extremely well, with excellent (video) projection on a large screen and an enthusiastic audience dominated by adults. That adult attendance was especially important to me, because my choice of cartoons, as I made clear in my comments about them, was governed by my belief that the best Hollywood cartoons were not made for children, but for a broader audience of which children happened to be part, and not necessarily the most important part.
The cartoons I showed Saturday were Who Killed Cock Robin? (Dave Hand) and Woodland Cafe (Wilfred Jackson), from Disney, Book Revue (Bob Clampett), Fresh Airedale, and Beep Beep (both Chuck Jones), from Warner Bros., and Little Rural Riding Hood (Tex Avery) from MGM. The audience's delighted and sustained laughter during Book Revue was especially gratifying—as much as I love that cartoon, I may never before have appreciated just how funny it is—but all the cartoons were very warmly received, and in exactly the spirit I hoped for.
The great value of appearances like this is, for me, the opportunity to take a fresh look at films I may know almost too well, and to think and talk about them in new ways. This time, I not only talked about the specifically adult nature of the cartoons I'd chosen, I also addressed the inescapable racial element in the two Disney cartoons, both of which include stereotypical black characters. I made two points: there is not a trace of hatred or contempt in either cartoon, whose characters are in fact caricatures of popular black performers of the '30s (Stepin Fetchit, Cab Calloway); and to put such cartoons on the shelf would mean depriving us of everything that's unquestionably wonderful about them—which is to my mind almost everything in each cartoon—for the sake of avoiding offense to the exceptionally sensitive. Not an acceptable bargain.
My trip didn't have many other animation ingredients, although I did see a couple of foreign features and had a pleasant brief visit at a Film Festival party with Brian Hohlfeld, writer and director of some of Disney's CGI children's TV programs (and a native Saint Louisan). I also enjoyed spending time with Cliff Froehlich, who as the head of Cinema Saint Louis runs the Film Festival, and who was a Funnyworld reader in years gone by.
An absorbing exhibit at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the WU campus about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II includes watercolors by Gene Sogioka, identified as a background artist at Disney. His name was new to me, but I've since learned via Google that he worked on several early features, most notably Dumbo. The exhibit runs through January 4.
And speaking of political correctness...
The Princess and the Frog opened today in New York and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times was enthusiastic, the New York Timesconsiderably less so. It'll be a few weeks before I can see the film myself. In the meantime, I'll peruse The Art of the Princess and the Frog, a review copy of which I received last week.
Last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times anticipated the film's opening by running a piece by Neal Gabler about Walt Disney's supposed racial/religious/ethnic bigotries. It's vintage Gabler, absolving Walt of the worst of the accusations against him (rather grudgingly), but still leaving you feeling that there was something not quite right about the man. And its handling of the facts is predictably loose; Gabler writes of Walt's sending the script for Song of the South to Hattie McDaniel, ostensibly to get her comments on it, but he doesn't mention that she played a role in the film. The total effect is not quite as repulsive as Gabler's handling (in his Disney biography) of Walt's supposed involvement in a fellow polo player's death, but it's repulsive enough. (Thanks to Thad Komorowski for the link.)
I saw Fantasia when it was revived in 1956, and what most sticks in my memory is the shot of the Earth at the start of the Rite of Spring—the planet was distended, egg-shaped, because most of the film image had been expanded to fit the new wide theater screens. I don't remember that most of the images were so flagrantly distorted as the one of the Earth, but no doubt what I saw would be intolerable to any serious viewer today. The live action couldn't have been similarly stretched without even more grotesque results, of course, and so it wasn't, and I must have wondered at the time how that mixture of screen ratios had been achieved. Thanks to Paul Penna, who steered me toward a posting of a March 1956 International Projectionist article by Norman Wasserman, now I know. Click on the thumbnails just below to go to much larger versions of each page.
I've accumulated a variety of items related to Walt Disney, and I've decided to post them in a batch, as follows:
Walt's moviegoing habits: Alberto Natal writes: "I have a question about Walt's taste. Did he have any favorite movies that were produced outside of his studios? The only thing I remember reading about him in regards to other Hollywood movies was that if a certain picture got too intense for him, he asked the projectionist to shut it off. I can't imagine what type of movie would have that effect on him. (I was thinking The Wild Bunch, but don't think he would ever want to see that one.) I'm curious if he admired or was inspired by other Hollywood movies. Yes, I read all about his idolization of Chaplin."
An interesting question, and I realized when I read it that I didn't have a clear sense of what Walt liked in movies, apart from his own productions. He watched a lot of movies and TV shows, of course, but was it for pleasure, ever—apart from Groucho Marx's TV show You Bet Your Life—or was he mainly interested in keeping up with what was going on? (As for what he didn't like, there's that unconfirmed story about his negative reaction to Hitchcock's Psycho that I mentioned some time back.) I'm sure there's an answer tucked away in some book or magazine or newspaper article, but I can't pull it up out of my meory.
Paul Anderson's return: Through Didier Ghez and his Disney History blog comes the very good news that Paul Anderson, whose magazine Persistence of Vision was overflowing with well-researched Disney information, has recovered sufficiently from a long illness to start a new blog he calls the Disney History Institute. It automatically becomes one of my first stops in my daily trawlings through the Web.
Walt up for auction: Philippe Videcoq writes: "I thought you might be interested in the upcoming November 24 Christie’s London film memorabilia auction where I’m selling 25 Disney items including Mary Blair and Bill Peet artwork, a rare 1927 typed synopsis of Alice the Beach Nut and the famous 191-page 'Future Fantasias' folder compiled for Walt before Fantasia’s premiere by studio researcher Bob Carr. Hoping you’ll consider this worthy of mentioning on your blog." Consider it done; here's the link.
And speaking of auctions...: You may have noticed on eBay recently the auction of a mimeographed intinerary for the 1941 Disney good-will tour of South America; the copy up for auction apparently originated with the late Jack Cutting. That mimeographed itinerary may be a preliminary version of the itinerary submitted to the U.S. government in December 1941 and that is now on file at the U.S. National Archives. (The Archives version is on letter-size paper; the eBay version is on legal-size paper of the kind the Disney secretaries used for meeting transcripts.) Looking at my copy of the itinerary reminded me that it includes a bit of detail about an event on the day of Walt's return to New York aboard the Santa Clara, October 20, 1941. I didn't include that detail in an item I posted last March about what Walt did in New York after he returned from South America and before he left for California, but I've added it now. The internet makes such changes easy, so why not?
Walt the Yalie, Cont'd: Yale University's archives has provided me with copies of all of its records related to Walt Disney's honorary degree in 1938, and I'll soon update my page on Walt's honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard with reproductions of a couple of Walt's letters. The Yale records came from the files of the secretary of the university, and they show that there was active interest in giving Walt an honorary degree as early as 1935, long before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Here's an exchange of notes between Carl Lohmann (Yale '10), the university's secretary between 1927 and 1953, and William Lyon Phelps (Yale '87), a venerable professor of English and, in those days, an imposing name in the academic world (but who was, to old friends like Lohmann, "Billy"). It was Phelps who read (and presumably wrote) the glowing citation when Walt received his honorary degree.
Meet Me in St. Louis: Phyllis and I will be driving in the direction of the Gateway Arch next week for a couple of Disney-related speaking engagements. I'll talk about Disney cartoons for Professor Gerald Early's "Introduction to Children's Studies" class at Washington University on Wednesday afternoon; then I'll speak on Hollywood cartoons in general at the 18th annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 21. I'll be showing cartoons on both occasions, but with DVD projection and no great rarities or curiosities; I'll be offering overviews for audiences that I expect will have only the most general awareness of Hollywood animation's accomplishments.
The Saturday event, which is co-sponsored by Washington U.'s Center for the Humanities, is part of the sixth annual Children's Film Symposium, but I will, in my usual perverse manner, be pointing out that the cartoons I'm showing, like most of the best Hollywood cartoons, are accessible to children but really aren't children's films at all. The Saturday show is open to the public without charge; it'll be at Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Washington U. campus. There'll be a Q&A session afterwards. Here's a link that lists the cartoons on the program.
The Animated Man in Italian: From my translator, Marco Pellitteri, comes word that The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney has just been published in Italian. That's the cover of the Italian edition to the left; its title is Life of Walt Disney: Man, Dreamer, and Genius (a literal Italian translation of The Animated Man would not have had the same meaning, Marco has told me). I haven't yet received a copy of the book itself, but I've been impressed by how carefully Marco has proceeded with the translation, and I expect the book to be an improvement over the original American edition in a number of respects.
I'm indebted to Giannalberto Bendazzi, himself an esteemed animation scholar (Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation), for bringing the book to the publisher's attention and writing an introduction for the Italian edition. It has always been a little surprising to me that, given the apparently substantial interest in American cartoons in Europe, translations like this one have been so scarce; for example, as far as I know there has never been any possibility of a translation into another language of my Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. So I'm hopeful that the Italian Animated Man is the start of a trend.
Animation Development: It may sound odd—well, actually, I'm sure it sounds odd—but when I read what David B. Levy writes, whether for his blog, Animondays, or his first book, Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive, or his new book, Animation Development: From Pitch to Production, I think of Haydn. That's because when I listen to the music of that great composer, the words that most often come to mind are "cheerful" and "sane." And that's the way David's writing strikes me. He works in and writes about a business, television animation, that leaves a lot of people frustrated and angry, and just about drives some of them crazy, and yet David's writings (and I assume David himself) never succumb to those dark urges. Living and working in New York may help him stay so even-tempered—the New York animation community strikes me as, overall, a healthier environment than the Hollywood swamp—but I'm sure David himself deserves most of the credit.
I won't pretend to have done more than sample Animation Development, since I have not the slightest interest in pitching the next SpongeBob SquarePants, but what I've read is certainly consistent with what I've read before of David Levy's work. And for an excellent review from the "inside," by someone who has gone through the process David describes, you can't beat Mark Mayerson's:
If you are interested in selling a show to television, this book is the best preparation in print that I'm aware of. If you've just toyed with the idea, this book will let you know what you're up against and perhaps persuade you that there are better ways to spend your time. ...
Levy is the eternal optimist; someone who feels that his career has been enriched by pitching and development. It has led him to some successes and to some employment opportunities on projects he didn't create, so who is to say that he is wrong? My own feeling is that any creator committed to an idea would be better off figuring out a way to develop it without interference, even if that means the idea isn't realized as animation. From my perspective, as someone who managed to get a show on the air, the compromises are too high a price to pay.
I hate to take up your time with such housekeeping matters, but some of you may have noticed that my RSS feeds are a bit of a mess, and that, in particular, it has become impossible to link directly from a feed entry to the relevant item on my home page. Reconciling RSS with the Dreamweaver software that I use has turned out to be much more difficult than I expected, but I hope to solve the problem, and make my RSS feed as useful as it should be, in the near future. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them!
I spent a few hours recently with microfilm of the mid-1941 issues of The People's World, the Communist Party's daily newspaper on the West Coast, a companion publication to the much more notorious New York-based Daily Worker. The World covered the Disney strike in considerable detail, always, of course, from a pro-strike perspective. I'd seen some of its coverage before, in Dave Hilberman's strike scrapbook—Hilberman permitted Milt Gray to make copies from the scrapbook after Milt and I interviewed him in 1976—but other articles were new to me.
One of the most interesting World articles is this June 6, 1941, profile of Art Babbitt, the strike's official leader. Babbitt was not a communist; Dave Hilberman was, and perhaps for that reason the World did not emphasize his role (although it did run a piece about his wife). The profile is by Charles Glenn, who covered Hollywood for the World. To go to a larger and more readable version of the article, click on the version below or on this link.
I asked Babbitt about the accuracy of the quotations in Glenn's article, and he replied in a tape recording he made on October 22, 1983:
You must remember that the strike was in its infancy at that time, and I still had stars in my eyes. I learned a great, great deal after that. So that my feeling now is, speaking of both labor and management, my feeling is, a plague on both their houses. I encountered so goddamn much corruption and double talk—you name it, every kind of evil you can dream of, including an unsolicited ride that I had to Mr. Willie Bioff's house.... At Mr. Bioff's house, guess who I encountered. There was Roy Disney, Walt's brother; Gunther Lessing, who was the legal vice president of the Walt Disney studio at the time, and Bill Garity [Disney's technical chief].... Bill was decent, and honest, and as I entered Willie Bioff's house, he whispered to me, "Don't do it, Art." He meant...that if a bribe was offered, not to take it. Of course, a bribe was offered, and I did not take it....
Charles Glenn did have an axe to grind, and I do not recall using two of the words that he has used several times in his article. I don't recall using the word "despotism" and the word "oppression." I didn't encounter despotism; I found stupid management and pettiness, and certainly I was never on the rack for anything I said or felt. That was Mr. Glenn's little play with words.
As Babbitt said, Glenn had an axe to grind, as did the World itself. Its coverage of the strike was relentlessly anti-Disney, with, in the usual Marxist fashion, scarcely a trace of humor. I had to smile, though, when I saw one headline, from August 14:
The headline linked the layoffs to Walt's departure for South America. But, well...if you were Walt, wouldn't you have wanted to get out of town, too?
Dear Disney historians, Disney artists or more largely Disney employees or former Disney artists, gallery owners or relatives of deceased Disney artists, artists working in the animation business, this message is for you!
After having published two French books on Disney animation (From Snow-White to Hercules prefaced by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and The Disney Heroines prefaced by Glen Keane), I am starting in earnest work on my third project. Its title will probably be The 20 Greatest Moments of Disney Feature Animation.
That’s where you might get involved. Instead of imposing my standpoint, I intend to do a kind of poll or survey if you are willing to help. The book will be an analysis of 20 great “moments.” It is on purpose that I didn’t use the word “sequence” or “scene” as I want it to be very free, although we may expect the moment to last a certain length of time. So, I’m asking you to select your 20 favorites, justifying, explaining and also giving details or anecdotes about these moments of Disney animation. For instance if you were a young artist working with the old timers, I’m sure you have a lot to tell.
The criteria are all yours. You may judge it from a layout standpoint, or because of a wonderful storyboarding, or a great song, or an outstanding animation, or because it is very funny or moving, or because of the colouring/styling, or the backgrounds, or because you are stunned by the special effects, etc. But we could also think that an excellent combination of most of these criteria might lead to THE choice.
Yes, I know how silly it may sound to have to just select 20 moments when some features like... (oops, stop, no influencing anyone!) already contain at least 20 great moments. That’s why I have decided to split it all into two legitimate parts: 20 "greats" when Walt Disney was alive and later on, I will do another investigation for the other part, i.e., the features since his death. For now, I’m asking you to focus on [the features from Snow White through The Jungle Book].
I will try to make a book with new information, as usual, based on interviews, but also with hardly ever or never-before seen artwork. It will surely be long in the making, but never mind! Thanks in advance for your participation, please think it over and send your mails to christian.renaut@wanadoo.fr
My post of a few days ago called "Lost Illusions" has generated just a few responses, but I particularly liked one from Geoffrey Hayes, which gave me the chance to explain some of my thinking about that Disney shibboleth called "sincerity." You can go directly to the Hayes comment and my response by clicking on this link.
Ward Kimball gave me this snapshot of Robert Crumb, the great underground cartoonist, when I interviewed him for the first time, at the Disney studio on June 6, 1969. The photo is dated December 1968, which I believe is when Ward first met Crumb, in San Francisco. I was publishing Funnyworld in those days, and Ward had written to me about Crumb in November 1968: "Have you seen Robert Crumb's new comic book, 'SNATCH'? I dare you to run reproductions from this pubic hair-raiser in 'Funnyworld.'" (No, I didn't take him up on that dare.)
Walt Kelly wrote to Walt Disney on May 25, 1960, a friendly letter—mostly about fund-raising for epilepsy research—that includes this paragraph:
Just in case I ever forgot to thank you, I'd like you to know that I, for one, have long appreciated the sort of training and atmosphere that you set up back there in the thirties. There were drawbacks as there are to everything, but it was an astounding experiment and experience as I look back on it. Certainly it was the only education I ever received and I hope of I'm living up to a few of your hopes for other people.
(The carbon of Kelly's letter is at Ohio State University; the original is presumably at the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank.)
On its Web site, Powell's, the great Portland, Oregon, bookstore, offers a daily review, from a wide variety of sources, of interesting books that you may want to buy—from Powell's, of course. Earlier this month, the "Review-a-Day" was from The Nation, by its art critic Barry Schwabsky. He wrote about a book called The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov. I consider myself fairly well educated in modern art, but I'm embarrassed to say that until I read Schwabsky's review I couldn't have told you that Tworkov was one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. The first paragraph of the review made me sit up straight:
Almost any fable of the artist's life could take its title from the novel about the life that Balzac wrote, and that stands as a model for the rest: Lost Illusions. Yet Balzac may have been too optimistic. Showing his would-be poet Lucien Chardon seduced by his social ambitions and undefended by any strength of character, a man who throws away his talent by selling out, Balzac implicitly defends those who labor with integrity as heirs to greatness—and its rewards. So we all hope. But experience teaches that greatness is rare, and perhaps no less so among the upright than among those of questionable character. A sadder novel than Balzac's could have been written about the lost illusions of those who with patience and determination remain true to their intuition of the artistic absolute yet never attain inner certainty of their achievement or even scant public acclaim for it. But how much recognition would be enough anyway? In exchange for its near-extinction in the exigencies of form, the ego demands twofold repayment. The artist's demands on his public are typically as unappeasable as those he makes on himself. Although the pleasures of Jack Tworkov's writing are many, The Extreme of the Middle is a book I'd recommend to aspiring artists as a warning: this is how depressing it can be to be a serious, successful artist.
Reading that, I first thought, yes, that's right—unfortunately. Then I thought about the times, blessedly rare, when my wife, being a wife, has said to me, you're a good writer, why don't you write something that will make some real money, instead of writing books about animated cartoons and comic books? I've always said to her, in effect, that if I were to try to do that, I'd lose the satisfaction of writing about things that matter to me—and I probably wouldn't make more money, anyway. You can't unleash your inner Dan Brown or John Grisham if there's nothing at the end of leash.
I'm sure there are many people making animated films or "art comics" who approach their work in a similar spirit. But I wonder how many are fully aware of the risks that Barry Schwabsky lays out. The emotional price of pursuing your goals with integrity can be very high, and there's always the possibility that the work into which you've poured your heart and soul will ultimately prove to be, in the eyes of your intended audience and even yourself, considerably less than dazzling.
But the risks may be even more serious, and more complex, than Schwabsky suggests.
I thought about Schwabsky's review while I was watching the opening six minutes of Disney's The Princess and the Frog on the new Blu-Ray set of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The bits and pieces of the film I'd already seen were discouraging, to say the least, but the extended excerpt was awful beyond my worst fears. The tone was aggressively smarmy, and the animated "acting" was not just coy and self-conscious in the odious Don Bluth manner, it was also as crude as anything I've seen in those low-grade TV sitcoms whose actors do nothing more than assume attitudes and avoid looking at the camera.
And yet the awfulness on the screen had been executed with a high level of skill and even dedication. There's every reason to think that many of the people who worked on The Princess and the Frog believed in what they were doing as much as Jack Tworkov did. And I don't doubt that when the film opens later this year, it will be greeted with a flood of mostly adoring comments on Cartoon Brew and other such bulletin-board blogs, especially those that cater to Disney geeks. The mainstream media reviews will be mixed but basically favorable, and curiosity, if nothing else, will drive the film to a respectable showing at the box office.
So, the people who made the film—a good many of them, anyway—will have "remained true to their intuition of the artistic absolute" and won considerably more than "scant public acclaim." But The Princess and the Frog, unless it's much, much better than we have any reason to expect, will stand as a monument to the unyielding uncertainties of the artist's life. In years to come, I'm sure that at least a few of the people who worked on it will say to themselves, when they measure what they actually accomplished against the hopes and ambitions that brought them into animation in the first place: "This is really not what I had in mind...not what I had in mind at all."
Here's the Disney studio's commissary in, I believe, the early 1940s. I ate frequently at the commissary in the 1990s, but usually in the cafeteria, and only a few times in the room (was it called the Coral Room?) with table service of the sort everyone is getting in the photo. I don't remember the table-service room being this large, in any case. Perhaps there's a history of the Disney commissary someplace that describes its permutations, but I haven't located it. I was around for the great makeover in 1995, but not for any other major upheavals. You can go to a much larger version of the photo by clicking on this link.
Last year Hans Perk posted a slightly different photo of the commissary, probably taken a few seconds before this one, with some identifications that I can carry over and add to, a little. I believe the balding gent in the lower right-hand corner is Ken O'Connor (who is not visible in Hans's version), and the dark-haired, mustachioed man higher in the photo who is turning to his right may be Les Clark (although, looking at the same man in Hans's photo, where he's gazing into the camera, I'm not at all sure). Hans identifies John Lounsbery at the base of the right-hand vertical pipe, and Claude Coats as looking directly at the camera in the rear center; he also sees Milt Kahl and Herb Ryman, but I'm not sure exactly which men he has identified as those two. Some of Hans's' visitors also suggested identifications, but not very many, so let's try again. If enough solid IDs turn up, I'll add an overlay like the one for my photo of the UPA staff in 1948.
On October 12, I posted a revised and greatly expanded version of my piece about the day—June 23, 1938—that Walt Disney received an honorary master of arts degree from Harvard University. My page includes five photos taken that day, but I had none from the previous day, June 22, when Walt received an honorary M.A. from Yale University. Now Mark Sonntag has remedied that lack with the photo above, a group photo of the recipients of Yale's honorary degrees with the university's president, which I'll also be appending to the Harvard page.
Walt is third from the left in the second row; he appears to be standing on one step lower than the other men in his row, thus leaving the impression that he was shorter than he actually was. Yale's president, Charles Seymour, is third from the right in the front row, and immediately to his left is Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), the governor general of Canada. Both men received honorary degrees from Harvard the next day, as did Wendell M. Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute, who is at the far left in the front row. Thomas Mann, the great German novelist, is second from the left in the front row, and Justice Stanley Reed of the U.S. Supreme Court (a Yale alumnus who had been appointed to the court five months earlier) is at the far right in that row. Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is standing just behind Seymour and Tweedsmuir.
My friend Professor Roger Webb of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a Yale alumnus, believes the photo was taken in front of Woodbridge Hall, the building that houses the offices of the university's president and the Yale Corporation, the university's governing body.
Last year, when I was searching through 1922 issues of the Kansas City Star for traces of Walt Disney's early career, I ran across this intriguing ad in the issue of Saturday, April 8:
It was around this time that Walt Disney was getting ready to make his break from the Kansas City Film Ad Company and his sideline business, Kaycee Studios, and go into business as Laugh-O-gram Films. He certainly could have attended one of the Marxes' shows the week of April 9, and I wish I knew if he did. How pleasing it is to think of the very young Walt rubbing shoulders with the not-quite-as-young Groucho. I don't recall any mention of Walt's encountering the Marxes when everyone was working in Hollywood in later years, but caricatures of the brothers did turn up in Mickey's Gala Premiere and Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, so presumably relations were at least friendly.
And speaking of the Marxes, here's another Disney connection, in Hedda Hopper's column as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times for March 2, 1946:
Johnny Appleseed, the legendary man who went through the wild west in the old days planting apple trees, is certainly getting a play here [in Hollywood, that is]. Walt Disney's doing a cartoon fantasy based on the character. Now GrouchoMarx is cooking up a musical for Broadway about Johnny Appleseed, in which, if plans go through, he'll play the lead role straight.
My Marx Brothers library is not extensive, but Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo makes no mention of either "On the Balcony," the 1922 show, or Groucho's abortive (I assume) Johnny Appleseed project. Additional information would be welcome.
[An October 14 update: Thanks to Craig Dauterive, Dana Gabbard, Peter Hale, and Mark Mayerson for steering me toward a Web page about On the Balcony(and, in Mark's case, to the entry in Glenn Mitchell's Marx Brothers Encyclopedia on which the Web page is based). The show, which ran in various forms for at least a year and a half, evidently played Kansas City at least twice; a photo on the Web page is identified as having been taken in Kansas City in December 1921. So if Walt Disney didn't see On the Balcony, it wasn't for lack of opportunities.]
Last May I posted a "Day in the Life" Essay page on Walt Disney's visit to Harvard University on June 23, 1938, to receive an honorary degree. Like other "Day in the Life" pages, that one is organized around a group of photos taken on the same day, sometimes no more than minutes apart.
I've now revised and greatly expanded the original "Day in the Life" page, adding a lot of information that I picked up when I visited Harvard's archives in July, along with bits and pieces from other sources. Reading that page, as well as the earlier "Day in the Life" page on Walt's arrival in New York on June 20, 1938, will give you some sense of what Walt's life was like seventy-one years ago last summer.
On the June 23, 1938, page, for example, you can see Walt, decked out in his academic robes, getting ready to light up and then puffing away in the company of his fellow honorees, including two Nobel Prize winners. He was an addicted smoker, no doubt about it, and I've never seen better photographic evidence of his addiction.
As to why we should care what Walt was up to, way back then, part of the answer is that it was Walt Disney doing those things. For some of us, anything Walt was doing is of interest. More than that, though, Walt had a way of making himself interesting that was beyond the capabilities of a lot of other celebrities. For one thing, he gave a lot of interviews, and what he said in them was often, and obviously, what he actually thought. Our present-day celebrities, politicians especially, could learn a lot from Walt's spontaneity and honesty. I've added some pertinent quotations from Walt to the Harvard page.
Enough. If you'd like to take a short trip back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1938, click on this link.
That does have an oxymoronic sound, doesn't it? Art Spiegelman is nothing if not a true New Yorker, and as we all know, when true New Yorkers leave their city they start getting dizzy and disoriented about the time they reach the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the Jersey Turnpike. And as for flying to the middle of the country, well...
But Art seemed to be weathering his one-day visit to the hinterlands quite well when I saw him last Tuesday evening. He was in the Natural State to speak at Hendrix College, a small private liberal-arts school in Conway, about a half hour's drive northwest of Little Rock. He packed Staples Auditorium, which holds almost nine hundred people, with a crowd made up mostly of students but with a substantial sprinkling of elders like me. Art gave them a PowerPoint show that summarized comics (or, if you prefer, comix) theory and history, as well as Art's own history. The show ran a little long, and it could have used more of Art's gifts as a comedian—there were flashes throughout his talk of a comic sensibility that echoed Jewish New Yorkers like Woody Allen and Larry David—but it was overall a very satisfying evening.
Art's best-known work is, of course, Maus, the harrowing translation into comics form of his father's suffering and survival during the Holocaust, but the best single-volume introduction to Spiegelman may be Breakdowns, a collection of short pieces originally published in 1978 but reissued last year with a great deal of new material. Maus is the more important book, deserving of its Pulitzer Prize and all the other praise it has received, but it is also blunt and harsh, as the subject matter demands. It is perhaps in Breakdowns that you can best sense Art's fascination with the comics form and the wonderful things that can be done with it but rarely are.
Art and I have been aware of each other for many years—as he reminded me Tuesday evening, he was a reader of Funnyworld—and over the years we've exchanged emails and, more recently, phone calls as he and his wife, Françoise Mouly, put together the gorgeous book published last month as The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics. But we'd never met. We made up for that after his talk, when Phyllis and I visited with him for an hour or so over a glass of wine at his hotel.
What a joy to talk with one of today's greatest cartoonists about Carl Barks and R. Crumb and other subjects of common interest. As to the substance of what we talked about...well, good conversation has a bad habit of evaporating quickly, and Tuesday evening's conversation was no exception. I do remember, though, Art's telling me that he and Françoise Mouly would share the stage with R. Crumb on November 13 at the University of Texas in Austin. Crumb and Mouly will be making several such appearances to promote Crumb's just-published illustrated version of the Book of Genesis, but Spiegelman will be with them only at Austin. I'd love to be there, too, although I probably won't be.
Speaking of that Crumb book: I've only started to read it, but so far it's extraordinary, not just in its drawing (that's to be expected with Crumb) but in its strict adherence to the biblical text. I can't help but wonder what the fundamentalists will make of it, especially since it's even clearer from Crumb's drawings than from the text itself how strange and often cruel so much of the Hebrew Bible really is. (I once read the King James Version of the Bible straight through—as anyone who fancies himself a writer probably should do, since so much of our everyday language is derived from it—and I remember that when I got to the sublime Book of Job I felt as if I were coming up for air.) I haven't seen many reviews so far, but Jeet Heer's excellent piece tells you what you most need to know about the book.
Paula Sigman Lowery, formerly a Disney archivist and more recently a "creative consultant" to the new Walt Disney Family Museum (and the wife of Howard Lowery, the well-known dealer in animation artwork), has written with some clarifications and corrections to several Disney-related items I've posted here. I've included links in Paula's comments to all the items, and I've added updates within two of the items themselves.
Re the photo of Walt in the kitchen, making a salad. Of course you realize that's Walt in his OFFICE kitchen, at the Disney Studio...so it's undoubtedly a publicity photo, circa 1940.
Re the Rockwell cover painting—the painting actually hung in the Archives for many years. I can probably still recite the description Dave [Smith] and I would provide to our weekly tours for new employees. It was returned to the family circa 1984, along with Walt's awards and miniature collection, which had been housed in and cared for by the Archives since its establishment in 1970.
Re the photo of Walt and the Mickey doll at the Western Union keyboard, some additional digging at the Western Union archives uncovered more clarification: Mickey was the first image transmitted by Western Union's new "facsimile" process, and was sent on the Buffalo to New York line. It was sent on Walt's birthday, December 5, 1935.
Well, it's not at all a big deal, but a friend sent me a surreptitiously snapped photo of a wall display at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco that includes this statement: "Reprinted newspaper comics began to appear in Mickey Mouse Magazine in 1935. These evolved into a full line of Disney comic books, which continued for decades."
Actually, reprinted Sunday comics didn't start appearing in the Mickey Mouse Magazine until the July 1937 issue, and the magazine didn't "evolve" into a comic book. Reprinted newspaper comics were never more than a minor part of its lineup until the very last issue, dated September 1940, when they suddenly took up half the pages. The first issue of Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, a true comic book, appeared the next month.
As I say, not a big deal, but I hope the carelessness visible in this small matter—how hard could it have been to get those two sentences right?—is not mirrored elsewhere in the museum.
He's Walt Disney, of course, and I wish I knew why he was in the kitchen for this photo shoot in, I'd guess, the mid- to late 1930s. Walt was not a salad kind of guy. Somewhere in my files I have a Los Angeles Times article that includes his chili recipe, and the inescapable conclusion after reading that recipe is that if cigarettes hadn't killed him, his diet was ready to finish the job.
But let's be grateful he was around for as long as he was. As every Disney devotee knows, today is the official opening day of the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, a $110 million high-tech tribute to the man and his many accomplishments. I've linked to the museum's official web site, but its Facebook page is a richer source of information.
Just about every "Disney historian" I've ever heard of seems to have been involved in the planning for this museum, but as I've mentioned, I wasn't invited to take part in any way. I've been exchanging cordial emails with Walt's daughter Disney Disney Miller, the museum's prime mover, for several years, but perhaps when decisions were being made, someone deemed me insufficiently enthusiastic or excessively skeptical about some parts of Walt's legacy. It wouldn't be the first time.
The advantage my position gives me is that when I get around to visiting the museum, I will be able to offer you my opinion of it without feeling the slightest obligation to color that opinion to suit anyone else. Not that my opinion will count for much, but it'll be wholly my own. I'd been feeling a little tepid about scheduling a visit to museum, but now that I've realized how unusual my position will be—at least as far as "Disney historians" are concerned—I'm excited about seeing it and telling you what I think. I hope and expect to like it a lot. I'll let you know when I've firmed up my travel plans.
The museum has been getting positive reviews so far, but it's unfortunate that the New York Times's Edward Rothstein chose to praise "Neal Gabler's fine recent biography" of Walt Disney in his piece on the museum's debut. This was probably Rothstein's way of making it up to Gabler (who moves in the same journalistic-literary circles) for what the Times did in an article about the museum last spring, when it cited Diane Miller's very low, and entirely justified, opinion of Gabler's book.
The museum is of course touting Rothstein's review on its Facebook page. You gotta do what you gotta do.
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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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.
From my friend Roger Webb, 
We were in England during an extended research trip to Europe, for The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, that had already taken us to 
There were reasons for that. For one thing, as I wrote in 
...more or less, although Christmas keeps getting in the way of my intention to write something here. I've seen the new Disney feature The Princess and the Frog since Phyllis and I returned from a short trip, and although I found in that film considerable food for thought, it'll be later this week before I can assemble a coherent review. (In brief: I liked it better than I expected).
The Animated Man in Italian: From my translator, Marco Pellitteri, comes word that 
