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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Fun & Fancy Free

~ electrictheatre ~ 2 Comments
Original theatrical release poster for Fun And Fancy Free

By the time 1947 rolled around, Walt and Roy Disney’s belt-tightening was beginning to pay off. The brothers had managed to keep the studio afloat through contract work, low-budget package films and re-releases of earlier favorites like Snow White and Pinocchio. Now that he had a little bit of money coming in, Walt went back to developing more ambitious features like Cinderella. But Walt held his animated features to a high standard, which meant that Cinderella wouldn’t be ready for a few years.

So Walt and his team went back to the discard pile in search of material for more of the profitable package films. They found a pair of stories that had both been in development as potential features until World War II ground everything to a halt. The Legend Of Happy Valley was an adaptation of Jack And The Beanstalk with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy taking on the giant. It had been almost completely finished before the war put it on hold.

Walt had never been all that crazy about Happy Valley. He thought the idea was hilarious but didn’t think the story was appropriate for the characters. When work picked up on the project, Walt decided to incorporate it into a package film instead of finishing it as a feature. His first instinct was to pair it with The Wind In The Willows but since that project still had a long way to go, he had to find something else.

Bongo, about a performing circus bear who longs to return to nature, was based on a children’s story by Sinclair Lewis. It had originally been developed as a semi-sequel to Dumbo, which makes sense. Both were about performing circus animals. But as work continued, Walt’s enthusiasm for the project waned.

The two stories had virtually nothing in common apart from the fact that Walt didn’t think either one was worth finishing as a stand-alone feature. But some new linking material would solve that problem and thus, Fun & Fancy Free was born.

Even the wraparound segments are built out of leftovers. Jiminy Cricket serves as host, a role he would continue to play on TV and in educational films. He first appears singing “I’m A Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow,” a song that had been cut from Pinocchio. Jiminy attempts to strike up a conversation with a morose-looking doll and teddy bear. The cricket has always had trouble discerning between sentient and inanimate creatures. Getting no response, he opts to play a record instead, selecting Bongo as performed by Make Mine Music alumna Dinah Shore.

VHS cover art for the Walt Disney Mini Classics release of Bongo

Even though all the crossover material between Bongo and Dumbo had been dropped, it’s easy to see how the two could have connected. It’s harder to understand how Bongo ever could have worked as a stand-alone feature. It’s only about half an hour long but even at that length, it feels padded and dull.

Longtime Disney animator Jack Kinney was in charge of Bongo and it’s clear that he was trying to recapture the simple pleasures of Dumbo. But there’s a difference between “simple” and “simplistic” and Bongo falls squarely on the wrong side of the equation. Bongo escapes the circus train, struggles to fit in with the other woodland creatures, falls in love with Lulubelle and has to challenge a much larger bear called Lumpjaw. Every story beat is punctuated with its own, seemingly endless song. Even if you’re the current president of the Dinah Shore Fan Club, it’s a bit much.

Bongo wouldn’t have been a particularly memorable cartoon even edited down to Silly Symphony length. There’s a reason you won’t find any Bongo plush toys at your local Disney Store. The bear’s cute enough but he doesn’t have much personality. Considering we actually see him being mistreated by his circus handlers, it’s weird that we have almost no sympathy for him. With little reason to care about its outcome, Bongo ends up as a shrug of a cartoon, a time-filler for a particularly gloomy afternoon.

After Bongo mercifully trudges to a conclusion, Jiminy Cricket decides to snoop around the house some more. Turns out he’s in the bedroom of beloved Hollywood child star Luana Patten! Luana has been invited to a party across the street thrown by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and friends, so Jiminy heads over to check it out.

Luana Patten was not exactly a beloved Hollywood child star at this point. But Disney had signed both her and her Song Of The South co-star Bobby Driscoll to multi-year contracts. So if nothing else, he had a vested interest in giving her the appearance of a beloved Hollywood child star. We’ll see her again in this column.

Now, I suppose we could simply acknowledge that the 1940s were a simpler, more innocent time, especially at the movies. And if we did so, there would be no need to comment on the inherent weirdness of a small, unaccompanied girl attending a party thrown by a middle-aged man and two wooden puppets. But come on…at what point in human history would this have ever been considered anything other than deeply uncomfortable?

The whole thing’s even weirder if you know much about Edgar Bergen’s life and act. Bergen keeps things wholesome here but Charlie McCarthy was not exactly G-rated. He’d become a sensation trading double entendres with Mae West and W.C. Fields. At this time, Bergen was also the father of a one-year-old daughter, Candice. In her memoir, Candice Bergen revealed the strange hold Charlie McCarthy had over her childhood, feeling that the dummy was more of a child to her father than she was. When Bergen died, he left Charlie $10,000 in his will. Candice got nothing. Luana Patten was lucky she was only visiting.

Bergen regales Luana, Charlie, sensitive yokel Mortimer Snerd and party crasher Jiminy Cricket with the tale formerly known as The Legend Of Happy Valley but now titled Mickey And The Beanstalk. You know the story and have probably seen the cartoon, so I won’t bother recapping it here.

VHS cover art for the Walt Disney Mini Classics release of Mickey And The Beanstalk

Odds are you remember this as a lively, funny cartoon with some unforgettable sequences. The Mickey/Donald/Goofy trio cartoons were always highlights of Disney’s short subjects, whether they were cleaning clocks or hunting ghosts. Their rapport is as reliably entertaining as ever here.

As it happened, this would be one of the last times Walt provided Mickey’s voice. After what sounds like a rather speedy audition process, he turned the job over to sound effects man Jimmy MacDonald. Walt would say that he simply didn’t have time to do it anymore but it’s not as though the studio was producing all that many Mickey Mouse cartoons at the time. It’s more likely that years of cigarette smoking had taken a toll on his voice, making it harder to reach Mickey’s falsetto.

Willie the Giant (voiced by Billy Gilbert, who had already worked for Disney as Sneezy in Snow White) is a terrific addition to the roster of Disney supporting characters. Almost 40 years later, the studio brought him back as the Ghost of Christmas Present in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. But he makes such an indelible impression here in his first appearance that it’s easy to believe he must have turned up elsewhere over the years.

Even the music is better in this half. Anita Gordon’s songs as the Singing Harp are happy without being cloying. I don’t think the residents of Happy Valley would have been so joyous if they’d had Dinah Shore singing over them all the time. Willie gets a catchy, memorable entrance song. And to this day, the promise of a large meal will get me singing, “Turkey, lobster, sweet potater pie! Pancakes piled up till they reach the sky!”

So if you have fond memories of Mickey And The Beanstalk, I completely understand. I’m also willing to bet those memories are based on seeing the cartoon by itself, after it was rescued from the morass of Fun & Fancy Free. In its original context, the cartoon’s momentum is torpedoed every few minutes by interruptions from Bergen and his dummies. In the right context, I can appreciate and even enjoy Bergen’s act. Here, it just gets in the way. It also doesn’t help that his actual ventriloquism skills had deteriorated from years performing on the radio. You can see his lips moving throughout, which only adds to the sense that nobody’s bringing their “A” game here.

Mickey And The Beanstalk proved to be the gift that keeps on giving for the studio. In the 50s, it aired as an episode of Disney’s TV series with new narration by old standby Sterling Holloway. They revisited it again in the 60s, this time with a framing sequence featuring new animation and narration by Ludwig Von Drake. It’s been released on VHS and DVD several times, frequently by itself. It has had a much more lasting impact on its own than it ever had as part of Fun & Fancy Free.

As for poor Bongo, time has not been as kind to the little circus bear. It was also released on its own and aired on television but nowhere near as often. It seems to rank somewhere near the bottom of the middle of the Disney canon. Nobody really hates it but nobody much loves it, either.

Fun & Fancy Free did fairly well at the box office, especially considering it hadn’t cost all that much to make. But critics were unimpressed and nobody seemed to mind when it disappeared from theatres and went into TV rotation. Audiences would have to wait a little longer for Disney to recapture his past magic. The package film era was not yet over.

VERDICT: If you can catch Mickey And The Beanstalk on its own, do that. It’s a Disney Plus but Fun & Fancy Free is a Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Saludos Amigos

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster

If there’s one word the Disney Marketing Department loves to toss around, it’s “timeless”. Not without some justification, of course. So far, this column has looked at six films made around 80 years ago. All but one of them has continued to enchant and delight audiences around the world to this day.

During this time period, Walt only seemed to know how to make two kinds of movies: timeless classics and hyper-specific oddities that make almost no sense when you take them out of context. Falling squarely into the latter category are such films as The Reluctant Dragon and Saludos Amigos.

The backstory of Saludos Amigos is almost more interesting than the movie itself (in fact, it’s the subject of its own Disney-produced documentary, Walt & El Grupo). In 1941, Disney was in a bit of financial trouble. Walt had opened an expensive new studio in Burbank, his features were struggling at the box office, and his animators had gone on strike. So when Nelson Rockefeller, President Roosevelt’s newly appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, called to commission a feature, Walt wasn’t exactly in a position to say no.

Rockefeller was on a diplomatic mission, strengthening ties between the US and our Latin American neighbors and counteracting the Axis propaganda that had been flooding these countries during the early days of World War II. To do this, Rockefeller met with a number of celebrities and artists, appointing them Goodwill Ambassadors and sending them off on cultural tours of Latin America. Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters went on tour and recorded Latin music with Xavier Cugat. Orson Welles hosted the radio show Hello Americans and started work on the film It’s All True. And Walt Disney assembled a team of artists and musicians to sketch their way through Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru. But unlike Welles, Walt was able to finish his movie.

It probably didn’t hurt that Walt’s movie really stretches the definition of what’s considered a feature film. At just 42 minutes, Saludos Amigos makes Dumbo look like Lawrence Of Arabia. Watching it today, it’s hard to believe that it actually played in cinemas on its own. I can’t imagine most audiences left the theater feeling like they got their money’s worth. It almost feels like an extended teaser for some other movie. Live-action footage introduces the premise that Walt Disney and his team are traveling south of the border to do research for an upcoming picture. The movie’s almost over before you realize that this is that picture.

The live-action footage continues throughout, linking four new animated segments. This wasn’t really Disney’s first “package” film. Prior to the release of Snow White, Disney had strung together five Silly Symphonies and released the compilation to theaters under the snappy title Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons. Fantasia had been a highly prestigious package film and The Reluctant Dragon had padded out its animated scraps with extensive live-action footage. But in the years to come, Disney would rely more and more on package films like this one to keep the doors open. They were cheaper, they were faster, and they could be easily chopped up and sold for parts.

Saludos Amigos kicks off with tourist Donald Duck exploring Lake Titicaca and having some trouble crossing a suspension bridge with a llama. Next, we meet the young Chilean airplane Pedro. Disney would essentially revisit this concept some 70 years later in the Cars spinoff Planes. Goofy, always a welcome presence, shows up in the third segment to demonstrate the ways of the Argentinean gaucho. Finally, Donald reappears to help introduce another new character, the Brazilian parrot José Carioca.

José “Joe” Carioca (voiced by Brazilian musician José Oliveira) was positioned as the breakout star of Saludos Amigos. His segment is certainly the most exciting, both visually, breaking the fourth wall of animation by having the animator’s paintbrush creating backgrounds around the two birds, and musically.

The song, “Aquarela do Brasil”, had been around for a few years but didn’t become a hit until Oliveira performed it here. Today, of course, everyone knows it as simply “Brazil” and it’s one of the most instantly recognizable samba songs ever recorded.

Saludos Amigos soundtrack album

José Carioca did in fact become a beloved, heavily merchandized star in Brazil but he never quite took off here in the US. Though that wasn’t for lack of trying on Disney’s part. We’ll see José in this column again soon.

Saludos Amigos isn’t really a bad movie. It’s far too slight and inconsequential for that. In fact, it’s barely a movie at all. Unlike some of Disney’s other package films, the segments here are extremely forgettable. Pedro is a little wisp of a cartoon and El Gaucho Goofy is far from the Goof’s funniest showcase. Donald fares slightly better. It’s always fun to see him in obnoxious tourist mode and the musical and visual flair of the finale ends things on a high note. But the whole thing’s over before you’ve even finished your popcorn.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Saludos Amigos is that the damn thing worked. There was no way the movie was not going to make money. The whole project had been bankrolled by the government and guaranteed with federal loans. But audiences actually turned up for this mini-movie. For many Americans, this was their first exposure to South American culture and they liked what they saw. More importantly, they liked what they heard. Latin American music became the hot new sound and its popularity continued to explode throughout the 1940s and 50s.

Saludos Amigos was even nominated for three Academy Awards, albeit in the traditionally overstuffed categories of Best Sound, Best Original Song and Best Original Score (Musical). Still, that’s the same number of nominations as Bambi. The movie’s best songs, “Brazil” and “Tico Tico”, weren’t original, so that left the title tune to compete in the Best Original Song category. It didn’t win any of the awards it was up for. But the fact that the Academy even recognized this as a feature and not a short subject is fairly impressive.

At best, Saludos Amigos was a minor success. It certainly wasn’t a dream project for Walt or anyone else at the studio. But Walt needed something to stay afloat. If that turned out to be a government-sponsored piece of South American boosterism, so be it. By turning his talents to propaganda, Walt would make it through World War II.

VERDICT: Disney Minus seems a little harsh, so let’s call it a Disney Neutral.

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Reluctant Dragon

~ electrictheatre

All was not well in the Magic Kingdom in 1941. Just a few years earlier, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs had been a worldwide phenomenon. Its success had enabled Walt Disney to break ground on a new multi-acre studio in Burbank, a big step up from his old Hyperion Avenue studio in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. The Burbank lot officially opened in February of 1940, right around the same time that Disney’s second animated feature, Pinocchio, premiered.

Unfortunately, Pinocchio underperformed at the box office, leading to a million dollar loss for the studio. Its follow-up, Fantasia, premiered in November. By spring of 1941, it was on track to do even worse business than Pinocchio.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Walt was also facing dissent among his animators who were demanding that the studio be unionized. Disney was having none of that. In a speech to his employees in February of 1941, he essentially dismissed the pro-union faction as a bunch of grumbling whiners. Needless to say, this did not go over well. The next thing Walt knew, he had a full-fledged strike on his hands.

This could not have come at a worse time. The studio was hemorrhaging money and the strike effectively shut down production of Disney’s next planned feature, Dumbo. If the studio was going to survive, Walt needed to get something into theaters. So he made a movie showcasing the biggest asset he had on hand: his shiny new studio in Burbank.

The Reluctant Dragon is, by any definition, a strange film. The movie opens on what is presumably a typical day for noted humorist and occasional actor Robert Benchley (appearing as himself). Mrs. Benchley (played by character actress Nana Bryant, not the actual Mrs. Benchley) reads aloud from Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Reluctant Dragon, while Robert lounges in the pool shooting darts at duck decoys. Mrs. Benchley is convinced that the story would make a great Walt Disney film. So she hectors her husband into dropping by the lot unannounced to somehow sell Walt the movie rights to this book (that, again, he did not write and presumably does not have any controlling interest in).

Once there, Robert is assigned a security guard escort named Humphrey (Buddy Pepper), an annoying little Poindexter who rattles off facts and data about the lot straight from the Disney Investors’ Prospectus. Robert understandably wants to shake Humphrey and, somewhat less understandably, avoid meeting Walt (perhaps to avoid being sued by the Kenneth Grahame estate), so he ducks into various rooms at random and ends up getting a lesson (more or less) in how cartoons get made.

As a documentary, The Reluctant Dragon is of dubious value. If you knew absolutely nothing about animation going into it, you would perhaps know slightly more than nothing coming out. Most of the Disney “employees” we meet are actors, including Alan Ladd as a story man who pitches Baby Weems to Benchley, Frank Faylen (who you’ll no doubt recognize as Ernie from It’s A Wonderful Life) as an orchestra leader, and Frances Gifford as Doris. We first meet Doris providing vocal effects for Casey Junior (soon to appear in Dumbo) and she ends up acting as a more attractive tour guide for Benchley but it’s never all that clear what her actual job is supposed to be.

Now as a Disney fan, some of these sequences are a lot of fun. We get to meet Clarence Nash and Florence Gill, the voices of Donald Duck and Clara Cluck. We get to see foley effects made, including the cool sonovox used by Doris. We get to see the massive multi-plane camera, the maquette department and a gorgeous Technicolor tour of the ink-and-paint department. And with the benefit of hindsight, we realize that 1941 audiences were treated to quite the preview of coming attractions. There are glimpses of Dumbo, Bambi and, if you’re really paying attention in the maquette department, models from such future films as Peter Pan and Lady And The Tramp.

But for anyone expecting a worthy successor to Disney’s first three films, this hodgepodge of animated scraps and live-action tour certainly wasn’t it. In 1941, the name Walt Disney was even more synonymous with animation than it is today and there is precious little animation to be found, including a few seconds of Donald Duck here and a few seconds of Bambi there. All told, there are four major animated sequences. The first is the black-and-white glimpse of Casey Junior, which is intercut with live-action looks at the sound effects team in action. The rest come one after the other at the tail end of the film and one of those isn’t even fully animated.

That would be the aforementioned Baby Weems sequence, told in the form of a stylized animatic. Even if this had been fleshed out, it isn’t much of a cartoon. It’s about a genius baby who becomes a worldwide sensation, gets sick, then reverts to being a normal baby after he recovers. As a means to recycle some rejected storyboards, it’s certainly cost-effective but that’s about the best you can say about it.

The next sequence, Goofy starring in How To Ride A Horse, is one of the film’s highlights. This was actually the first of Goofy’s long-running How-To shorts that would find our intrepid hero mastering everything from skiing (“pronounced shee-ing”) to hooking up a home theatre. These were some of the funniest cartoons Disney ever produced and the formula is established from the get-go here. And for Disney aficionados, it’s nice to see the animators in this sequence portrayed by actual animators Ward Kimball, Fred Moore and Norm Ferguson.

Finally, Benchley arrives at the Disney screening room where he comes face-to-face with Walt himself and watches his latest cartoon: The Reluctant Dragon. (I guess the fact that Walt has already made the movie Benchley wanted to sell him is meant to be a punchline of sorts but I couldn’t tell you what the joke’s supposed to be.) This is a pleasant little two-reeler about a boy who befriends a gentle, poetry-loving dragon. When the eccentric knight Sir Giles rides into town, the boy tries to arrange a battle between the two, only to discover that Sir Giles is a bit of a poet himself. So a mock battle is arranged, Sir Giles emerges triumphant and the dragon’s fearsome reputation is rehabilitated.

Kenneth Grahame’s original story works on a number of different levels but Disney seems content with just a surface reading. It’s silly, breezy fun but nothing more. Disney had proven himself capable of much more than this and not just in his features. He’d made Silly Symphonies and other short films with more ambition than is on display here. This feels exactly like the placeholder it was.

The Reluctant Dragon was hardly a blockbuster but it accomplished what it was designed to do: it turned a modest profit. Walt Disney did eventually (and begrudgingly) sign a union contract, ending the strike and getting the studio back to work. But the strike came at a heavy cost. Many of Disney’s best animators left the studio, some temporarily, others forever. Some went to MGM, others went to Warner Bros. A handful, including David Hilberman, Stephen Bosustow and John Hubley, struck out on their own, forming United Productions of America (UPA), a studio that would have a profound effect on animation in the 1940s and 50s.

This was also an important film in the burgeoning cult of personality that was beginning to surround Disney and persists to this day. Seriously, who else besides Walt Disney would even consider releasing a movie like this? The “peek-behind-the-curtain” premise is really just an excuse to show off the new Burbank digs. That’s a premise Walt would return to in the 1950s with the opening of Disneyland, both the theme park and the TV show of the same name.

More importantly, The Reluctant Dragon and its all-access tour of the Burbank studio sows the seeds that will eventually blossom into Disneyland’s moniker, “The Happiest Place on Earth”. Life on the Disney lot looks like a dream job. It’s unstructured, free-wheeling, and open to all. You don’t even need an appointment to get a meeting with Walt himself. Everyone who works on the lot is happy, smiling, and eager to stop whatever they’re doing and show off their work. It’s a magical place full of music and laughter where no one would ever even consider grabbing a picket sign and going on strike.

Of course, real life is a lot messier than a Disney movie, which is exactly why Walt went to such pains to ensure that his movies had as little to do with real life as possible. The Reluctant Dragon couldn’t make all of Disney’s problems go away. His real employees were still on strike and his studio still badly needed money. But it could hide them for a little while and make the rest of the world believe that Disney’s land was the happiest studio on Earth.

VERDICT: A split decision. For hardcore Disney buffs, it’s a Disney Plus. For the more casual fan, it’s a Disney Minus.