Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Melody Time

Original teaser poster for Melody Time

Walt Disney was unquestionably one of the most imaginative figures of the twentieth century. His expansive vision went well beyond animation, transforming feature films, television and, of course, theme parks. So when he sat down to assemble Melody Time, Disney’s fifth package film of the decade, you’d think Walt could have come up with a more interesting theme than, “Let’s just do another music one.”

On the face of it, Walt’s commitment to musically themed package films is almost quixotic. He had hoped that Fantasia would be his crowning achievement and had taken its financial and critical disappointment personally. It seems as though he almost viewed it like a warning against letting his ambitions run away with him. He played it much safer on Make Mine Music. Most of the animation was done in the more traditional, cartoony style. The music was contemporary. And most of the segments could stand on their own as individually released short subjects in case the feature version tanked.

Walt’s compromises paid off. Make Mine Music was a modest success, at a time when the studio needed all the successes it could get. With their next full-length animated feature still on the horizon, Walt needed to release something to theaters in 1948. Another hodgepodge of contemporary songs must have seemed like as good an idea as any.

But Disney’s team had already had a more interesting idea. Perhaps inspired by the success of the Casey At The Bat segment in Make Mine Music, the animators were keen to develop an entire compilation of American folk heroes, tall tales and legends. Two segments were completed: The Legend Of Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill. But for whatever reason, Walt decided not to pursue the idea and instead filled the rest of the film with an odd assortment of completely unrelated cartoons.

Perhaps it was Johnny Appleseed that soured Walt on the project. Performed by radio star Dennis Day, the segment mines all the excitement it can from the story of the peace-loving gardener who roamed the countryside planting apple trees. Which is to say, not much. It’s pleasant enough but it is completely bereft of dramatic conflict. Johnny walks, plants, befriends animals, walks, plants, naps, walks, plants, dies peacefully beneath a tree, then is escorted to heaven where he presumably walks, plants, and so on.

But The Legend Of Johnny Appleseed is slightly unusual for Disney in that it’s one of the most explicitly Christian projects the studio ever produced. We’re introduced to Johnny singing “The Lord’s Been Good To Me” and he carries his Bible with him everywhere. It’s hardly radical but it may have been too much for Walt, who was never a churchgoer and tried to keep religion out of his creative work.

About ten years after Melody Time, Walt’s brother Roy came to him with a potential live-action project: a religious epic called The Big Fisherman based on the life of Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. Walt wanted nothing to do with it but Roy backed it anyway, releasing the independent production through Buena Vista. Today, The Big Fisherman remains virtually impossible to see.

At any rate, it’s possible that Johnny Appleseed‘s fairly innocuous religious content, coupled with its overall sleepy tone, helped put the kibosh on the tall tales and legends concept, at least for the time being. Disney would eventually get back to it in short form. In 1950, Casey Jones starred in The Brave Engineer. The Oscar-nominated Paul Bunyan followed in 1958. Finally in 2002, the studio got around to compiling most of these, along with the new short John Henry, in the direct-to-video package film Disney’s American Legends.

DVD cover art for Disney's American Legends

Still, it’s unfortunate that Walt didn’t have enough faith in the idea at the time, especially since the second folk tale, Pecos Bill, is easily the film’s highlight. In the live-action framing sequence, Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers (and Trigger, the Smartest Horse in the Movies, of course) tell the story to young Disney contract-buckaroos Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten (reunited after Song Of The South). It’s a classic Tall Tale of the Wild West, with a pioneer boy raised by coyotes and growing up to shape the Great State of Texas alongside his trusty horse, Widowmaker.

Pecos Bill is just a breezy, fun cartoon. It’s the longest segment in Melody Time but it’s never in danger of overstaying its welcome. The animation is a treat and the music is delightful, especially the cowboy classic “Blue Shadows On The Trail”. That song is not to be confused with Randy Newman’s similar “Blue Shadows” from Three Amigos!, although I’m guessing Newman wrote his song because Disney wouldn’t let them use the original. In fact, the original title of Three Amigos! was actually The Three Caballeros. Disney probably had a thing or two to say about that, too.

The rest of the segments run the usual gamut of highs and lows. Singer Frances Langford performs the charming and nostalgic Once Upon A Wintertime. This cartoon would find a more receptive audience later after it was released on its own and included in various Christmas-themed compilations.

Bumble Boogie is a jazzed-up version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight Of The Bumblebee. A presumably more traditional performance of the piece had been considered as a potential Fantasia segment a few years earlier. The music, performed by Freddy Martin and His Orchestra with Jack Fina killing it on piano, is great but the animation is disappointing. An insect that frankly doesn’t look all that much like a bumblebee has to maneuver his way through various musical backgrounds. Compared to the more ambitious abstract segments in Fantasia and even Make Mine Music, this comes across as a little pedestrian. It feels like Disney wasn’t all that interested in challenging himself anymore.

The Andrews Sisters perform the epic story of Little Toot, which is essentially the same as Pedro from Saludos Amigos but with boats instead of planes. A little tugboat who wants to be a big tugboat saves the day after he gets in a world of trouble. There isn’t much to this and it goes on a bit too long but I like the Andrews Sisters, so at least the music’s good. If you don’t like the Andrews Sisters, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Just about everyone is gonna have a bad time with Trees, in which Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians perform Joyce Kilmer’s poem set to music by Oscar Rasbach. Trees is one of the most famous poems ever written and I don’t know a single person who likes it. It’s the kind of thuddingly obvious poem that gives poetry in general a bad name. It’s one of the easiest poems to parody but Disney plays it completely straight. But the animation is certainly pretty, so if you mute your television, you might be able to appreciate it.

The penultimate segment, arriving just before Pecos Bill, is the third and final entry in the Saludos Amigos/Three Caballeros saga, Blame It On The Samba. Donald Duck and José Carioca are back, along with that damn Aracuan Bird, but Panchito Pistoles sits this one out. This time, Donald and José have lost their pep until the Aracuan Bird spices things up with the samba rhythms of the Dinning Sisters and organist Ethel Smith, who appears in live-action footage.

This segment only adds to the sense that Melody Time is primarily scraps and leftovers. Any pretense of introducing audiences to authentic Latin American music is out the window. Donald and José don’t even get a chance to speak. It all feels like half an abandoned idea from The Three Caballeros that nobody bothered to flesh out.

Walt Disney’s years of penny-pinching and piecemeal package films were finally drawing to a close but he wasn’t completely done with them yet. By the early 1950s, Disney’s relationship with long-time distributor RKO was coming to an acrimonious end. Roy didn’t feel RKO was doing enough to publicize the Disney films, while RKO had problems of its own with Disney. A particular bone of contention was the series of True-Life Adventures nature documentaries, which RKO had no interest in distributing. This column will get back to those soon enough.

In 1953, Roy decided to break from RKO and created his own distribution company, Buena Vista. But the studio was on the hook to deliver one more animated feature to RKO. So in 1955, Walt re-edited a handful of segments from both Make Mine Music and Melody Time, added the bare minimum of new introductory material, and delivered Music Land to RKO.

Original theatrical release poster for Music Land

Music Land is without question the rarest of all Disney features. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a greatest-hits album or a clip show. After it fulfilled Walt’s contractual obligation, it was locked up in the Disney Vault, never to be heard from again. I’m not advocating for its release. You could put together a YouTube playlist and have roughly the same experience. But it’s an interesting footnote to both the musical package films and Disney’s long relationship with RKO.

In the end, Melody Time didn’t do much for Disney. It failed to find much of an audience and critics received it with a shrug and a yawn. After years of package films and odd experiments, there were plenty of people who assumed that Walt Disney had lost his touch, perhaps for good. Unfortunately, it would be another few years before he’d prove them wrong.

VERDICT: Only Once Upon A Wintertime and Pecos Bill can really be considered winners here, so it’s another Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Make Mine Music

Original theatrical release poster for Make Mine Music

Fantasia had been a costly failure for Walt Disney but he still believed the idea of marrying music to animation had merit. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Walt believed the unused animation from Fantasia still had merit. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the motto around the Disney studio was “Waste not, want not.” Absolutely nothing was thrown away if there was even the slightest chance of repurposing it.

One of the abandoned Fantasia sequences was Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune, depicting herons flying gracefully through the Everglades by night. There’s no real context for it. It’s simply an elegant piece of animation that was too good to waste. But Walt knew that Fantasia II would be another financial disaster. Instead of classical music, which had been expensive to produce and had limited appeal, Walt decided to focus on popular, contemporary sounds. Debussy was out, the Ken Darby Singers’ Blue Bayou (no relation to the later Roy Orbison song) was in and Make Mine Music was born.

Make Mine Music makes its intentions clear from the get-go. For the first time in an animated feature, the opening credits feature above-the-title celebrity names. Nelson Eddy! Dinah Shore! The Andrews Sisters! Benny Goodman! No stuffed shirts like Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor here. These are musicians you already know and love, so sit back and have a good time.

Unfortunately, that proves easier said than done. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how the individual segments in Make Mine Music were slapped together. They don’t flow seamlessly from one to the next. There’s no attempt at a framing device to connect them. You could hit “shuffle” and watch the segments in any random order and have pretty much the same experience. In fact, the segments are so independent of one another that you could cut one out entirely and not affect the rest of the movie at all. We know this because that’s exactly what Disney did.

This is not the first time censorship has reared its head in this column and it won’t be the last. The studio altered Fantasia to remove some outmoded racial caricatures and removed shots of Goofy smoking cigarettes from Saludos Amigos. When the studio released Make Mine Music on DVD back in 2000, they eliminated the opening segment, The Martins And The Coys, in a ham-fisted attempt at protecting children from overtly cartoonish gun violence. The edited version is still the only one available on disc in the US. Ironically, the uncut version is available on DVD in the UK and a couple of other territories that don’t have nearly as much of a problem with real guns as we do. As of this writing, it’s one of the only animated features you can’t watch on Disney+.

Now, I’m not going to make the case that The Martins And The Coys is some great piece of suppressed art. It’s a cute, mildly funny cartoon and its inclusion would certainly help get Make Mine Music off to a more energetic start than the pretty but sleepy Blue Bayou. But getting rid of it because you’re afraid that kids are going to mimic these goofball hillbillies is ridiculous. It’s an overreaction to a problem that probably didn’t exist in the first place. Make Mine Music doesn’t get screened all that often, so I find it hard to believe that concerned parents were complaining to the studio about it.

The Martins And The Coys isn’t the only censored piece in Make Mine Music. All The Cats Join In is a vibrantly animated piece with swing-loving teens dancing to a Benny Goodman tune. At one point, a young woman jumps out of a shower and some tame (but still surprising by Disney standards) nudity has been eliminated. It’s about as edgy and controversial as a vintage Archie comic.

Disney loves to operate under the mistaken belief that everything the studio has ever produced is a cherished evergreen passed on from generation to generation. But movies like Make Mine Music are simply not going to have enormous appeal for modern kids. The only people who really want to see it are adult Disney fans who have an interest in the studio’s history. Releasing a bowdlerized version like this doesn’t do anyone any favors.

As with Disney’s other package films, some of the individual segments in Make Mine Music are probably more familiar to fans than the movie as a whole. Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf, narrated by Disney favorite Sterling Holloway, was probably the first to break out. It was released as a stand-alone short in 1947 and subsequently became a staple in a lot of kids’ record collections.

Peter And The Wolf album cover

Radio star Jerry Colonna narrates Casey At The Bat, based on the immortal baseball poem by Ernest Thayer. Everyone knows at least a few lines from the poem and everyone seems to have a passing familiarity with Disney’s version of it. It was popular enough on its own to warrant a short sequel, Casey Bats Again, in 1954. Both of these segments are fine but nothing special. Peter And The Wolf has a slight edge with its character design and Holloway’s familiar voice. Casey At The Bat is okay but there are dozens of other baseball-themed cartoons just like it.

Like Fantasia, Make Mine Music tries to strike a balance between story-based cartoons like these and more abstract animations. But unlike Fantasia, the abstract sequences of Make Mine Music are easily the weakest. Two Silhouettes, performed by Dinah Shore over images of rotoscoped ballet dancers, is pleasant but overstays its welcome. The two Benny Goodman numbers, All The Cats Join In and After You’ve Gone, are fast-paced fun but nothing new. And both the animation and the music of Without You, sung by Andy Russell, are so forgettable that I literally couldn’t remember what this segment was without looking it up and I just watched this thing a couple days ago.

The final two segments are certainly memorable but that’s not necessarily a compliment. Johnny Fedora And Alice Blue Bonnet is a romance between two sentient hats performed by the Andrews Sisters. This is meant to be cute and charming. For my money, there’s nothing more cloying than something that’s trying to be cute and this segment tries very hard. As for the music, I love the Andrews Sisters most of the time but this is not a good song. I’m already wishing it’s over before they’ve even finished singing the lengthy title.

The grand finale is the 15-minute oddity The Whale Who Wanted To Sing At The Met (later re-released on its own under the title Willie The Operatic Whale). It’s the only segment not based around one specific song or piece of music, instead telling an original story incorporating various operatic motifs with Nelson Eddy providing all the voices.

After hearing reports of an operatic singing whale, impresario Tetti-Tatti becomes convinced that the whale has swallowed a great opera singer and sets out to rescue him. Willie the Whale finds out that Tetti-Tatti is looking for him and goes to meet him, assuming he’ll get an audition. He gives a magnificent performance, amazing the crew with his ability to sing in three different registers simultaneously. This only convinces Tetti-Tatti that Willie has swallowed three opera singers. The crew tries to stop Tetti-Tatti but it’s too late. Tetti-Tatti shoots Willie with a harpoon, sending him to a watery grave.

Let me just repeat that. Make Mine Music, a light-hearted animated anthology advertised on the poster as “Walt Disney’s Happy Comedy Musical”, ends with a miraculous singing whale shot dead by a crazed lunatic. What the hell, Walt?

Before it takes its sudden left turn into tragedy, The Whale Who Wanted To Sing At The Met is one of the most purely enjoyable segments. Willie is an engaging new character, the animation is lively and genuinely funny, and Nelson Eddy’s vocal prowess is no joke. But that ending leaves the movie on a sour note. Granted, as another great opera singer, Signore Bugs Bunny, once said, “What do you expect in an opera, a happy ending?” Still, this feels like a misstep.

Even with its bummer of an ending, Make Mine Music proved to be a solid money-earner for the studio. Its original theatrical release did well and the individual segments continued to generate income on their own for years afterward. But it was the first Disney release in quite some time that failed to earn a single Oscar nomination, possibly because the Academy had finally begun limiting the music categories to a reasonable number. Even Victory Through Air Power had managed to nab a Best Original Score nod.

But despite its relative popularity, Disney has never treated Make Mine Music with much respect. It was never re-released theatrically in its original form. Video releases have been few, far between, sometimes edited and not always in great shape. Knowing how carefully the Disney Archivists treat the material in their vault, I find it unlikely that the studio hasn’t protected the elements for this movie. So what gives?

It seems possible that the studio is simply trying to generate demand for Make Mine Music by making it hard to find. Taken on its own merits, this is not a great movie or even a particularly interesting one. What you have here is Disney and his team treading water, just trying to keep the studio afloat. They met that modest goal and moved on to bigger and better things.

Today, the studio could once again use Make Mine Music to generate some quick cash by releasing a fully restored version on Blu-ray and Disney+. There are countless fans who would buy a copy in a heartbeat simply because they haven’t been allowed to for so long. Scarcity generates interest. In this case, that can only help to develop a fanbase that the movie itself doesn’t really earn or deserve.

VERDICT: It’s a Disney Minus with a handful of moments that rise up to a Plus.