Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad

Original theatrical release poster for The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad

Walt Disney started the 1940s with two of the most ambitious creative gambles of his career: Pinocchio and Fantasia. Neither one paid off the way he had hoped. What followed was arguably the most tumultuous decade of his life. World War II, an animators strike, and too many expensive box office flops had forced him to scale back considerably. Walt had started the decade with high hopes and big dreams. By 1949, he just wanted to be done.

Walt’s lack of enthusiasm bled over into the last few package films of the decade. The connective tissue between the segments grew flimsier as time went on. The segments themselves betrayed their origins as scraps and leftovers from other projects. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the behind-the-scenes drama on Disney’s final package film, The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad.

Walt’s animators first pitched The Wind In The Willows as a potential feature back in 1938. Walt was lukewarm on the idea but bought the rights to Kenneth Grahame’s book anyway. Since the Disney coffers were stuffed with Snow White money, he was buying the rights to a lot of things at the time. Production officially began in 1941 with James Algar directing. But they didn’t get far before the strike and the war caused it to be abandoned.

A few years later, Walt turned his attention back to the project. He took a look at what had been done so far and didn’t care for it. He told Algar and Frank Thomas to take another crack at it but to cut it down to the bone. If they could get it under 25 minutes, Walt would pair it up with the Mickey Mouse mega-short The Legend Of Happy Valley (soon to be renamed Mickey And The Beanstalk) and release it under the truly abysmal title Two Fabulous Characters.

But it soon became apparent that The Wind In The Willows was going to take longer to finish than anyone had anticipated. Not wanting to delay the release of the Mickey cartoon any longer, Mickey And The Beanstalk got shuffled over to Fun & Fancy Free. In need of a fabulous replacement character, Walt settled on another project that didn’t seem worth expanding to feature-length, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Not because it made a better thematic match with The Wind In The Willows. That’s just what he had left.

At some point, Disney mercifully decided to drop the Two Fabulous Characters name, although not before the phrase crept into the narration. Instead, he gave the project the slightly-less generic title The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad. That’s not even the order the stories appear in the film but whatever. At this point, I’m surprised Walt didn’t call the movie Fire Sale: Everything Must Go!

(For whatever reason, Walt seemed to have a thing for that original title. Later on, he’d air an episode of the Disneyland TV series called Four Fabulous Characters that had nothing to do with any of this. Instead, it featured The Martins And The Coys and Casey At The Bat segments from Make Mine Music, Johnny Appleseed from Melody Time and The Brave Engineer short. If nothing else, Walt Disney was a firm believer in recycling.)

To narrate the stories, Walt hired two of the biggest stars he’d worked with to date. Basil Rathbone was already a highly respected actor when his definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes on film and radio turned him into an icon. Bing Crosby was one of the most popular entertainers in the world. Having either one associated with a Disney production must have been a huge coup.

Even though the movie was assembled in such a lazy, slapdash manner, The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad ironically emerges as one of Disney’s better package films. The only real problem with it, and it’s a fairly large problem, is that the two stories could not be more dissimilar. If you’re a fan of Ichabod, it’s a chore to sit through The Wind In The Willows. And if you loved Mr. Toad, Sleepy Hollow is a jarring change of tone. Even the flow from one story to the next seems off. The British Wind In The Willows ends up as a Christmas/New Years story. The American Sleepy Hollow is autumn leading up to Halloween. Everything about the film seems backwards.

Walt’s disinterest in The Wind In The Willows may have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether his mind was on other things or he simply didn’t get it, he really wasn’t the right choice to adapt Grahame’s gentle, deeply British novel. Like a lot of adaptations, Disney decides to focus on the fun-loving, adventure-seeking Toad, although Mole and Rat are really the main characters of the book. There’s nothing wrong with that choice but it does reduce the story to a series of madcap chases. At least Walt was able to get a fun Disneyland attraction out of it.

UK quad poster for The Wind In The Willows.

For what it is, Disney’s Wind In The Willows is perfectly fine. The animation is lively and the character design is memorable. Rathbone’s narration gives it an air of English authenticity that is otherwise wholly unearned. Eric Blore, a reliably hilarious presence in such films as Top Hat and Sullivan’s Travels, is an excellent choice to provide the voice of J. Thaddeus Toad. But it’s easier to appreciate the cartoon’s strengths when viewed on its own instead of as an opening act.

Make no mistake, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow is very much the headliner of this double feature. All these years later, I would argue that it remains the definitive screen version of Washington Irving’s classic story (sorry, Tim Burton). Even though it’s lighter and family-friendlier than Irving’s original, the cartoon’s images and sounds are so indelible that they’ve come to represent the tale in the popular imagination.

On the face of it, Bing Crosby may seem a counterintuitive choice to tell the tale but it’s actually an inspired choice. Crosby had been a hugely popular singer since the early 1930s. Since crossing over to film, he had become a top box office draw and won an Oscar for his work in Going My Way. Thanks to his work for the USO during the war, he had essentially become the voice of America. In 1948, he topped polls as “the most admired man alive”. Who better to take you by the hand and guide you through a quintessentially American ghost story?

Of course, you don’t hire Bing Crosby just to narrate. You want him to sing, so Disney hired songwriters Don Raye and Gene de Paul to come up with three original songs, one for each of the main characters, Ichabod, Katrina and the Headless Horseman. Raye and de Paul didn’t contribute all that much to the Disney songbook. They’d written the song “It’s Whatcha Do With Whatcha Got” for So Dear To My Heart and would later come up with “Beware The Jabberwock”, an unused song from Alice In Wonderland. But they’re best known for future standards like “You Don’t Know What Love Is”. Their pop sensibilities work well here, creating three instant earworms that suit Crosby’s style perfectly.

Album cover art for Walt Disney's Ichabod by Bing Crosby

As wonderful as the music and Crosby’s narration are, it’s the animation and design that makes Sleepy Hollow so unforgettable. Co-director Jack Kinney was the main director on the Goofy shorts and you can see the same lanky, graceful awkwardness in Ichabod Crane. Brom Bones is such an ideal caricature of a rugged he-man that the studio essentially recast him some 40 years later as Gaston in Beauty And The Beast.

And then there’s the Headless Horseman, a character who gets one of the top-five best entrances in Disney history. Only Maleficent and maybe Cruella De Vil come close to topping it. Every other character is exaggerated to some extent but the Horseman is played completely straight. This isn’t some cartoon monster. This is a demon who seriously means to cut your head clean off.

The chase sequence is a masterpiece of animation. Directors Kinney and Clyde Geronimi manage to pull off the difficult trick of making the scene both funny and frightening at the same time. Humor is a vital element in horror, helping to provide a release valve for tension. Without the business between Ichabod and his horse, this sequence would be unbearably tense for most kids.

Even with it, it’s still a lot to take. I’ve talked to plenty of people who say this movie gave them nightmares and it’s hardly surprising. This chase feels completely different from, say, the police pursuit of Mr. Toad in the previous segment. Even though bullets are flying, you’re never afraid that Toad is in danger of being picked off. You don’t have that same assurance with Ichabod and the Horseman. There’s real weight behind the Horseman’s sword.

The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad was released in October of 1949, in time for Halloween. It made some money but considering the fact that the studio had been working on it in some form or another for the better part of a decade, it wasn’t enough to recover its costs. After it completed its original theatrical engagement, the film wouldn’t be seen in its original form again for decades.

Instead, as had become common practice with the package films, the two halves were split up to air separately on TV, theatrically, and eventually on video. The Wind In The Willows debuted on television first, paired with Disney’s earlier adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon. Years later, it was retitled The Madcap Adventures Of Mr. Toad and released in front of the live-action comedy western Hot Lead And Cold Feet.

Sleepy Hollow had a much bigger impact on its own. Its television debut was a Halloween episode of Disneyland, for which the studio produced an introductory prologue on the life of Washington Irving. Disney has never officially released that prologue on home video but YouTube is a thing, so here it is now:

The short was released to theatres in 1963 and I can personally vouch for the fact that it became a Halloween staple of elementary school teachers throughout the 1970s and 80s. It would continue to be a part of holiday specials like Halloween Hall O’ Fame (featuring a pumpkinhead Jonathan Winters) and Disney’s Halloween Treat for years. In the early 90s, Disney finally put the original film back together on laserdisc.

VHS cover art for Disney's Halloween Treat

For too long, you could only see these films individually. Today it’s the opposite problem: whether it’s on Blu-ray or streaming, you can only access them together. Why on earth is it so difficult for Disney to give audiences BOTH options? Believe it or not, most people don’t want to make The Wind In The Willows part of their Halloween traditions. To be clear, I don’t want them to erase the original version from existence. But when a studio repurposes material as drastically as Disney has done with the segments from its various package films, the ideal presentation would include all the different variations.

Disney ended the package film years on a high note, even if that wouldn’t become fully apparent until later. At the time, I’m sure that Walt didn’t even notice. The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad had never been a priority for him. As usual, his eyes were on the future. The 1950s would be a much different decade for Walt Disney.

VERDICT: It’s a Disney Plus but it’d be a Disney Double Plus if they split the segments up again.

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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: Fun & Fancy Free

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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