BEFORE: Walt Disney carries over from "Walt & El Grupo", makes sense, right? This is Walt's third appearance in my documentary chain, but he's still lagging behind Adolf Hitler and several others (filmmakers LOVE using Hitler footage...). But I've got a new leader for number of appearances for the year, Toni Collette is no longer the front-runner. After all the political films, Donald Trump rose to 7 appearances, but he's only in the second spot, Barack Obama's now in the lead with 8 appearances. (filmmakers also LOVE using Obama footage...)
We're also getting very close to the end of April and TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, so here's the line-up for tomorrow, Wednesday, April 28:
7:30 am "The Sunshine Boys" (1975) - SEEN IT
9:30 am "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962)
11:45 am "Swing Time" (1936) - SEEN IT
1:30 pm "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935)
3:45 pm "Test Pilot" (1938)
5:45 pm "That Hamilton Woman" (1941)
8:00 pm "Them!" (1954) - SEEN IT
9:45 pm "Theodora Goes Wild" (1936)
11:30 pm "The Thin Man" (1934) - SEEN IT
1:15 am "The Third Man" (1949) - SEEN IT
3:15 am "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)
5:45 am "This Land Is Mine" (1943)
Sort of getting my last chance here, with 5 seen out of 12, I've seen 129 out of 326 overall, which is 39.5%, just a bit shy of respectable. The work continues.
THE PLOT: This documentary offers a fascinating look at the man behind such classics as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Mary Poppins and Bambi, as well as the creation of Disneyland and many of the other things Walt Disney imagined into reality, featuring more than 50 interviews with original artists, imagineers, friends, family and collaborators.
AFTER: This documentary starts with footage of the premiere of "Mary Poppins" and suggests that film was Walt Disney's crowning achievement in cinema (Dick Van Dyke narrates the doc, so either they had to write that, or maybe he slipped it in...). That footage was from 1964, and then two years later, Walt Disney was dead - so the moral seems to be, never accomplish anything great, because then there's nowhere else to go, how are you going to top it? Karma then takes its toll, apparently, so maybe it's better to never achieve much. (JK, he died from lung cancer, after a lifetime of heavy smoking.)
Disney's really the great American success story, who else could take a few drawings of a mouse, assemble them into a series of short films, and then parlay that into a multi-billion dollar empire. Oh, well, multi-million within his lifetime, the billions part came later. When his fledgling studio was in trouble, Walt turned to TV and signed a deal with ABC to air second-run Disney movies and cartoons, called "The Wonderful World of Disney", with films introduced by the man himself, and then he'd take the TV network's money and invest it in making more movies, plus buying up land in California and Florida for theme parks. Decades later, DisneyCorp would own ABC outright, plus ESPN, Fox, Marvel, Lucasfilm and I think Hulu. Then of course there are the Disney Parks, Disney stores, Disney Cruise lines, and if you've got kids who watch the Disney Channel or Disney Plus, it's probably close to a religion in your house...
But there were apparently down times for Walt Disney, both financially, creatively and personally. As I mentioned yesterday, his brother Roy was the business guy, and probably freaked out every time Walt went over budget on a movie, or had some crazy notion about building the city of tomorrow (later called EPCOT) or wasn't able to handle a labor dispute. The famous 1941 labor strike and Walt's trip to South America from yesterday's film are seen here, but only briefly, as if it were just a small bump in the road. The problems that caused it seem to stem from the fact that the three features after "Snow White" (Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo) just didn't perform as well as expected, and the studio fell deeper and deeper into debt. (Again, by millions, which was a lot of money back in those days...)
On the personal level, Walt's wife had a few miscarriages before their daughter was born, and to console themselves they would go on long cruise vacations (must be nice to be the boss...I assume that the animators working at the studio didn't have such luxuries) and when Walt and his brother bought their parents a new house in California, a malfunctioning gas heater led to the death of their mother. (See, there's that pesky karma again....) Walt and his wife Lillian had two daughters, one of them adopted, and you just KNOW the guy really wanted a son, because this was back in the 1950's, a very sexist time. Walt celebrated the biggest when he finally got a grandson, he was probably ten times happier for this than any daughter or granddaughter, those male-heir notions persisted.
Of course, it was a different time - yesterday's film touched on cultural appropriation just a tad, and looking back on old Disney films through a modern lens brings up some very obvious problems, particularly with "Song of the South". The Disney Parks only recently altered the "Splash Mountain" ride to remove the Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox characters from that movie (one might ask, what took so long?) and they've redecorated the ride with characters from "The Princess and the Frog", another Disney film with African-American characters, but one that society hasn't been deemed racist. Yet.
But it's all just grist for the mill, isn't it? Everything's designed to funnel foot traffic to Anaheim and Orlando, to put asses in the seats of the latest Disney-themed or Star Wars-themed ride. I admit I'm part of the problem, we had plane tickets to go to Disney World in May 2020, and up until the pandemic hit, there was a good chance that I would visit the "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge" exhibit on May 4 (Star Wars day). But the universe had other plans, and we got flight credits that we just turned in a few days ago so we can fly to Chicago in June and visit my brother-in-law. Sorry, Disney Parks, maybe next year. (It is the 50th Anniversary of Disney World, but I'm betting attendance is slow to rebound - then again, it is Florida, so who knows?)
It's interesting to note that Disney was ahead of his time on the technical front for the theme parks, when he learned that using real jungle animals was a bad idea for the "Jungle Cruise" ride, that's when they developed animatronic animals. Eventually this same concept was applied to the Hall of Presidents, creating animatronic Abe Lincoln and George Washington after he learned that the real Presidents were even more unreliable than jungle animals. Disney practically invented the concept of recycling by creating exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair - "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln", "Carousel of Progress" and "It's a Small World" and after the fair was over, the exhibits were shipped down to Florida to become part of the Hall of Presidents, the Carousel of Progress at Tomorrowland, and the ride that is everybody's worst nightmare.
This film has a lot of interviews with the Disney animators and staff (some of whom have also passed on since) and Disney actors (some, like Buddy Ebsen, have also passed) and friends of Disney like Ray Bradbury (yup, him too). The animators all had nothing but praise for Disney as a man, yet I noticed they also made it a point to mention that Walt didn't praise or compliment his workers very often, in fact he would often pair them up with people they didn't like to challenge them, or pit them in gladiatorial combat to see which would survive. (Again, JK) This all sort of reminded me of Anthony Scaramucci in "Unfit" talking about Donald Trump, where his argument was basically, "No, Trump's not a racist, because he hates everybody. He's just an asshole, but he was MY asshole, because he gave me a job."
This movie is NOT on the major streaming services, and honestly, I'm not even sure it counts as a movie because IMDB lists it as an episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney". Should that disqualify it? It's definitely feature-length. And why hasn't it been made available for streaming on Disney Plus? I found a copy posted on YouTube but it kept skipping, every two or three minutes there would be five or ten seconds missing and the screen got very pixellated, so was this just a bad upload or what? I tracked down a copy posted on archive.org but it had the same skipping problem, so maybe there was some kind of accident and there's no error-free copy of this film available any more. I must have missed some key points about Disney's life due to this bad video copy, but it was too late to drop in a substitute or change course, so I persisted. (I realized too late that another documentary, "The Boys", was also about Disney's filmmaking and would also have connected to tomorrow's film.)
Also starring Harriet Burns, John Canemaker, J.B. Kaufman, Diane Disney Miller, Frank Thomas, (all carrying over from "Walt & El Grupo"), Paul Anderson, Ken Annakin, Sharon Baird, Buddy Baker, Ray Bradbury, Michael Broggie, Bobby Burgess, Mickey Clark, Kevin Corcoran, Bill Cotter, Alice Davis, Marc Davis, Virginia Davis, Roy E. Disney, Buddy Ebsen (last seen in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), Peter Ellenshaw, Richard Fleischer, Bruce Gordon, Joe Grant, Ollie Johnston, Chuck Jones, Ward Kimball, John Lasseter, Art Linkletter, Bill Littlejohn, Leonard Maltin (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Bill Melendez, Ron Miller, Floyd Norman, Don Peri, Mel Shaw, Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman, Brian Sibley, Dave Smith, Charles Solomon, Jack Speirs, Robert Stack (last seen in "Joe Versus the Volcano"), Bob Thomas, Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Gilbert")
with archive footage of Julie Andrews (last heard in "Aquaman"), Gary Cooper (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Angie Dickinson (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), Lillian Disney (also carrying over from "Walt & El Grupo"), Adolf Hitler (ditto), Sharon Disney, Karen Dotrice, Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Shirley Temple (last seen in "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer"), Spencer Tracy (last seen in "The Old Man and the Sea").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Laugh-o-grams shorts
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