October 16, 1967 - The Jungle Book

Have you ever seen Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler? And by that I mean the fuller, unexpurgated versions floating around online, not the dreadful dub n' hack version released by Disney.

It's a fascinating film, not least of which because Williams refused to storyboard the film. As a result, each shot in a sequence is as long as its' animator wished it to be. As a result, each shot has internal rhythms but the larger sequences do not, dictated as they are by such factors as speed, fatigue, and interest. It's an animator's dream but an editor's nightmare.

I think Thief and the Cobbler helps illustrate why the 60s and 70s Disney animated features are so pokily paced. Through the 50s, Walt and others insisted on keeping the pace up and the narrative tight, but as animators like Ollie Johnston and Ken Anderson were given more latitude to craft sequences, the whole pace of the enterprise slows down to a casual wobble. It's the pace of animation allowed to exist for its own sake.

The Jungle Book is the ultimate Disney clip show movie. It's the first Disney film I'd be comfortable calling a road movie - while an argument can be mounted for Pinocchio, it's Jungle Book that sticks pretty closely to the road movie formula. The frame story is a linear movement from point A to point B, and each "stop" along the way is a self-contained episode that can be split off from the other episodes with little lost. Within those episodes, the animation is astonishing, and with the slacker pace and structure in place it's the animated performances that totally drive the film. That's a good thing, because the road movie formula thrives on vivid characters and incidents, allowing us to project ourselves into these situations through central characters on a journey who are no more than ciphers.

a pivotal scene.

Honestly, if there's a problem with Jungle Book, it's Mowgli the man-cub. While he's cute enough, Mowgli is a big donut-hole in a film filled with remarkable personalities. He's voiced by director Reitherman's son Bruce, who does a serviceable job and provides some live-action reference that will be animated and recycled as Christopher Robin in The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. Disney's Mowgli is a far cry from the fierce and wise survivor of Ripling's book or the 1942 film. When he's about to be mauled by Shere Khan we express only minor alarm. When he's about to be devoured by Kaa we register amusement. This makes the Jungle Book a weirdly passive experience: even Baloo steals all of the big emotional moments. In the final reel, as Mowgli vanishes into the human village, we shrug in amusement the same way Bagheera does and the film returns, much more deservedly, to Baloo and Bagheera as they saunter off into the sunset.

What separates Jungle Book from atmospheric but dramatically inert rambles like Sword in the Stone or Robin Hood is probably what Walt brought, which is a fastidious attention to structure and rhythm. Each sequence has a big bit of slapstick action or a clever song or, often enough, both. There are two sets of two characters, with Mowgli standing between each: Bagheera and Baloo complement Kaa and Shere Khan. Each of these four characters have two big scenes, one in each half of the movie. The entire film is bisected by King Louie, who can only appear once for danger of stealing the whole show. Louie himself is a comic figure who becomes increasingly sinister as his sequence unfolds, paving the way for the sinister Shere Khan who is lightened by touches of comedy.

This is a really nicely set up film which requires the animators knock down the sequences, neatly and cleanly; in other words Walt constructed the only film which truly plays to the strengths of the animation unit in the Reitherman era.


The film slacks in the last few reels where it really should be getting tighter; the Beatle-vultures who sing "That's What Friends Are For" are funny enough but the scene wouldn't be harmed by removing them and proceeding directly to the confrontation with Khan. It's a shame that John, George, Paul and Ringo turned these roles down, for no other reason than it'd perk up a scene in need of perking. On the other hand, the roles seem to reflect the public image of the Beatles as ludicrous mop-topped good natured slackers, an image the Beatles themselves had been working to escape for the better part of two years at the time of Jungle Book's release. The disconnect between the sophistication of the actual Beatles act, which in October 1967 was between Srgt. Pepper and the "White Album", and this fun-house reflection by Disney, the squarest of the square studios, is deliciously inappropriate. Or is the casting of the bandleaders of the psychedelic movement as scavenging birds a subtle slam?

Watching Jungle Book I was reminded of a piquant passage in Walter Kerr's The Silent Clowns where Kerr describes the poetic effect of the best silent performances. Silent films were shot in cameras cranked by hand and projected back at a pace rate somewhere around 20 fps, you see, and since the human hand is not a motor there is naturally a subtle, almost organic fluctuation in the rate at which the image is exposed. When you project this back at the right speed the result is a slight increase in the movement of the human onscreen. Turns become balletic, falls become spectacular, and the very best of the silent stars - Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin - could modulate their movements onscreen to look remarkably graceful on playback. It's not the way people move - it's better.

Great animation is a lot like that. These animals are more human than people can be. They move, think, react better, faster, funnier than people do. That's why when we see sped-up human actors bouncing around in, say, the Gnome-Mobile the effect is the opposite of what's intended... ghoulish and artificial, the opposite of being magical and effortless. It's just people moving twice as fast, not twice as well. You have to go to the Disney animated films to get the real deal.


Still, from the gorgeously painted backdrops to George Bruns' haunting score, I prefer Jungle Book to the roughly similar Lion King.  Walt's road movie may not express the full breadth of his brilliance, but it shows America's last great showman as the last great coordinator of the craft he helped create.

October 16, 1967 - Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar

Okay, who here has heard of Lev Kuleshov? If you have, then you know where this is going.

Kuleshov was an early film experimenter who devised a simple series of shots which wrote his name in history. The shots were images of a bowl of soup, a little girl in a coffin, and the woman reclining on a couch. Each shot was edited together with a repeated shot of an actor staring impassively into the camera. When this actor's blank face was contextualized by the soup, the dead girl, etc, audiences experienced through the actor the idea of hunger, grief, or love.

Kuleshov was not the first person to figure this out. In Hollywood, filmmakers had been experimenting for years with editing - in the service of storytelling. American directors found that they could cut together two strips of film to give the illusion of continuous action - a pioneer family trapped by Indians as the Calvary rides to their rescue, for example - to create dramatic effects. Editing could also be used for purely spatial effects - Charlie Chaplin walks off frame right and enters frame left in the next shot and we know he is in the next room over. As basic as all this is, there was a time when these were radical ideas.

The "Kuleshov Effect" is basically the big thing Charlie has going for it. As entertainment it's modest - unless you are a filmmaker or editor, in which case it becomes fairly interesting. Trained cougars flounce around nondescript shacks or cross logs and the magic of editing makes them into an endearing character: Good-Time Charlie, the cougar kitten of the pacific northwest.

"I'm acting!"

This film has a disarming gravitas because it appears to be what it manifestly is not: a documentary. Shot in grainy 16mm on what appears to be a wing and a prayer, Charlie inter cuts trained cougars, actors, non-actors, and documentary material into a surprising whole. Were the result a bit more demanding on the audience, it could qualify as avant-garde. As it is the film has the squirmy, uncomfortable sense of is-it-real-or-not captured in films like The Blair Witch Project or Boggy Creek II.

Casually narrated by Rex Allen, and with a uniquely terrible theme song, Charlie is a B movie release all the way, but it's not all that bad. Demanding only about an hour of your life, even the poky pace and mediocre actors give a sense of weight to the basic illusion of the film. Looking back at it from 2014, it's remarkable that this film even qualified for a theatrical release by a major studio - a lot of what can be found on YouTube looks more professional.

The film appears to have been shot mostly or entirely silent on location; actors are looped shouting dialogue while onscreen in Washington are seen gesturing wildly. Close ups and dialogue points that move the story forward were shot back in Burbank on the optical stage; these shots stand out because the actors are sharp and synchronized while the background is soft and grainy. One shot of actor Ron Brown did not have the background optically inserted so he momentarily appears to stand in a black void; this was left in the movie! One wonders if the whole thing was just made up as they went along. It's more of a fascinating byproduct of an unusual creative process than it is an honestly good movie.

Still, it's cute enough. I wonder if the kids ran around the theater the whole time Roger Ebert saw it.

November 30, 1967 - The Happiest Millionaire

 "I understand Mr. Biddle is going off to war."

"I'm glad to hear it. Maybe we'll finally have some peace around here."


Well, here it is, and at least it's out of the way early - the longest official Disney movie.

If we're talking about Disney movies as things Walt Disney personally oversaw, Happiest Millionaire is pretty much the end of the line. For Disney people, it's an item of particular fascination, because of what it is and also what it isn't. Walt's hand is felt very strongly in this one, but so is his absence.

What we really need to begin with here is addressing why this is a Disney movie at all. One of the most consistent claims for the true top tier classics is that Disney films are timeless - and whether that's true or not, what a "Disney Movie" is is a distinct enough sub genre that those films which fit pretty well into it and remain in the consciousness tend to keep getting watched. Despite being as of it's era (ie 1938) as something like Mr. Moto's Gamble, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs also works well enough as a "Disney movie" that people are still watching it, 80 years later.

Happiest Millionaire isn't one of those. There's no fairy tale element, no magic, no scary villain. There isn't really even a neat moral like "love conquers all" or "families are magical" or whatever it is that Mary Poppins is about. In fact, looking back from today it may not even be obvious why Disney made it at all. Outside of the context of 1964, it's hard to see Mary Poppins as part of a string of high-budget color musicals which began officially with Gigi in 1958. Poppins itself was up against My Fair Lady for best picture of 1964, and the prestige musical cycle continued into the 1970s. In 1968, the year that the landmark 2001 was in theaters, the best picture winner was... Oliver. A fine film, sure, but best picture?

There was money and prestige to be had in this sort of thing, however, and so Happiest Millionaire went from a minor stage comedy to an expensive musical. Walt spared no expense: a talented cast, hugely elaborate sets furnished with real antiques, and a full overture, intermission, and exit music - Millionaire was an A-picture effort. Fans of 1960s musicals are more likely to get something out of it than other viewers.


It's doubly unfortunate, then, that Walt died shortly after the first cut (ie, a rough assembly) was made. In its full form, Millionaire is an absurdly, butt-numbingly long movie. The Shermans here contribute three great songs and a bunch of just okay ones, and their music all but vanishes from a long stretch of the second half.

Millionaire is a film that defines the concept of "bloated". An introductory number - which fades up out of a painting, the exact same gag used to start Bullwhip Griffin - is lots of fun but takes forever to get actor Tommy Steele to the actual mansion where the film will take place. There's at least five gags along the way that stop the momentum and once he gets there he dances up and down the front steps to sing his final refrain. This would be fine by itself but the entire film has this same everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mentality. Once Steele gets into the mansion, two brothers who never re-appear sing a song to demonstrate the family affinity for boxing and knock out their sister's suitor, who also never re-appears. Later, sister Cordelia has her roommate teach her how to dance in the current fashionable way in a tedious musical sequence. When Cordelia gets to the dance she hardly even uses her new moves and is swept off her feet in yet another song about dancing.

Tommy Steele, as butler John Lawless, sings and grins up a storm and steals the show, although to be fair he doesn't have too much competition. Fred MacMurray is surprisingly good here, and demonstrates a nice singing voice from time to time. Greer Garson as his wife is mostly on view to stand around and scold him; their most effective scene comes at the very end of the film and was cut from all theatrical prints. Gladys Cooper is the only real competition for Steele; her dressing down of Geraldine Paige is the highlight of the second half. MacMurray keeps alligators in his conservatory because... well, that doesn't really go anywhere either, except to provide a slapstick sequence at the 90 minute mark which, typically, goes on about ten minutes too long. Near the end there's another slapstick sequence in a bar with a terrific Shermans song, Let's Have A Drink On It, that would play better if we hadn't been beaten down to the point of apathy by two and a half hours of go-nowhere material preceding it.

The real problem is that Millionaire has no real sense of how to condense all of this into something better than its constituent parts. Details aren't just redundant, they're absurdly redundant. Even the best musical numbers are too long. Characters drift in and out randomly without any reason to be there. Each plot point is treated with about the same dramatic emphasis as everything else, as if Cordelia going off to boarding school requires the same dramatic weight as her deciding to get married.


This is a shame because what works in the movie is really good. Even MacMurray, who comes off somewhat dry in other similar roles for Disney, is unexpectedly moving when he's finally faced with an empty nest. Then, of course, he ends up going off to World War I.

Oh yes, I haven't even mentioned that the film is set between 1914 and 1917. The period atmosphere is nicely handled, with a pleasing emphasis on vintage publications like the New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar. MacMuray as Biddle has extended dealings with the Marines after being kicked out of every office in Washington. He knocks out their best boxer and so the corp tolerates his efforts to teach them "self defense".


These are more scenes that do very little to advance the plot, and sadly that's about where the period detail ends. Either director Norman Tokar or cinematographer Edward Colman decided to shoot everything bright, wide, and flat, like a TV movie. It looks like every set was lit exactly once and the power switch was thrown at the start of shooting each day with no extra emphasis. It's almost impossible to tell day scenes from night scenes. Outside of a few matte paintings, there's no sense of the Biddle house as a real place. MacMurray is supposed to have a converted garage out back that he
teaches his bible/boxing classes in, but you have to watch the film a few times to understand how this connects to and relates to the house; it's just another set. When you consider the atmosphere a director like Robert Stevenson brought to even the weakest Disney movies he was handed, this is another huge demerit to this film.

Then there's the central romance between Cordelia Biddle and Angier Duke. Probably the only onscreen romance between a boxing tomboy and a jiu jitsu-tossing car enthusiast (this plot point is exceptionally weird), actors Lesie Ann Warren and John Davidson do a perfectly straightforward good job. Davidson's big ballad about Detroit, where he longs to move and become an automobile magnate, isn't very good but Davidson sells his dream well. Weirdly, the actual sequence of Davidson singing his love song to Detroit is the only one staged in the countryside - the natural trees and open sky contrasted directly with his lyrics about "a land where golden chariots are molded out of dreams". When Cordelia agrees to move with him to Detroit, the heavens open up into a menacing rainstorm. The shot proceeding it is eerily like the roadside confession in Vertigo. Is this a premonition?

The last shot of the film is an unexpected downer - Cordelia and Angie's car rolling towards a hell scape city skyline belching smoke. It's like something out of a horror movie and ends the film on an uncomfortable note - are we supposed to find this as appalling as it looks? If so, then how are we supposed to feel about this romance?


I'm sounding really down on this movie, and I shouldn't, because despite all of its problems I do like it. But it's very much a film that appears as if it could have cohered into a minor classic had there been a mediating influence like Walt Disney to iron out the problems and insist on keeping the pace up. This is almost a film that demands its own fan edit, like others have done with Star Wars.

In many ways this film seems to have been orphaned by Disney.  The DVD release, in non-anamorphic widescreen, is bleary and pixellated. There are no extras to provide much needed background and context. In this form, even the visual and textual pleasure of the film are too blurred to really enjoy. As unlikely as it may be, this film would really benefit from a HD upgrade.

I didn't really expect to watch Millionaire all the way through again for this review, having seen it several times before, but once the film started unrolling I found myself watching it and enjoying it and it mostly held my attention, so despite the hundreds of words of misgivings I've typed up above, there is something to it that I find worthwhile. This one is recommended to interested parties who know what they're getting into. Ordinarily I'd say a product like this is a ruin of a great film, but that assumes that the film was ever built to completion to begin with, which it wasn't. The Happiest Millionaire is more like a pallet of lumber that's supposed to be a house. You supply the nails.

The final shot - weirdly, a mirror of the opening shot of The Magnificent Ambersons

For next week: Blackbeard's Ghost, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band, and Never A Dull Moment

February 8 1968 - Blackbeard's Ghost

"I, Captain Teach, affectionately known as Blackbeard, was not... all bad."

I've been singing the praises of director Robert Stevenson time and again these past few weeks, and I'm afraid we're in for more of the same now.  While The Happiest Millionaire was playing out its troubled run around the country in a perplexing variety of forms with a high ticket price, first-run promotion strategy (one pointedly not undertaken for Mary Poppins), Disney released a film much more worthy of Walt Disney's legacy: Blackbeard's Ghost. It is another one of Stevenson's  memorably atmospheric creations for Disney.

This is the first live action Disney film we've seen here which I can honestly, conscientiously, and with no qualifications or excuses recommend to anyone. It's an exciting, fast paced comedy adventure with imagination. Amazingly enough, in the first four minutes there's a real laugh - not a strained, cute, sort-of-amusing gag the likes of which you'll find in other Disney films but a genuine funny thing occurs, and this chemistry keeps occurring throughout this film.

Blackbeard is held together almost entirely by  Peter Ustinov. At once a wildly imaginative and appealingly casual creation, Ustinov's Blackbeard is probably the saddest sack of a pirate to ever appear in a film. Lazy, drunk, and petty, Blackbeard steals everything impulsively and unglamourously as possible. His immediate response to any problem is to gamble or cheat. Although this is definitely a cutesier, more childlike interpretation of piracy than that found in Disney's recent Pirates of the Caribbean films, to me Ustinov here is more on the mark with his portrayal of Blackbeard as an amoral stooge than the more embroidered and romantic versions created by Johnny Depp or Geoffrey Rush. His moral lapses have real - if absurd - consequences.

His straight man here is Dean Jones who, with a good director and a decent script, suddenly shows  promise as a sort of kiddie James Stewart. In this case he's stuck training a hilariously hopeless track team, assisted by Blackbeard who pulls some truly mean tricks to ensure the team will win. Jones spend the entire film fuming as Blackbeard doggedly follows him around, leading to the usual assortment of jokes where Jones is accused of being either crazy and/or drunk. Since he's the only one who can see Blackbeard, he even shouts Ustinov down, nearly losing the big game for his track team by refusing to cheat in a sequence seems to be an attempt to recreate the spirit of the famous football match in Son of Flubber. Throughout the film, Blackbeard causes inversions of characters' moral values: Jones accepts Blackbeard's trickery if it wins the game for his clueless team, and his girlfriend Suzanne Pleshette unexpectedly develops a mania for gambling at the worst possible moment.

The macguffin that drives this plot is a land grab by local villain Silky Seymour, but the real star here is a spooky, moonlit, fog-shrouded coastal atmosphere and the stunning, imaginative Inn at stake on the land built by Blackbeard out of pieces of ships. Some sort of predecessor to the Columbia Harbour House, the film gets by for two full reels on spooky atmosphere alone until Ustinov shows up. An atmospheric beach scene ends the film on a high note as Blackbeard rows off into the mist and rejoins his ship and crew glimpsed as silhouettes in a fog bank, an idea which may have influenced the ending of The Goonies. Blackbeard's Ghost may count objectively as only mediocre entertainment, but unlike so many other live action Disney films of its era it is remembered fondly for good reason.

It's here, I feel, where we can assess what a good director on the Disney lot could do within the constraints of the Disney story department system. Make no mistake - in the Walt era on films like Mary Poppins or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea every casting choice and visual detail was devised with input from Walt. Mary Poppins was begun with songs and paintings, then storyboarded in its entirety, then a script was written to  bridge the sequences in a pre determined order, and then all of that was given to the director and actors to execute on set.

Mary Poppins storyboards

Compare the sense of tone and pace conveyed in even a mediocre Stevenson film like Gnome-Mobile to the total washed-out drudgery of Happiest Millionaire. On Millionaire, Norman Tokar painted by numbers in exactly the way described in the storyboards and ended up with a paint by numbers movie. Blackbeard is a less controlled film than Millionaire - probably only the effects sequences were heavily boarded - but the whole film moves and flows and maintains a consistent tone and energy. Actors and technicians can't spin dross into gold just on their own - there needs to be a mediating creative force that holds the whole thing together inside the constraints. That's the sort of thing an engaged director can bring, pushing quality films along even in an era after Walt Disney.


March 21, 1968 - The One and Only, Genuine, Original, Family Band

"It just didn't seem like the type of song that would appreciate a Republican convention."

Well, here it is, and there's no reason to be shy about it. This is it. This is the first Disney movie I've ever seen that angered - not bored, but angered me enough to strongly consider throwing the DVD out a window and then running it over with a car.

Talking to older Disney fans, or my parents, I was well aware that there was an era when liking Disney was just about the most socially inadvisable thing possible. I knew, intellectually, that there was an era when Disney was run entirely by middlebrow white men in mediocre suits who decided to build Space Mountain between liquid lunches at the Glendale country club and hob-nobbing with guys in Richard Nixon's inner circle. Or, to put it another way, that Disney was in that day - intellectually, aesthetically, and politically - the squarest of the squares.

I knew all this conceptually, and then I collided into Family Band. In 1968, despite better than average production values and a run in prestigious theaters around the country, this film deservedly burned and sunk at the box office. Released on the eve of when American politics were about to get truly ugly, this film shows Disney with their eyes shut, ears plugged - squatting on the dynamite keg. It's an appalling sight.

Why? Why drag politics into this seemingly perfectly nice family musical, those who have not seen this film may ask? Well, because that's exactly what Disney did. They started it. And if that's what this film is about, then there is no reason to jump around it sheepishly. Family Band must qualify as one of the most misguided, boneheaded allegories I've ever seen.


This is one of those movies that doesn't go remotely the way you want it to. After a very unusual cold opening, we find our Family Band cavorting about a barn to the tune of yet another song by the overworked Shermans. For about thirty minutes this appears to be a very different movie than what it is, ie, a fun, lighthearted musical. Excitingly enough, they are headed to the 1888 Democratic National Convention to perform a campaign song written by grandfather Walter Brennan for Grover Cleveland, despite the Republican convictions of their father, played by Buddy Ebsen. To top that off, daughter Alice (Lesley Ann Warren, again) has just met suitor Joe (John Davidson, again). This is conveyed in no less than four Sherman songs in under twenty minutes, the principal campaign song "Let's Put It Over With Grover" feeling like the better part of the run time of Happiest Millionaire alone.

Okay, now pause. Can you guess where this film is going? Perhaps there will be a wacky train ride to the convention. The Bower children will march up and down the aisles and Warren and Davidson will have a duet on the caboose. At the Convention, things will heat up. There will be a complication in the staging of the song, but the family will triumph and somebody will knock Grover Cleveland into the punch bowl. Just a fun, simple family comedy in an intriguing historical setting.

Well you're wrong.

Instead, newly arrived Joe Carder convinces the family to move with him to - Dakota? And once in Dakota, the family will - zanily be swept up in the politics of the 1888 presidential election and become politically and emotionally divided? By the 45 minute mark they're whimsically causing a political riot by playing "Let's Put It Over For Grover" in staunchly Republican, pro-Benjamin Harrison Dakota and you will be searching for your belly button to confirm that you have not accidentally branched off into an alternate reality.

I mean, with a date like 1888, there's no way this could possibly be a topical commentary on the election of 1968, could it?? Well, it is.

Before too long, there's dramatic confrontations. Brennan is dispatched to close a schoolhouse, and ends up teaching all the schoolchildren that they have the right to stand up for their beliefs - just like the hippie kids of today! This causes the townsfolk to publicly and humiliatingly harangue Lesley Ann Warren for allowing her grandfather to "poison their minds". How could this possibly be resolved? Perhaps Dean Jones will appear with four monkeys dressed as ghosts who will drop some hay on the assembly? Nope, another ill-conceived dramatic speech. Fun!

It's hard to fully convey the insulting banality of this film. While the anti-Americanism sentiment in Monkeys, Go Home! at least stays in the background and is treated casually enough by the film to come across as a tasteless joke of no great consequence, in Family Band the political struggle between Dakotans is the point of the whole darn thing. Every scene in the second half of the film is directly caused by splintering politics. It's like drunkenly flipping between Turner Classic Movies and CNN at four in the morning and reassembling the result into a composite film in your head.

The political struggle is that Dakotans want Statehood, but they want to be admitted into the Union as two states, allowing them to send twice as many Republicans to Congress. Of course, we all know that Dakota is indeed two states, and if there's any fact generally known about Benjamin Harrison at all, it's that he narrowly won the presidency against Cleveland. This makes the entire enterprise feel weirdly futile - why invest in the political persuasions of anyone when we know they're barreling towards an inevitable outcome? And who wants to invest in a family only to see their ugliest moments? Who wants to pay to see a family musical comedy that's short of warmth and humor and long on moralizing and discomfort?

The Shermans only manage one truly great song here, and it's "Dakota" - which is, truthfully, probably amongst the best of their obscurities. But if "Let's Put It Over With Grover" amuses with it's pure audacity than with real quality, then the late-film musical theme "Benjamin Harrison Is Far Beyond Comparison" makes Grover look like an inspired masterpiece. I wish I were making this up. Practically all of the other musical numbers aren't even as good as the less inspired ones in Millionaire. This is a problem for a "comedy" short on actual humor in its back half.

The basic problem with Family Band is that it offers nothing to anyone who doesn't want to deal with the political side, but insults anyone (of any political persuasion) who does bother to invest in it by offering a non-resolution. Cleveland, not Harrison, extends statehood to the Dakotas - as two states. Just when the Republicans exult in victory, news comes down that Cleveland has also ratified two more states - who vote Democratic. After over an hour of unpleasantness, what does the film say to codify this into a moral?

"That's politics!"

Now back up a moment. Let's pull out of 1888 and look at 1968, the actual political era this film in intended to be received as a parody of for a moment. Yes, complex political issues are dividing families and friends into opposing camps. But unlike in 1888, a relatively peaceful era in American politics, in 1968 riots and demonstrations are taking place in every major American city. In less than a month, Dr. King will be murdered. Three months later, Robert Kennedy will be murdered as well. Lyndon B. Johnson has painted his party into a corner where they cannot oppose the war in Vietnam or appear to be backing down on party policy, and the nation in general is moving towards electing Richard Nixon as president and shattering the "solid South" forever. Nixon would leave his office under a cloud of disgrace, but not after extending the Vietnam war to secure re-election. This is not "just politics", this is a pivotal year in American political history. People are dying.

In the end, Disney's "ya win some, ya lose some!" resolution is far more offensive in retrospect. But worse than that: why is this film even about politics at all? It's entirely unjustifiable, and after putting its audience through the emotional wringer has nothing to say, to boot. The Dakotans are given a feel-good reconciliation that would never come to 60s America. The social upheaval forever shattered the post-war fantasy of national consensus.

Back in our film, Walter Brennan looks even more bored here than he did in Gnome-Mobile but, professional to the end, is always engaging when the camera is rolling. Leslie Warren is given more fun things to do than in Happiest Millionaire but has less overall screen time. She's pared with John Davidson and he's much better this time around, giving his boyfriend some real charm and shading. Stuck playing leader to a pack of moppets who appear to have been cast according to height, Kurt Russell shows real acting chops despite being given nothing to do, and all but vanishes in the second half of the film.

Technically the film is both better and worse than Happiest Millionaire. TV director Michael O'Herlihy manages consistently good angles and cinematographer Frank Phillips actually knows what to do with a light, giving each scene the visual variety and pleasure so badly missing from Millionaire. Just like Millionaire, every song is looped, but unlike Millionaire everything is badly out of sync. There's sections where the family band stops playing their instruments while the soundtrack plays on. Thankfully, the film is fairly tightly paced - no sloppy half-done editing here. It's a handsome film, it's just lousy.


1968 may have been a good year for vague political manifestos. Later in 1968, long after Family Band had been fully forgotten, John Lennon would be roundly pillaged in the Liberal press for writing the song "Revolution", which cattily suggests that social upheaval isn't all it's cracked up to be.That's politics!

As for The One and Only, Genuine, Original, Family Band? You tell me it's the institution - well, you know, you'd be better to free your mind instead.

June 26, 1968 - Never A Dull Moment

"I've fallen over a hot dog!"

Titles like these are catnip for snarky critics, so, no, I'm not going to go for it. Besides, Never A Dull Moment doesn't deserve it - it isn't half bad. It has at least two things going for it - Dick Van Dyke and Edward G. Robinson. That said, it's not half good, either.

Robinson was one of the most gifted screen performers of the early sound era. His Rico in Little Caesar was a groundbreaking achievement in screen acting, a detestable little creep who rises from nothing to be one of the top mafia bosses in Chicago only to die squawking in a ditch with a stomach full of machine gun lead. It wouldn't be until James Cagney in The Public Enemy and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein that the early sound motion picture would result in performances more dynamic, and Robinson was made into a star overnight.

What isn't talked about much is that Robinson hit the same wall that Cagney would in a year's time and Humphrey Bogart would much later - the performances that made them famous were the sort of performances that top box office attractions didn't give. Movie stars did not play pitiless sociopaths. It would not be until the post-War period when, led by Bogart's brilliant performance of Fred C. Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that Cagney and Robinson would once again play outright villains. Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat and Robinson as Johnny Rocco in Key Largo are truly frightening monsters.

In between came a lot of "tough guy makes right" and "gangster with a heart of gold" roles for Robinson and Cagney, and it is in this period that Edward G. Robinson proved himself as a surprising, if gifted, comic performer. Never A Dull Moment is, in spirit at least, the last of these films.

Throughout the 1930s Warner Brothers kept Robinson in sight in a series of tough guy roles and straight up gangland faces, starting in 1932 with The Little Giant (get it?) and proceeding through Larceny, Inc in 1942. The best of these is probably A Slight Case of Murder in 1936, and in places Never A Dull Moment seems to revive the spirit of these vintage comedies, including the fact that they aren't very good.

Dick Van Dyke is an actor who is mistaken for an assassin and brought to the house of Prohibition-era gangster Joe Smooth, introduced in the midst of an art lesson. Longtime film fans will immediately think of Robinson in Scarlet Street as the tragic artist who becomes the fall guy of his own conscience. Robinson always had an air about him that allowed him to play kindly doctors (The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse) and heroic lawmen (The Stranger) as easily as he slipped into the role of a mafioso.


In the first third of the film, Robinson takes over the film and absolutely steamrolls over Van Dyke as Joe Smooth plans to heist a gigantic painting, "Field of Sunflowers", from the Manhattan Museum of Art then return it to the museum upon his death. His pack of hoodlums includes Slim Pickens, wasted in his role but still very funny, and Jack Elam appears briefly as the real hired killer.

Van Dyke isn't given much to do here, and when the film's balance shifts back to him the movie finally begins to drag. He shifts between an amusing tough guy act and a drunk performance for one long sequence, but the best jokes remain conceptual or visual: required to dispatch two museum guards, Van Dyke merely touches each guard and they pass out immediately. The final slapstick sequence finds Van Dyke hiding amongst a pop art exhibit in the museum, making this the only Disney film in history where a huge hot dog plays into the denouement.


Shooting mostly on a recycled Happiest Millionaire set, director Jerry Paris, who directed and acted in Van Dyke's television show, manages some nice shots and uses some interesting colors, but he's no Frank Tashlin for sure. During one long chase we mostly spend time admiring how the Millionaire set looks when somebody's actually trying to light it dramatically. Appropriate for being a gentle send up of the crime genre, the film has some nice atmosphere, especially in the opening reel as Van Dyke slips down New York streets provided by some gorgeous matte paintings.


Still, pretty much the main reason to see the film remains Eddie G, who carries all the best laughs. Just as in A Slight Case of Murder, he labors over his hoodlums, no more able to pronounce "hors d'oeuvre" than they are ("or-doo-ver"). He slaps a lackey repeatedly, drawing blood, then snaps: "Stop that bleeding, will ya? It's stupid." At the end of the film, we're sad to see him arrested. Dick Van Dyke's character runs off the Hollywood to star in the very film we've been watching!

--

Innervated by a recent Disney Cruise vacation and having just finished J. B. Kaufman's excellent book The Fairest One of All, following Never A Dull Moment I was feeling rather down on Disney and this project in general and found myself poking through not only my DVDs of Snow White but also Pinocchio and Fantasia - Walt's "Holy Trinity", if such a thing is open to election.

It's sometimes hard to put all of the pieces of this company together. There are definite phases where everything seems to be "of a piece", as they say - there's a clear line of progression from the New York World's Fair projects and Mary Poppins on to New Orleans Square, Pirates and Haunted Mansion and then onto Magic Kingdom. Slot the products into the right order, and an aesthetic narrative emerges.

But then we come across stuff like Cinderella, a bare bones basic fairy tale produced at the tail end of a period of imaginative experimentation throughout the 1940s. Compared to something crazy like Three Caballeros, to me Cinderella is manifestly a step down in ambition. But those first three animated features, the Trinity, are even tougher to pull into any narrative. They exist out on their own, remote and unapproachable.

How do we get from the ruthless economy and textural complexity, the emotional fever pitch of Snow White to the vaguely amusing humdrum of Never A Dull Moment? What weird alchemy allows us to place Happiest Millionaire and Family Band in remotely the same aesthetic universe as the nearly perfect Mary Poppins? Is film art really all that open to chance?

In the 1950s as Walt diversified his interests into live action, television, and theme parks, the company finally had something it had never before enjoyed: stability. But Walt was always willing to hedge it all. Having created the most beloved film on the face of the planet in 1938, he spent all those earnings and more on Pinocchio and Fantasia. Yet as the empire expanded, Walt suddenly had a luxury that was not afforded him in those heady days between 1934 and 1941: he could put out a mediocre product. Not everything needed to be an A-list effort.

The films we're looking at in this series often seem to be the creative leftovers of a remarkable legacy. Even today it's remarkable how challenging and rewarding something like Fantasia is - it's still way out on the conceptual horizon of animation, sitting snugly alongside artists like Stan Brakhage and Walther Ruttmann. Were Walt's attentions too divided in his final years? Or was he planning yet another bold new direction that would only make sense in retrospect - his EPCOT city perhaps? Had he lived only ten years longer, I suspect only then would posterity know for sure.

That's politics!

No, that's leadership.

For next week: The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Love Bug, and Rascal

Thought for the week:

"Movies are terribly easy to make. It's much harder to put on a play. Oh yes.

What's hard to do is to make a very good movie. Even a good movie is easier to make, because if you have a good camera man, if you have the cast that happens to be right, if you have a story that happens to be vaguely interesting - that is the art form that works in our day and age.

It would be very hard to write a great play in blank verse today, but I think it was pretty easy in Elizabethian days to write a good verse play. Not a great one, but a good one. It's damn near impossible now because it has nothing to do with our culture. But somehow, a good movie gets itself made even by a lot of second rate people."

December 20, 1968 - The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit

As America exited the war years of the 1940s and began to navigate the rocky terrain of the 1950s, a new and creeping social unease began to spread. Many men returning from combat found it difficult or impossible to re-acclimate to civilian life, and even worse: while they were gone, everything changed. Women had entered the workforce and were hesitant to return to submissive roles as housekeepers. Russia's threat began to loom large, and the massive strides in mechanization and industrialization which had made the manufacture of war machines possible had created a new kind of job where conformity was key: the corporate office.

While we look back at the 1950s as a romantic era of rock n' roll, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, on the ground it was not so pretty. Part of the price of waging war and then simply being able to carry on was conformity: everyone was expected to put on a happy face. In this environment, stories of the day to day struggles of small men in big companies became new myths. The most important of these was The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, released in 1955.

Gray Flannel Suit was such a big success that it sparked a cycle of "Flannel Suit" movies: Executive Suite, Desk Set, and The Power and the Prize followed suit. By the end of the decade the genre was well enough established to inspire outright parodies (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) and cynical deconstructions (The Apartment). Madison Avenue and advertising agencies were a popular setting in the post-war corporate boom culture, a setting lately re-invigorated by Mad Men. The trope even crops up in North by Northwest.

What does this have to do with Disney's The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit? Well... nothing. It's about an advertising man who buys a horse to get a promotion. At no point does the ad man (Dean Jones....... again) become a horse to be a horse in a gray flannel suit, nor does the horse itself ever get near a grey flannel suit except the ones Dean Jones wears. Heck, the advertising angle practically vanishes from the movie after a certain point. The horse is gray, however.

About ten minutes into this movie I paused it and jotted down some guesses about where it would be going. Dean Jones is a single dad to an under confident young girl who, it is dramatically revealed, perceives herself to be...

homely...!

....and so Dean has to find some way to get her a riding horse and save his advertising career at the same time. In my estimate, I guessed that Dean Jones would come across an enchanted artifact that would turn him into the Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit, allowing his daughter to go on to fame and fortune while resulting in high-larious office hijinx. In the end, the curse is lifted and everyone learns the true meaning of family.


Instead I got a rather straightforward, if pleasantly shot, equestrian show drama. Geared at young girls, the film spends long stretches focusing on the riding and training, care, and feeding of horses, courtesy of riding pro "S. J." Clemens, played by Diane Baker. S. J. becomes a surrogate Mom to young Helen Bolton and beau to her father Fred (Jones), all while the three steadily rise up the ranks of the horse shows. Young Kurt Russell is in sight as a hunky but wholesome prospective boyfriend (with a sports car!), and just about the most exciting thing that happens is that Helen's horse Aspercel (named for a stomach acid reducer) gets loose and Dean Jones ends up in jail for riding him back home in his underwear.

Pleasingly full of autumnal tones in a convincingly rendered New England setting, Horse has an abundant case of the cutes. There isn't even anything unintentionally awful - in the last third a Chinese Gardener materializes out of nowhere to provide "comedy" for about a minute. Probably the most unfortunate thing in the whole show is the Boltons' nickname for their horse Aspercel: Aspie! As you probably know, Aspie is a term used inside the community for those with Asperger syndrome. Even the entertainment value of seeing Dean Jones repeatedly shout "Aspie!" at a horse, regrettably, soon wears off.

This movie isn't half bad but I can't see too many people remembering it fondly. It goes down easy and smooth and ends before you know it. Two hours after watching it, I had to think carefully about whether or not I had seen it yet. Aspercel may as well be a sedative.

December 24, 1968 - The Love Bug

You've probably heard this one before, via Snopes.com:

"Two of those big huge 18-wheelers were involved in a collision at very high speeds; one tail-ended the other one really really hard, so hard that the two trucks were basically fused together. The proper authorities dragged the trucks (still connected) to wherever it is they take them, I guess a junkyard, and then just left them there until someone could figure out what to do with them. After a few days, a stench started to emanate from the wreckage, and no one knew what it was. It got worse each day. When they finally pulled the two trucks apart, they found that a VW Bug, its passengers still inside, had gotten smashed between the trucks during the accident."

March 21, 1969 - Smith! [Unavailable]

"Smith!""Johnnyboy!""Brewster?""Chief?!""McCloud!?"

Okay, here it is, the first film we're going to skip.

I vacillated on this one for a while: Smith! can be purchased through the Disney Movie Club and/or Disney Store, but it's not yet available for rental in any form and I'll be darned if I'm going to make anyone buy a 1969 Disney Western just to keep up with a blog series.

Smith!, which I've never seen, stars Glenn Ford as a rancher who defends a Native American named "Johnnyboy". And yes, while Smith! remains unseen, celebrating it briefly here is an adequate excuse to walk around your house and bellow "Smith!" at the slightest provocation.

A side note: up until 1969, Walt Disney Productions had been managing a steady release of around six pictures a year, with one film each year slated as a "tentpole" and released around Christmas. That's not bad for a small studio. In 1969, they only managed three pictures, and none of them featured Dean Jones. Of course 1969 also saw the Haunted Mansion finally open at Disneyland plus the start of real steady construction in Florida so it's not like this is Disney resting on their laurels - an obscure Western, a raccoon movie, a classic attraction and Kurt Russell in one year is the sort of year I wish I'd see Disney pull off in 2014. Still, one wonders if the slackened pace indicates that the Studio was finally using up the last little bit of left over Walt Disney concepts.

June 11, 1969 - Rascal

"I've got to de-raccoonify him!"

This one really took me by surprise.

All I really knew about Rascal is that it featured a raccoon - I thought it would be another Winston Hibler Special, a weird little comedy/documentary along the lines of Charlie or Perri. What I was not expecting was a rather sweet little period piece, but that's what I got. And maybe that surprise completely disarmed me but I was entirely captivated and charmed by Rascal from beginning to end.

I admit, I'm a nostalgic at heart so this sort of thing hits home easily for me. Set in the Midwest in 1919, Rascal is the cliche "last summer of innocence" story. This time director Norman Tokar is given a new producer - True Life Adventures producer James Algar - and his output is significantly better here than in Grey Flannel Suit. Tokar seems to have really come to life when allowed to go outdoors in his movies - the only moments where Millionaire seems to have any life is daylight exteriors. In Rascal, out of nowhere pops great period atmosphere and really effective natural light photography. As awkward teenager Bill Mumy rides his bicycle with Rascal on the front the shots are both beautiful and appealingly casual, unfussy. It's a reminder that sometimes getting great photography amounts to nothing more than showing up at the right place.


Algar seems to have contributed a healthy love of period detail. Rascal is overstuffed with design detail that wouldn't be out of place on Main Street USA. Gaslights still flicker and a major plot point is an obnoxious local automobile enthusiast. A sequence in a small town market house is on board seemingly only to include yet more period detail. Rascal rides in a little basket that brings money up to a cashier located in an isolated loft, exactly like those inside the Disneyland Emporium. If the mechanics aren't vintage, they're darn close replicas.

Rascal may be the title character and is treated to extended scenery-chewing cute animal sequences, but the story here remains tightly focused on the core characters of the film: Bill Mumby's awkward teenager Sterling and his flaky absentee father, traveling salesman Williard, played by Steve Forrest. Sterling's mother has recently died, and Dad's devil-may-care attitude towards life leaves Sterling home alone for the summer with only Rascal and his dog to keep him company. Sterling slowly builds a canoe in the living room, and when Dad returns from his periodic and long term trips the two boys totally trash the house over the course of the summer. As Rascal grows from a raccoon kit to a yearling over the course of the summer, he becomes increasingly uncontrollable.

One thing I love about this film is that all of the drama has a completely understated edge. The neighbors squawk about the unconventional nature of life in the North household and we keep expecting one or another of the local villains to show up and snatch Rascal like Toto in The Wizard of Oz; this never happens. A schoolteacher and a local priest show up to intervene; Father arrives with a new jug of top-quality cider and the adults instead spend the night getting thoroughly drunk. Even the final dramatic sequence where sister Theo convinces Father of his need to settle down and raise his son we expect shouting but get instead a quietly dignified scene. This is a very well played movie and by Disney standards this alone is a marvel.


Typical of Rascal's easygoing grace is a scene where Steve Forrest must decide on a housekeeper. He sits at an upright piano, talking over the prospects to his dead wife's photograph. As each prospective housekeeper is mentioned, Father plays a few characterizing notes on the upright: crashing chords, a hymnal, an Irish jig. It's the sort of casual integration of character and content you'd expect to find in a John Ford film; the tunes tell us more about Father than they do about the housekeepers. The most gently moving moment in the film comes when Father rejects the authoritarian Mrs. Satterfield: "She'll break your son's heart."

Moved along by a gorgeous Buddy Baker score, Rascal delivers gentle lessons and emotional understatement where we have reason to expect ponderous sentiment, and it's not a minute too long either: there's no padding in its 85 minutes. As far as accomplishments go it may be a slight one, but Rascal turned out better than anyone had any reason to expect. It's the nearest the Disney studio got to another Summer Magic.



Rascal, by the way, is based on Sterling North's Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era, a Newbery Honor-winning book. The real-life house the events took place in is preserved as the Sterling North Museum, and the various fences and guards Sterling put up to keep Rascal inside the house may still be seen. In a bizarre twist of fate, the same book was adapted into a 52-episode anime by Nippon Animation as part of their "World Masterpiece Theater" ongoing television show. "Rascal the Raccoon"'s wild popularity created demand for imported raccoon pets, and is thus credited with accidentally introducing the North American raccoon into Japan.



Not a bad peripheral legacy for a Disney obscurity.

For next week: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, King of the Grizzlies, and The Boatniks.

Week Five of the "Age of Not Believing" is now upon us, so it's time to collect some thoughts before the midterm break.

I began thinking about the idea for this series after seeing The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band for the first time. It was included in a set of 4 DVDs with two Disney movies I genuinely wanted - Darby O'Gill and Happiest Millionaire - and if readers thought I was rough on that film in my review here they should've been there upon my first screening. But something happened in those two hours that had never before happened to me in a Disney film: I was mad.

I had been bored before, I had been disappointed before, but I'd never seen a Disney film that made me actually mad. Mad enough to write.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that there was a whole swath of Disney that I had next to no contact with. My childhood had a Disney bias - I caught a lot of vintage material on the Disney Channel in the 1990s, back when they actually showed the back cataloge, and I was especially impressed with Darby O'Gill and Blackbeard's Ghost, but unlike the many Disney 50s live action comedies I rented or watched I realized that I had no experience with the 60s material and, as such, no nostalgia. I was coming to the bulk of these films totally fresh and, realizing this, I also realized I could leverage this fact against my otherwise fairly decently developed film knowledge to maybe create some interesting writing.


What I mean to say about all this is that I don't come to these films necessarily to praise them. There's a lot of writing about, say, Charlie the Lonesome Cougar online that's more about the age the author was when she or he first saw it and very little about what's on screen. Nor am I out to grind an axe or prove some larger cultural thesis, which is the other dominant mode of a lot of serious Disney writing, and a critique is not always an attack.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Disney films are built on nostalgia, and once we see them, then they become nostalgic memories of our own. This is why Main Street, USA still works - there's nobody left to actually be first-hand nostalgic for what it depicts, but it is designed to evoke nostalgia and then becomes nostalgic, so the emotional affect works in two directions simultaneously. We respond to an idea then the idea becomes an ideal, a self-actualization. Everyone who enters Disneyland is doomed to be nostalgic for Main Street.

This is why Disney markets the diverse material we're covering here under banners like "Movies We Remember" or "Relive the Magic". It's not so much about the film as it is about the viewer. Are the Disney films of the era we're looking at in this series, except for maybe a few exceptions, museum pieces or heirlooms? Would a ten year old of today respond to The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? Would they even recognize the titular computer?

December 24 1969 - The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes

If there's such a thing as a unified Disney Theory, than Medfield College is the nexus of everything. Yes, it is also the setting for The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, but then don't forget that The Shaggy D.A. is set in the town of Medfield, and thereby probably The Shaggy Dog is too. Then there's the Merlin Jones series, set in the possible alternate-universe Medfield of Midvale College. And then there's the Merrivale College of The World's Greatest Athlete. Then don't forget the Medfield College of the 1997 remake Flubber, which itself also draws in the Imagination Institute chronology at Epcot, by which time the town of Medfield has effectively annexed the entire Honey, I Shrunk the Audience franchise as well as Dreamfinder, Figment, and a former Python.

There's a lot of stuff in there, and my my mind the original Walt Disney "Professor Brainnerd" films are nothing to sneeze at, but the Dexter Riley trilogy - The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him Now You Don't, and The Strongest Man in the World are most fondly remembered. For better or worse, they truly capture an era.

By 1969, the times they weren't changing, they had changed - and left Disney in the dust. The top three grossing movies of 1969 were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, and Disney wasn't even in the top 25 box office draws anymore. American Film was in the midst of what some call the "second golden age", an era when intellectual and artistic potboilers like The Godfather and Chinatown were becoming the big hits. Disney couldn't do anything remotely approaching that - they made movies about talking mice. Still, some tentative efforts were being made to meet their audience halfway, as seen in The Love Bug. Despite its ga-roovy title and hippie extras, there isn't too much about Love Bug that screams "late 60s" - this despite being set in San Fransisco, whose Haight-Ashbury district was then sitting under a permanent cloud of pot smoke. At least, I don't think that's a pot cloud Dean Jones runs into after Herbie.

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes does that one better by bringing a pack of likable kids into the center of the film. Introduced eavesdropping on the absurd contingent of old fuddies who run their constantly broke private college, instead of the fatherly Fred MacMurray of the Walt-era Medfield films having all the fun, Tennis Shoes is powered by this group of teens.

Okay, so they're not exactly 60s-style rebels. About the only political persuasion these kids seem to express is that Dean Higgins is a rube and they make some mildly topical jokes. A telephone is answered as if a boarding house is a pizza service - that joke was cutting edge in 1935. Still, to Disney's credit, the kids drive the whole narrative and even once mention Playboy.

When it comes to plot contrivances, Tennis Shoes exists firmly in the "lightning can do anything" genre, although the nearest cousin to its basic plot as far as I can tell from Disney is the Baby Weems segment of The Reluctant Dragon: average schlub gets an amazing ability, turns the world upside down, then loses it at an inopportune moment. In this case Dexter Riley gets electrocuted by a giant 60's mainframe computer after being out in the rain and somehow transfers the computer into his brain.

As visually creative as Disney is, the way they show the school's realization of this is weird and lazy. Doctors examine his eye as see a montage of the computer's blinking lights; when they look into his ear they see, well:


I'm pretty sure young boys in 1969 or now don't have fantasies about women riding around in bathtubs on wheels but who am I to judge.

Once he becomes The Computer, Kurt Russell packs Dexter Riley with lots of interesting performance touches, from eerily precise head movements to the strangely credible way Riley is shown memorizing entire encyclopedia. In the third act after getting dropped on his head, the computer part of his brain starts malfunctioning, and Russell here delivers an extended, scenery chewing performance modeled on HAL-9000's death rattle in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He's convincing enough that we wonder how the computer's memory death doesn't adversely affect Riley physically.

Cesar Romero's villain A.J. Arno isn't given much to do. If the Dexter Riley subplot is recycled from Baby Weems then A.J. is nothing but Silky from Blackbeard's Ghost given yet another spin around the block. Just about the most menacing activity Disney can come up with for a small town empire of crime is running illegal back-room gambling dens; were these super common in the late 1960s or something? Arno is nearly undone when The Computer starts listing the earnings of his gambling dens on television after being prompted by the password...


...APPLEJACK! Sorry, I had to. Arno and his cheap thugs get their comeuppance in a bale of hay and then later by driving onto a poorly disguised Disney Studio lot from Buena Vista Drive and being stopped in front of the sound stages. This is mostly interesting for providing views of the vacant lot of land which would one day house the Burbank St. Joseph Medical Center.

In my notes I wrote down that Tennis Shoes"feels like a TV episode", and that's because that was the medium of director Robert Butler. He keeps Tennis Shoes humming along at a good pace - nearly every scene has a "flip" optical transition familiar from 60s television comedies and they keep the film feeling lively, similar to George Lucas' use of the wipe to keep Star Wars moving at a quick pace. The film begins in media res and ends there, too.

Personally I'm relieved that these Disney movies are starting to move faster. There's really no justification of something like Monkeys, Go Home! to fill up more than 90 minutes of your life. Actually, there was, and it was that all of these movies were destined to be recycled on The Wonderful World of Disney in a year or two, and the longer they were, the more they could be broken up into chunks for television airings. I wonder if the gradual increase in the length of televised commercial breaks accounts for the overall shortening of the Disney movies.

And with that, folks, Disney exited the tumultuous sixties and went blazing into the 1970s with that renowned classic leading the pack...

February 11, 1970 - King of the Grizzlies

"It was time for an introduction to the wonderful world of solid food."

What was the deal with Winston Hibler?

Here's a guy who came up in the story department at Disney and is credited with work on some genuine classics but is mostly remembered for those nature movies where a genial narrator blathers over footage of romping animals. He made a seemingly bottomless well of these for Disney, most of which sound like the sort of thing that you'd honestly think I made up if they weren't corroborated by online documentation. A quick search on IMDB brings up such titles as:



Little Dog Lost
Chico, the Misunderstood Coyote
Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx (srsly)

The Hound That Thought He Was A Raccoon
Ida, the Offbeat Eagle (stop)
Sammy, the Way-Out Seal
The Pidgeon That Worked a Miracle

And oh yeah, King of the Grizzlies. This one is bad. This is the sort of thing you'd be punished with in middle school if your teacher was out sick a whole week. Watching it I began to feel like I was in middle school. All that was missing was the whir of a 16mm projector.

King of the Grizzlies defines "television filler". The unengaging saga of a baby grizzly bear who grows up to be King of the Grizzlies (who knew that post was open to election?) and the mystic connection he has with a native American working as a cattle rancher, I had had enough of this one after about ten minutes but stuck around for the full 85 out of loyalty to this series.

To be fair, this film was made by two units: an animal unit and an actor unit. The actor unit is fine, occasionally managing some evocative shots and interesting scenes. The actors here are much better than in Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar, although they're working from a script that could've been written on a post-it note. You don't even have to watch the movie half the time; Hibler's droning narration spells out every plot point for you. Wahb the bear isn't nearly as fun as Good-Time Charlie anyway.

While waiting for this film's run time to expire we are treated to such riveting sequences as the "Wahb uses a tree as a toboggan" scene ("That trip made Wahb feel a little wobbly", Hibler helpfully intones on the soundtrack), and of course the seminal "Burying Shorty" scene. Twenty minutes into the movie Wahb's entire family is killed by a rancher and we are so bored we hardly even register alarm.

Grizzlies is full of weird editing to make the basic illusion work; bears are evidently less trainable than cougars. But in reality the basic problem is that the concept and style of Charlie worked to dramatically push the film along but King of the Grizzlies doesn't. Charlie was just a big cat, not a mystical king of the wilderness. The main human actor was some random schlub instead of a human protector. The disarming effect of the documentary style of Charlie hinged on the fact that Charlie could turn into a real danger at any moment as he got older, Wahb is a total fantasy creation embodied by an inarticulate animal. King of the Grizzlies needed to be something like an animated movie to work. As a live-action Hibler Special, it's dead on arrival.

July 1, 1970 - The Boatniks

"This chicken is indestructible."

There isn't much that can be said about Ron Miller that has not been said before. Publicly humiliated and forced out of the Walt Disney Company in 1984 in what basically amounted to a family feud inside a corporate takeover, Miller is today a controversial figure - a close associate of Walt's associated with a string of visible failures but also with Diane Disney Miller and the Walt Disney Family Museum. Many of the projects Miller began during his brief presidency of Disney became Michael Eisner's earliest successes. But just looking at his filmography, it doesn't seem like Miller every really wanted to work for Disney.

Of the three producers for Disney we've been examining in depth here since 1967, Bill Walsh was the most accomplished, Winston Hibler was the most conservative, and Ron Miller was all over the place. Miller was most willing to mash up things with Disney that most people would try to keep separate, producing such out-of-the-box movies as Freaky Friday, Candleshoe, and Escape to Witch Mountain. As his career progressed Miller got bolder and bolder in his choices, eventually leading to a series of "dark" adventure-dramas that remain something of a black eye on the company: Watcher in the Woods, TRON, The Devil and Max Devlin, and finally the one that cost him his job: Something Wicked This Way Comes. He didn't even last long enough to suffer the repercussions of The Black Cauldron.

Miller produced The Boatniks and I think it's supposed to be a kind of Disney version of the kind of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style of comedy popularized by Blake Edwards in the 1960s, something like a family-friendlier version of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or Casino Royale or The Party. Of course, to have a comedy like that you have to be willing to break some rules and offend some sensibilities, which makes the idea of a Disney version even more absurd - but really, is it any more absurd than a Disney film that's also a horror movie? Boatniks may not be funny, per se, but it does do something nearly no other Disney film of its era is willing to do: try anything for a laugh.


Ostensibly about the tribulations of a tedious Coast Guard Ensign Robert Morse - a very long way from How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying - the center of the whole film is yet another pack of Disneyized criminals on the run. In this case instead of Silky's gamblers, Joe Smooth's reformed mobsters or A.J. Arno's..... gamblers, we have jewel thieves whose grand plans to conceal their jewels inside food inside a picnic basket and yacht to Mexico goes non-dramatically pear shaped.

Boatniks has a huge array of gags in it, and about one in sixteen actually works. If you sat in your living room with a tape recorder and tried to cue the "sad trombone" music every time a joke misfired, the tape recorder would probably explode around minute 45. I nearly gave myself a neck cramp from shaking my head for 100 minutes.

To be fair, some jokes do land, and they're actually funny. But the entire film is such a soul-deadening chore to watch that it isn't worth the few clever laughs and weird moments. The film goes nowhere - it's a succession of random blackout sketches of varying length. Imagine Monty Python and the Holy Grail except almost nothing is funny. And nothing is played for even minor irony. Typical of this film's jokes is a sequence where the jewel thieves, having lost the picnic basket of jewels at the bottom of the sea, think to call in a favor from a Japanese friend to get an authentic pearl diver. The Diver arrives in Los Angeles - a geisha straight out of a sixteenth-century wood print. Those backwards Japanese! Of course then she strips down to a bikini as Morse salivates on the other end of a pair of binoculars. Later, she puts the hoodlums in their place - it's revealed she learned perfect English by watching TV last night. Joke? Joke??

If that wasn't racist enough the film then goes on to top that by having Phil Silvers put in a call to Trans-Mexican Airlines, which is run by two sleepy stereotypes sitting in a desolate shack with a sign reading "Sancho Panza Airport" on the roof. When their aqua-plane is rented, the pilot chases his giant family of Mexican children out of the plane - which they've been using as a house.

All of this comes to a climax with what may be the most boring chase scene ever filmed, where a dramatic escape to scored the leisurely Hawaiian music and the jewel thieves make use of a yellow submarine (get it?? LIKE THE SONG) to slowly effect an even more boring escape. As they board their Mexican flight, they're offered coffee, tea, or tequila. After the jewels are thrown out of the airplane in a joke we can see coming half the film away, Silvers quips: "Maybe the movie will be good" and pulls down an in-flight movie screen the side of a small window shade.

It wasn't.


The Boatniks concludes week five of our series and next week I will be taking a break. The Age of Not Believing will continue the following week, with the new post going on on the long July 4 weekend. Blogging on the Fourth of July? That's politics!

For July 5: The Wild Country, The Aristocats, and The Barefoot Executive

 Article updatedSeptember 12, 2013 with additional information about Jack Olsen.

"Savor fresh seafood treasures and frozen Strawberry Margaritas in this nautical oyster bar surrounded by Buena Vista Lagoon. Open at 11 am."

Things come and go at Walt Disney World - always have, always will. And as we speak Walt Disney World is moving forward with its rebuilding of their "Downtown Disney" area into something called Disney Springs, a significant thing has happened, and it is the sort of thing which runs the risk of passing us by quietly. In Disney circles, the unloved are forgotten quickly. While future generations have mountains of material to remember Horizons by, just try to find material on the Fantasyland show where guests danced the "macarena".

Although the intent has never been to present Passport to Dreams as a sort of obituary column for early Walt Disney World, just as the removal of Snow White's Scary Adventure last year prompted a passing notice, here we must pause to give due consideration to an early feature of Another Magic Corner of the World, and the significance of its removal is very much likely to be overlooked. Cap'n Jack's Restaurant, not much loved in the world, has closed. But it wasn't always that way.

The Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village is but a fading memory by now, having been thoroughly disassembled by waves of refurbishments in the 1990s and 2000s - curtailed, re-arranged, cut up, truncated, and scattered. Through it all, the unassuming Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar has remained remarkably intact, even while formidable and lauded giants of the Village fell all around it: the Village Restaurant, Gourmet Pantry, Christmas Chalet, and Character Shop are all now gone. Even the once formidable Chef Mickey's failed to make waves on this little dockside dinette when it departed for the Contemporary in 1996, opening up its former space for rubber elephants and silk plants. Cap'n Jack's endured as decade after decade passed, and it nearly made it across the forty-year mark as the last remaining Disney-owned restaurant in the Village. That is, naturally, what doomed it. Disney, in their new "Disney Springs" model, wishes to act more as a benevolent landlord and less as a participant, and Cap'n Jack's is being razed to make way for a new walkway spanning the Village Lagoon. That, as they say, is progress.

Yet who could've imagined, in 1975, that Cap'n Jack's of all things would one day be the last vestige of a bygone era? Anyone betting on such a proposition surely would've chosen The Village Lounge, Gourmet Pantry, Village Spirits, almost anything that opened in those heady early years. It was an era when Disney wanted to do things themselves - and they often did. A movie studio has no business building submarines, operating hotels, or selling antiques, but Disney did all of that - in house, and with the flair of their showbusiness roots. And so they decided to operate an oyster bar, and they were so good at it that they opened another - Cococino Cove, at the Contemporary, followed in 1977. But we are getting ahead of our story.


In 1975, the Shopping Village was intended to be Disney's stepstone into a larger world not confined inside a railroad. Lake Buena Vista was intended to grow into a community of townhouses, condominums, and timeshare communities complete with a downtown that would appeal to locals and tourists alike and a mass transit hub linking Walt Disney World into planned train routes from Tampa up to Daytona Beach. The Village was intended to draw as much local as tourism money.

To this end Disney built the highest of high end shopping plazas smack in the middle of a city which ten years ago could hardly qualify as a cow town. Early shops such as Carolyn's Couture and Miss Merrily's Madness were serious, top line clothing boutiques selling custom clothes of the kind then only seen in New York and Los Angeles. Gourmet Pantry was selling dry-aged beef decades before anyone in Orlando had ever heard of Wagyu.  Village Spirits offered wines and wine tastings which constituted an entire in-house education for those ready for it. In a very real way, Disney brought the Orlando food culture forward twenty years in five, and the keystone of that effort was the smart, stylish, and adult Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village. Whatever high-end food can now be found in and around Orlando has a distant antecedent at Disney.

Cap'n Jack's was one of two Village establishments open until the wee hours, and both it and the Village Chummery were within spitting distance of each other (and the parking lot and boat dock) to make containing late-night crowds more manageable. Cap'n Jack's was in size and layout essentially a tavern and the stylish Chummery, adjoining the Village Restaurant, a lounge masquerading as a living room full of overstuffed chairs. To ensure drawing power to the new Shopping Village, Disney relocated their popular Saltwater Express group from the Polynesian to the Chummery, and these two establishments, along with the Giraffe Discotheque across the street in the nearby Royal Plaza Hotel, represented practically all of Orlando's nascent nightlight scene.

Giraffe Discothèque at the Royal Plaza - early Orlando nightlife

In advance of the opening of the Village, John Rutherford wrote for Orlando-land Magazine about Cap'n Jack's and its adjoining beach wear shop in November of 1974:

"Stop by Windjammer Mercantile for every concievable style, color, and size bathing suit. [Carolyn Harris, women's wear buyer] said that the swimsuit industry will each week have a different manufactuer at the Windjammer modeling its products. The models, gentlemen, will parade along the dock that leads to Captain Jack's Oyster Bar. [..] Captain Jack's, with its steamed clams and oysters-on-the-halfshell offerings should prove to be a big hit since its being built right out on the water."

What finally opened in 1975 was a three-part structure extending out into the newly created Village Lagoon. The front two sections - a wide glass-walled showroom and a narrower hallway behind it lined with a nautical porch (for modeling!) on either side - was what opened as the Windjammer Dock Shop, with a sort of informal spill-over area for lounging between the shop and Oyster Bar. The hexagonal Cap'n Jack's sat out on the end, with a six-sided bar and seats along the windows.

Patrons to the south side enjoyed a view of the Village Marina, heavy on aged woods and amber craftwork lanterns, and those to the north had a view of the Lake Buena Vista townhouses and the comings and goings of electric Flote Boats headed to and from the Lake Buena Vista Club at the Cruise Dock. In those early years, Cap'n Jack's directly faced nothing but a sea of natural Florida cypress and scrub across the water of the lagoon.


Appropriately for its location, the name of the establishment paid tribute to Jack Olsen, who ran Disneyland's Merchandise department from 1964 to 1970. An avid sailor, Olsen is the one who established the pattern which Disney theme park merchandise maintained until the 1990s - unique products, store as show, and  limited Mickey merchandise. It is likely Olsen who contributed to such unique shopping locations as Olde World Antiques in Liberty Square and it is his demands on his department which made the Shopping Village as unique as it was. Olsen retired from Walt Disney World in 1977.

In just a few months, Lake Buena Vista Village News, a sort a combination newsletter and map, proudly announced what would come to be Cap'n Jack's most famous specialty:

"Strawberry Margaritas Make Their Eastern Debut

An exciting new house drink has been introduced at Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar and the Village Chummery. It's called a strawberry margarita and it's made from the only Valido Fresa (Strawberry Tequila) this side of the Rockies.

Original tequila is the distillate from the sap of a Century Plant - a sort of cactus resembling a "pregnant" pineapple. It's found all over the Mexican desert surrounding the town of Tequila. Strawberry Tequila, however, is found only in two locations - California, and the Village Spirits.

Enjoy a unique Strawberry Margarita at Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar, then try your hand at preparing one yourself. Just secure a bottle of Valido Fresa from the Village Spirits and follow this recipe: mix the Strawberry Tequila, Triple Sec, regular tequila, and sweetened lemon and lime in a frosted 12 ounce wine glass. Coat the rim lightly with salt and garnish with lemon wedges. Ole! In no time at all, you'll have become the most popular bartender around!"

The unbeatable combo of Saltwater Express and strawberry margaritas, however, may have been too potent: within a few weeks, the popular folk combo was back at the Polynesian Village. After several months of Disney-provided entertainment, The Chummery was rechristened the Village Lounge and began its long-running series of rotating jazz performances by December 1975. These jazz sets by famous artists became a major draw, to the extent that music and jazz enthusiasts from college campuses as far flung as University of Florida began filling up the Lounge on weekends, leading Disney to institute a cover charge.

 Cap'n Jack's potent mixed drinks and late hours and Jazz at the Village Lounge supported each other happily for many years, making the east side of Lake Buena Vista the only happening night spot inside Disney's domain beyond the walls of the Top of the World. By the late 70s, Church Street Station in Orlando was absorbing most of the younger clientele just looking for a good time, and things were settling down in Lake Buena Vista. The Empress Lilly Riverboat restaurant went up in 1977, forever altering the view from inside Jack's, and the Shopping Village was re-named the Walt Disney World Village at this time. Steve Birnbaum writes about Cap'n Jack's in his original 1982 Walt Disney World guide:

"The menu at this water-side spot is so full of good things - seafood marinara, stuffed clams, ceviche (marinated raw fish), crab claws, clams and oysters and the half shell, and delicious smoked kingfish with guacamole - that it's as terrific for a light lunch or dinner as it is for a snack, even though the place is nominally a bar. Cap'n Jack's is a terrific place to be, especially in the later afternoon, as the sun streams through the narrow-slated blinds and glints on the polished tables and the copper above the bar. And the house's special frozen strawberry margaritas - made with fresh fruit, strawberry tequila, and a couple other potent ingredients - are as tasty as they are beautiful. They're served in big balloon-shaped goblets, with a slice of lime astraddle the rim: tart, slightly fruity, and altogether delightful."

The first shock to the system which should've killed off Cap'n Jack's (but didn't) was the removal of the Village Restaurant in 1989. Without a lifeline of jazz enthusiasts to keep this part of the World humming, the late nights at Jack's fell by the wayside. The energy had shifted east to the new Pleasure Island nightspot, and since management had decreed that Pleasure Island was the new "adult" hotspot, the Village changed its image to better accomodate children and families.

Heidelberger's Deli became The All American Sandwich Shop, The Verandah Restaurant became Minnie Mia's Pizzeria (can't make this stuff up...), and the Village Lounge was now the waiting area for Chef Mickey's, showing cartoons where jazz trombonists once filled houses.

At this time, Cap'n Jack's was expanded and the transition space between the Dock Shop and the Oyster Bar became more seating space. A proper kitchen was added at this time as well, allowing Jack to serve full meals instead of just mixed drinks and some simple seafood dishes. This was accomplished by expanding out onto what was once the dock-themed porches to the north and south, enclosing this space with glass windows, unfortunately giving the building a lumpy appearance not present in the original, sleek and symmetrical design. The former modeling promenade was divided between seating and the new kitchen.

1993 menu

Still, Cap'n Jack rolled on for another seven years, until the second shock that should've killed it off came around.

The former Dock Shop / waiting room

In 1995 and 1996 as part of the same project which eventually gave us the West Side, Disney leveled the original Pottery/Christmas Chalet complex to the east side of the Village Lagoon and built World of Disney on that spot. At the same time they leased out both the Village Restaurant and Empress Lilly to outside tenants, moving Chef Mickey's to the Contemporary Resort and turning it into a buffet. Now Cap'n Jack's nearest neighbor was a smoking volcano, and the beautiful Empress Lilly restaurant was painted stark grey and became the rambling Fulton's Crab House. At this time Cap'n Jack's was given a blue/white paint scheme to further an ostensible "New England" theme. By early 1996, the Windjammer Dock Shop was gone for good and its former location had become the waiting area for Jack's. Once World of Disney was open all of the Village's original wood and earth tones had been painted over with bright colors, the Captain's Tower reflection pond was filled in with a train ride for toddlers, and Lego characters popped out of the Lagoon where once willows gently waved above the water. Lake Buena Vista was a memory, and Cap'n Jack's was an anachronism.

But it continued along for nearly another twenty years without anybody paying much attention to it. The constant expansion from what was once just a bar into a full family restaurant certainly impliessome degree of success, but Cap'n Jack's remained for years one of the easiest eateries at Walt Disney World to get seated at. At some point in the last fifteen years it was renamed Cap'n Jack's Restaurant, and Jack himself was redrawn to look a bit trimmer and friendlier, but the years moved very slowly by. The Village Marketplace was a busy place, and Cap'n Jack's was not.

Reception area, looking into the former modeling promenade space.

Still, it endured. It endured the rocky mid-2000s, when everyone seemed sure it was due to receive a Pirates of the Caribbean overlay to cash in on a coincidentally named certain other Jack. It did not. Since Disney seems ever willing to invest in quick cash-grab tie ins, the fact that this did not happen is perhaps a red flag instead of something to be celebrated.

The enclosed porch / expanded seating area.

I had exactly one experience inside Cap'n Jack's - in 2005. My mother and I were fatigued from an entire day of Downtown Disney, and we wandered into Jack's in desperate need of nothing but a seat and something to eat, and Jack's was the only option available. It was one of those particuarly nasty overcast kind of Florida days, where the heat just seems to stick to your entire body. The meal was entirely unmemorable. I remember it started to rain while we were inside, and that we were seated along the back wall, and even with most of the restaurant empty the place seemed far too poorly laid out. Not being a seafood person, I probably ordered a steak, although I can hardly remember anything about it except finding the entire experience unpleasant. It wasn't until a few years later that I began to research the Walt Disney World Village / Marketplace and found out that Jack's had any history at all.

The original Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar, almost entirely untouched.

Through most of the 2000s, Jack was in the doldrums. The restaurant's reputation was extremely poor, and the few people who wandered in hardly seem to have been able to describe anything memorable about it at all. The announcement that it was set to be demolished to make way for a new walkway, official as of only a few months ago, then hardly ranks as a surprise.


But in another way it's a shame, and not just because the food is reported to have improved in the last few years, per evidence presented in this 2013 review and photos on Disney Food Blog. It's because there's nothing especially broken about the location, idea or size of Cap'n Jack's - Disney just tried to make it into something it was not, which was a sort of in-house Red Lobster. There still is a market for good, fresh seafood in an intimate setting, but Jack's was situated out on a pier trying to sell meals to families with kids who would rather eat at Rainforest Cafe. Cap'n Jack's could have gone in the opposite direction in the 2000s, away from the mass market it was jammed into in the late 80s, and towards one of exclusivity and uniqueness. In short, what it was doing back in the 70s to begin with.

In another sense, it's always sad to lose something of the past which somehow remained unblemished by modern trends for so very long. Practically everything about the place, from its profoundly unfashionable woods and brass lanterns - even Red Lobster has given those up - to the stained glass panels, unique name and art, and even those dusty silk plants in the corners speaks to the very last little pocket of Lake Buena Vista which survives in the loud and ugly Downtown Disney. Even if the space had to be emptied out and converted to some kind of store, there surely is more to be gained by retaining the basic structure in some capacity than simply tearing down the last little bit of history the place has left.

The preceding paragraph, of course, is little but spilled bandwidth. History has passed Cap'n Jack's by. But that's the reason why it's worth writing this article, here, and now, not so much to protest against Jack going quietly into the night, but to point out that, on the cusp of Disney Springs bursting onto the scene, that the last little bit of WED Enterprises's little Village where the water once lapped calmly along little European chalets is finally being dismantled. To revel in the weirdness that it lasted this long at all, and to show that even something as friendless as Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar is a signifier of an era when things were done differently.

It is, in short, a potent symbolic moment. Downtown Disney can't go home again.

December 15, 1970 - The Wild Country

What is a "Disney" movie anyway?

We can't pretend this isn't a problem the studio itself was never without - not when something like Victory Thru Air Power sits cheek-to-jowl with Pinocchio. I ran into this a few weeks ago when I ran headlong into two friends and eventually the conversation drifted into favorite/least favorite Disney movies. I kept bringing up the sort of films I love that also happen to be Disney movies - Three Caballeros, Melody Time, Mary Poppins, Parent Trap, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantasia - while I could not get either of them to see past the Lion King, Frozen, Mulan, Toy Story and so forth. For them, a Disney movie was an animated adventure-comedy made relatively recently that was fun without being especially demanding of its audience. Similarly thy could not see their way towards accepting my view of a Disney movie as being a very diverse thing.

I suspect that whatever Disney has mutated into by 2044 will have its fans too, and they will look back with equal befuddlement at our own era's inexplicable cycle of gruesome, dark, long Disney action-blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean. What Disney is, then, is in open negotiation with the audience - perhaps tonight you'd like an overlong sentimental musical comedy with an animated sequence? Or a sassy talking animal movie starring Cheech?

The Disney of Walt's era faced similar problems. Yes, he made lighthearted comedies and nature films, but he also put out some pretty darn good serious dramas and adventures like Third Man on the Mountain and Those Calloways. Audiences today are likely to look askance at a family adventure-drama produced by Walt Disney, but it was once part of the Disney canon.

That's the case with The Wild Country. It's one of "those" Disney movies you have to join their movie club to own on DVD. Even the streaming version is presented in a rather ugly full-frame aspect ratio, direct from the VHS. The print they used is just okay, full of buckles and flecks. This film looks exactly like the odd-fit-in-the-box it is. I suspect Disney profits the least from these midcentury wilderness dramas of all their backstock, because The Wild Country isn't so much released as it is available.

It's a shame because this is a good movie, and not in a vacillating "good-for-Disney" way. What looks to be an uninteresting setup and weird cast actually works very well. Even the direction can't be faulted: The Wild Country wears its 100 minutes easily, moving from scene to scene rapidly, sometimes audaciously. Director Robert Totten worked primarily in television, in shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Kung Fu, but unlike The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes' Robert Butler, The Wild Country doesn't feel like an episode in some ongoing serial, it feels vast and wide - which makes its existence only in a full frame version even sadder. While I can't speak to Totten's other credits, this is easily the best directed film released by Disney since Walt died. Wide, gentle framings are well composed without quite recalling the painterly effect of John Ford - instead, favoring a wide angle lens and understated but terrifically effective tilts and pans, The Wild Country periodically echoes mid-period Sergio Leone, especially Once Upon A Time in the West.


Totten's direction isn't the whole show here but Jack Elam's wild-eyed coot both recalls Leone and nearly steals the rest. Introduced with his pants down, literally, Elam's charm gets a full workout here as the fearsome looking but cuddly neighbor. This was an odd period in Elam's career - he was already showing up as a kind of signifier of Western films in movies like Once Upon A Time in the West and Pat Garret & Billy the Kid but was still in the process of shedding his tough guy persona and moving into over comedy roles - compare Elam here with his one-scene role in Never a Dull Moment. Ultimately it's Elam who provides the sense of warmth and home that The Wild Country so restlessly seeks. He ends his role by giving cooking tips on bear fat.

The core family itself does decent work. Steve Forrest is given another shot at a "Dad" role and although he's never quite as good as in the charmed Rascal he's convincingly strained holding the family together. Your desire to see things turn out well for Forrest is what drives the entire last half of the film, and he doesn't let his director down. Forrest is even given an astonishingly drawn out fight with the chief baddie Woodward, giving Totten a chance to show off some evocative camera work. It goes on so long that The Wild Country may qualify as something of a Disney equivalent of They Live.

Ron Howard is okay as the main kiddie identification point. Howard isn't quite able to pull off the conflicted emotions of his older brother Virgil - he comes off as a sullen whiner for a lot of the run time, but then again most kids his age are that way in real life anyway. Still, his big heroic scene at the end comes off as a fully earned shock - I'm surprised Disney actually went for such a level of violence. His real-life brother Clint Howard, instantly identifiable even as a tyke, is a one-note character constantly obsessed with replacing his dog Ralph. That this running "joke" does not detract from the engaging drama elsewhere is a sign of good film craft.

The film builds to a big climax during a tornado, and unlike other tedious effects-driven climaxes in Disney films this one works like gangbusters because the audience is by now fully invested in the safety of this family and the obvious effects matter less. Totten gets away with a truly audacious moment: as the family hides in their root cellar, the door is closed and the screen goes entirely dark for what feels like a long time until Ron Howard manages to strike a match. The dislouge scene continues for the duration that the match burns, and when it goes out, the screen is again plunged into darkness. I have no idea if this was inspired by the similar "blackout" sequence in Wait Until Dark, but it has a similarly striking effect.

Coming after so much medicore comedy, The Wild Country is a breath of fresh air. It's a quietly commendable movie that doesn't pull back from the rough stuff and quality filmmaking when it has no reason to aspire to anything better than the standard Disney product. I expected the lazily plotted animated films, the tedious nature documentaries and the leaden-whimsical comedies, but I didn't expect to get a solid, exciting wilderness drama out of Disney in his era. I'll probably never watch it again, but The Wild Country was an welcome surprise and fully recommended.

December 24, 1970 - The AristoCats

"Saul Steinberg once drew a bedraggled cube with a trail of bubbles overhead. In the largest bubble was a perfect cube, its sides impeccably straight. The cartoon was dreaming about its platonic ideal. If Saturday morning TV cartoons dreamed, the feature in the top bubble would be The Aristocats." - Time Magazine, 1971

There's something vaguely, indefinably wrong about the AristoCats. I say this as a admirer of Wolfgang Reitherman's other "Lazy Sunday in the Park with Woolie" movies - Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, and Jungle Book. This movie is broken and I'm not sure why. It feels like a lackluster sequel to a movie we never saw.

On second thought, maybe that's it - The Aristocats is a sequel to every Disney movie of the 60s, but nothing is assembled with any care - Sterling Halloway, a horse left over from Mary Poppins, Phil Harris, Pat Buttram, cute animals who are CATS instead of dogs, Sherman brothers... instant classic, right? If anything, ArtistoCats proved that Walt Disney was more than an assembly of random parts, no more than pushing a bunch of furniture together in an open space immediately qualifies as a house.

Even so, AristoCats is somewhat better than its dire reputation suggests - where the animation department can never thrill us, it can charm us, and the AristoCats spits out charming gags quicker than Michael Eisner printing Bette Midler contracts.

The film's most typical gag is Pat Buttram's hilariously precise hound dog - he's funny when he gets around to his jokes but he takes forever to get there. Each scene in the film is practically its own seven-minute short film, each punctuated with leisurely fades to black. These short chunks vary in quality from absolutely tedious to pretty good, but none of them are based on anything other than a one idea joke, for example "old people dancing!" or "crazy chase!". Unfortunately they never go out on top form, generally peaking in comedy a minute or two before they end and trailing off into some sort of variation on characters standing around reflecting on how crazy all of those preceding jokes were. AristoCats' staunch refusal to end any sequence on anything resembling a "topper" gag eventually reduced this reviewer to impotent limb flailing.

Following the rules of this tired assembly of material from better movies, midway through the film we get a jazz number because I Wanna Be Like You was so successful. Never mind the Paris 1910 setting, suddenly we get an English mop-haired hippie cat with love beads and psychedelic colors. Bless the film, Everybody Wants To Be A Cat tries and tries, but Scat Cat's band never end up getting anywhere near a good time. Their "midnight howl" keeps switching styles and genres until they literally bring the house down with zero of the sense of escalating chaos that destroyed King Louie's temple. Just to prove that white guys still run the studio, the sequence also has some racism seasoned over it, care of the Chinese Siamese with plays his piano with chopsticks because what will those crazy Chinks go and do next? Despite all of this, Everybody Wants To Be A Cat is the most boring part of the film - it creates so much noise and racket yet never raises more than a minor stir.

Actual lyrics: "Shanghai Hong Kong Egg Foo Young / Fortune Cookie Always Wrong"

The best sequence, by contrast, involves a charmingly animated duo of geese from Ollie Johnston. Most of the characters in Aristocats move just like people in animal suits - an effect sadly only enhanced by the endless parade of medium shots -  but this fact slips past us until these geese show up, imaginatively blending avian and human movements in a way that puts the rest of the show to shame. That this sequence climaxes with a drunk goose - and I don't care who you are, a drunk goose is always funny - is just a cherry on top.


Perhaps what's missing is any sense of stakes or dramatic action. Depending on your perspective, the chief dramatic action of the film - where Edgar the butler drugs and abandons the cats in the countryside because seriously who leaves their inheritance to animals - is either dramatically mediocre or entirely justified. Yet there's no stakes - he doesn't seem to be intent on, say, drowning the cats, merely losing them, and there's no particularly salient reason why he chooses to act when he does besides moving the first act along. Madame Bonfamille isn't, for example, deathly sick, giving Edgar good reason to move his inheritance along. The only dramatic stakes is that Madame will - gasp! - miss her cats, but since she's already bequeathed millions of francs to them, we don't put much faith in her emotional state at any given moment. Even the cats don't seem too much worried. This zero-stakes adventure creates the feeling that Reitherman is repeatedly bellowing "Hurry up, take your time!"

There's also some weirdness about voice nationality that's carried over from Jungle Book. At least Jungle Book is set in British India so the mix of British and American voice actors feels, at best, somewhat possible - certainly no less objectionable than the all-American cast of, say, Lubtisch's To Be Or Not To Be portraying resistance Poles. It's a long-standing convention of Hollywood films that Americans can stand in for nearly any ethnic group. But The Aristocats' summer of 1910 in Paris is epically bizarre. Dutchess' three kittens speak a blend of American and British-accented English, and Duchess herself is a French kitty with a Hungarian accent. Their mouse friend Roquefort has a French name but has Sterling Halloway's distinct midwestern nasal weeze. By the time we reach Pat Buttram as a farm dog who's clearly just wandered in off Green Acres, there's no reason to even try to reconcile any of this. The animation staff clearly just didn't care; if you were funny, you got to be in the movie.

Imagine a version of Aristocats with just a few tweaks. Imagine a version where the butler's plan is to kill the cats is better thought out and nearly successful. Or a version where there's an urgent reason to return to the Bonfamille villa. Watching the film, I conversely began entertaining the idea of the same casual wobble of a story -- set in 1917, and when the cats leave Paris there's more than a suggestion of the Great War raging out somewhere in the distance. This would justify the multi-national cast and set off the pleasantly banal, low-stakes story of monied cats with the real-world Fin de siècle. At least this approach would add an extra layer of resonance to the otherwise remarkably lightweight trifle. Although Disney seems to have gone out of their way to avoid the issue, circa 1910 the world of moneyed priviledge was being pulled down around the AristoCats anyway.

The vanished world of the Aristocats.

AristoCats has quite a toxic reputation, and frankly a worse one than perhaps the film deserves. Taken on its own and isolated from the glories of, say, Lady and the Tramp - another low stakes animal story that still manages some real emotional resonance - AristoCats is good enough. Not great, but good enough. The bones of a better film are in there, but it just fails to deliver the full package.

Traditional wisdom says that this gaping hole was Walt Disney, but I'm personally not satisfied with that explanation. Yes, had Walt been alive, AristoCats would not have been made in the way it was if it was made at all. But simply saying that the animation department was helpless without their leader is a lazy excuse. For one, the animation department was capable of good solo work before Walt's passing and will be capable of good work later. And other divisions of the company were doing well too. Yet somehow the animation unit was getting so lazy that The AristoCats makes Blackbeard's Ghost look like a Hitchcock thriller. No, this is the one where it's too easy to try to lay the blame on somebody else up and dying to save the "Old Men" from the brunt of the blame. If the AristoCats is a mess, it's the animation department's mess, and maybe it's time to stop exonerating a group of great artists when they try too little and dream too small.


March 17, 1971 - The Barefoot Executive

Time for a confession: I'm not a monkey movie person. I'm not even sure if that's a fully sanctified film subgenre, but monkey movies are made often enough to suggest that they make enough money and that there are people out there who are, in fact, monkey movie people. I simply don't really enjoy the illusion of seeing chimps and orangutangs do their stuff onscreen, treated as if they're fully functioning actors: they bare their teeth, and the movie reacts as if that's a smile instead of an unnerving grimace. The whole thing feels undignified.

Still, The Barefoot Executive, while no King Kong or Monkey Shines, comes close to a monkey movie ideal I didn't know I was harboring, at least as far as comedies go. Raffles the chimp is introduced as an irritable grouch obsessed with lousy television; he won't even let poor Kurt Russell watch Star Journey (circa 1970 that counts as a major nerd offense). Russell's slow realization that this chimp can pick the top performing television shows would be, if it were just a bit nastier, the sort of joke that Mad Magazine would've run with in their golden era. As it is it's got a bit more bite than the typical Disney feature, although this is no Network.

In 1970 television was in the era of Laugh-In, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and the various spin-offs of the Andy Griffith Show (direct or conceptual). Those are the readily recognizable ones to modern eyes; most of the rest of the top 20 rated programs were things like The Dean Martin Show and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, ie nothing that anybody of today would probably willingly watch if they were curious. Yet by 1970 demographics were shifting, and nobody quite knew why. 1970 is also the year when shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Odd Couple appear, shows dominated by good writing and character, instead of situation, driven comedy. Just a few months after the premiere of Barefoot Executive, the infamous "Rural Purge" was underway at CBS and the era of the cornpone comedy was forcibly retired.

Director Robert Butler got his start on television, and so did cinematographer Charles Wheeler. Of the four credited writers, two-thirds of those credited with "story" were staff writers on Bewitched. The people behind this film had good reason to write it the way they did, and occasionally the banal surface of the film ruptures and something venomous spills out. Despite the inter office politics and self importance of the TV industry, the average person on the street in Executive thinks TV is as idiotic as the film makes it look. The network's breakout hit is something called DEVIL DAN, and it's chosen  by an animal and put on the air by a teenager after a shortcut to the top. When the executives find out, they have to get rid of the chimp more as a matter of internal pride than any scandal to cover.

Somebody had a lot of fun on Barefoot Executive raiding the entire Disney film vault to find the clips that populate this world's airwaves; depicted as an incoherent Gilliam-esque swirl of abstract images and idiotic highlight clips, we believe Kurt Russell's disillusioned teen when he all but states that television is crappy.

Director Butler delivers a much more cinematic film than Tennis Shoes this time around, adding some satisfying scope even if the pacing is much more pedestrian than before. This is a visually dark movie, especially compared to Tennis Shoes.... practically the whole thing seems to be capturing the glitz and glamor of Downtown Burbank. Is the visual style intended to set us up for the moral ambiguity the film flirts with? So much of the cast and crew of Tennis Shoes returned that we can easily imagine Roy Disney announcing "Round up the usual suspects!"

Although he's ably supported by the Disney infastructure and given a decent director with a good script, Barefoot Executive demonstrates just how good Kurt Russell is. Quick: name another movie almost totally supported by a nineteen-year-old (really!). Russell is one of the few actors to work in genre fare to give their characters a genuine emotional interior, and although Executive demands only a fraction of his talent, his remarkable range would be best demonstrated in his unsurpassed trilogy of thriller for John Carpenter in the 80s: Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. He's easily the best actor "launched" by the Disney studio - and unlike, say, Julie Andrews, Russell was able to escape his typecasting in these films. While it's impossible to see Andrews in anything else and not think "Mary Poppins", it's almost weird to see these early Russell Disney movies when today we might think of him in Tombstone, or Death Proof, or Tango & Cash.


Underneath the whole thing is a "youth empowerment" subplot that was not improved by my having watched A Hard Day's Night in the same week. Russell's night school grad badgers the uniformly white, old men in power about Alexander the Great but still has to have a rigged system to get ahead. Because it's another Kurt Russell Disney movie, he has another idiotic theme song, this time breathlessly sung by an offscreen chorus. A sample:


Compared to the Beatles' casual flaunting of authority in the anarchic Hard Day's Night, this whole thing just comes off as embarrassingly dated and labored, as if those 1971 kids were supposed to be sitting around watching this in a Soho theater, passing a joint, and nodding righteously. "He's right, man - it's the system!" And that song doesn't help at all - it's no Can't Buy Me Love, for sure.

Where Barefoot Executive falls short is that it never quite lives up to the scathing promise of its premise. This is a film that treats a room full of executives very much like the generals in the War Room of Doctor Strangelove and expects us to applaud when they're all ejected from an airplane over a remote jungle region by a monkey. And while a director like Kubrick, Lester or Edwards may have been content to let Russell ride away on his motorbike with the chimp, the girl, and the million dollars in the end, Disney has Russell clear his conscience and we are told that a rescue operation is underway. No room for moral ambiguity in a Disney movie; the kids are Good, the execs are Comedy Relief Oldies, and the film is a firm G, no questions asked. With a bit more venom in its bite and a tighter pace, Barefoot Executive could have been a minor classic..... as far as monkey movies go, at least.

For next week: Scandalous John, The Million Dollar Duck, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Part One: Back from the West

It's become something of a tradition on this blog to wrap up the year around the holidays with what I call the Year End Report, an annual accounting and grading of the resort overall which gives me an opportunity to assess recent additions and do some old-fashioned proactive journalism. Longtime readers of my blog may have noticed that I missed my 2012 round up, and I'm probably going to miss the 2013 one too, which this entry will seek to account for. It may seem strange that, right on the doorstep of the opening of the first phase of Magic Kingdom's snazzy Fantasyland area, this blog should go silent. It wasn't really planned that way, you see, I haven't been in Florida.

I've now returned from a year in California and, yes, Disneyland. Over the years I've worn a number of hats as a Disney specialist: I began as a Walt Disney World tourist, became a Vacation Club member, followed by a Cast Member, and then an Annual Passholder. I've also been at Disneyland as a tourist, a day tripper, and now for the past year an Annual Passholder too. As a result I think I'm in a unique position to speak about Disneyland, as a transplanted East Coast kid and then transplanted back. This article will seek to discuss some of my experiences and thoughts about Disneyland from the other side of the coin. Theme parks change when you get to know them well. Magic Kingdom changed for me as a Cast Member and local, and Disneyland has changed too. No longer the exotic other, I've spent enough time in that park for the last year to think of it as a pleasant hangout and good friend and less as a destination or ideal.

So what is that "Disneyland Difference" you hear people (locals) extolling?  I'd like to take a few minutes to cover the things that stood out most vividly to me, and also some things I'd love to see Walt Disney World start emulating.

Perhaps the thing that struck me most impressively as a local was that I finally understood the one component of Disneyland's appeal to Southern California residents that cannot be appreciated as a tourist: the sense of difference. Los Angeles has been a big city for a long time. You can pull up photos of almost any neighborhood from 1940 on and see a lot of the things you see in LA today: tall buildings, wide streets, pollution. Inside Disneyland, you see almost entirely things you don't see elsewhere in the area: cute, tiny buildings. Structures made of wood, even logs. Spreading trees. Rivers with boats on them. Castles. This is the secret extra ingredient that Disneyland has that Walt Disney World does not. By the time you get into any theme park in Florida, you've already been brought so far down the rabbit hole of the fantasy world that it's not really a huge shock to step onto Main Street. But when you have to drive down I-5 in bottleneck traffic, park in a concrete bunker, then schlep across a mall from 1998, stepping onto that tiny, cute, intimate Main Street is like a shot in the arm. I'm at Disneyland. It makes it that much harder to leave at the end of the night, knowing that you'll be driving back through an urban hell scape to get to wherever home is. It makes the return that much more satisfying.

Los Angeles in Walt's own time

Southern California contributes other things to Disneyland, too. One key item is the weather. Most of the time, when the sun sets in Florida the humidity will linger into the night. Although Magic Kingdom is very beautiful at night, there is less of a sense of the extreme difference that you get at Disneyland, and that difference is just plain due to the location.

Southern California tends to start her days cool, heat up quite a lot during the day, then cool off again at night. The effect of this on your day at Disneyland is seismic. Magic Kingdom's crowds tend to peak in the afternoon, then taper off to be fewer and fewer as the night wears on. At Disneyland, after a period of a few hours in the late afternoon, the heat subsides, the sun sets, the lights come on, and the entire park seems to regenerate into a new form. By 7 pm most of Magic Kingdom is seeing her last busy crowds for the day, but Disneyland is just getting started. Disneyland's Main Street, with its real gas lanterns, tiny size and intimate scale, or Fantasyland, with her cute architecture and close quarters, become at night maybe my favorite places on earth.

It seems like it shouldn't be a huge deal, and I bet many tourists never notice as they charge from attraction to attraction on their itinerary, but I really appreciated it on my casual visits.  It makes it possible to spend many, many hours inside the park - far beyond the two or three I'll spend inside a Walt Disney World park before needing to get out of the frying pan.

And once you've spent an entire day at Disneyland repeatedly, one thing that really makes a difference becomes the food. Although Epcot provides a rough equivalent in terms of quality, selection and availability, Disneyland simply kicks the rest of Walt Disney World around the block in this regard. As a Central Florida local, I've become accustomed to eating in a chain cafe like Panera before venturing into any of the WDW theme parks or, if I must eat at Walt Disney World, absconding to a resort. While the Florida property offers a great array of expensive sit-down meals, Disneyland is so full of good food that it's easier to list the places not to eat than the places to eat.

This is a source of some controversy, but I think there is just no reason for Walt Disney World to operate their food service the way they do except for laziness and cheapness. Even Columbia Harbor House has fallen into the doldrums and the rather decent Pecos Bill specialty burger from 2009 is hardly worth the price anymore, having shrunk to 60% of its size. WDW has effectively instituted a two-tier dining system, where the options inside a theme park involve generic American fare being readily available for a fairly predictable price, or, for a higher price point, going right up to table service. There is no middle ground. Disneyland has burger joints - The Hungry Bear, the Village Haus, and the Tomorrowland Terrace - but practically everywhere else offers above average food for good prices. Defenders have long claimed that WDW patrons won't buy anything else, but the ludicrous lines outside the new restaurant in Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland where not a burger may be found put the lie to all of that.

I find it impossible to believe that a place like, say, the Plaza Pavilion / Noodle Station boondoggle between Tomorrowland and Main Street couldn't attract a good crowd each day with a tasteful refurbishment, a new order station, and a menu of good sandwiches, salads, and soups. Or that the lovely Tortuga Tavern in Caribbean Plaza is incapable of drawing a crowd which is why it's closed. That's reductionist thinking, where the effect becomes the cause. Making better food at Walt Disney World takes being willing to open a place, think outside the box, and keep it open until it catches on.


Disneyland also uses real plates and silverware in many counter service locations. No, you're not eating off Spode - they're decent high-impact colorful plates and the silverware is that awkwardly heavy kind you're used to experiencing at a place like Golden Corral. Still, once you've gotten used to getting a nice fresh salad on a good solid plate with a real fork, paying the same price for Walt Disney World's version in a disposable bowl just feels like a cheap-out. Most Walt Disney World restaurants still have washing machines to service those plates and cups they no longer use, and again, this is the way it is supposed to be. One wonders how much waste Disney is creating by skimping on the reusable plates at take-out locations. Disneyland also still buses their tables - when you finish your meal, you just walk away, and Disney's attentive staff cleans them for you. It sounds small on paper, but isn't Disney supposed to be about the details?

Lens Art by Tom Bricker: Food Stylist

Here's a story for you. In 2005 at Magic Kingdom, the long misbegotten Plaza Pavilion was reworked as the Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station. The Noodle Station provided fresh wok meals made to order. The most popular item was the Beef and Broccoli. Because the Beef and Broccoli was so popular, waits for the dish became very long. And because Magic Kingdom didn't budget to rework the Plaza Pavilion's antiquated service window corral arrangement, the wait was very congested and guests, naturally, complained.

What did Walt Disney World do? They removed the Beef and Broccoli from the menu. That was their solution. And so people stopped going to the Noodle Station and eventually it closed. That's the sort of thinking that leads to the poor food situation we have now. It's a true story.

The other thing that Disneyland has that Magic Kingdom is much, much poorer without is live music.

Yes, Magic Kingdom has a big stage show and some strolling entertainment groups - acts like the Banjo Brothers in Frontierland or the Dapper Dans are great - but Disneyland really uses live music like a battery to energize entire portions of their theme park. The jazz bands in New Orleans Square and the rock music in Tomorrowland really affect the entire area they're in and keep these areas of the theme park feeling lively late into the night. The secret here is - big surprise - live music attracts people, and people do things like go on rides and buy food. I bet Magic Kingdom might be surprised what, say, a Dixeland Bandstand in Frontierland or a drumming group in Adventureland may do to keep those areas of the park that seem to empty out after nightfall feeling active.

Some wags, especially those based at the Disney HQ in Burbank, regularly opine through online "sources" (mouthpieces) that the problem here is that good entertainment simply isn't available in poor out of the way Central Florida, but this is pure west coast elitism. Yes, it is true, Disneyland benefits from being located just south of the entertainment mecca of the country, but Florida isn't so bad off. Back in 1971, Disney imported talent en mass because there really was nothing in Central Florida, but how many generations ago was that? Tampa offers a lively rock and Latin music community, Orlando has some great clubs, and a full range of specialty groups. How much willful ignorance does it take to believe that the talent simply isn't out there?

This is really Disneyland's ace in the hole: great food that isn't hard to get and live music. These were priorities of the Walt Disney Company until the late 90s, when Eisner began to hack as much Entertainment Equity out of Magic Kingdom as the park could stand in the fallout of the disastrous opening of Animal Kingdom, which failed to grow attendance in any meaningful way. During the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of tourists who had been long time visitors stopped going, the new visitors didn't know what they were missing, and people forgot that it was ever like that at all. Disneyland never cut their entertainment, and the balance of the park still very much works. Again, this is the way it is supposed to be.

The rest of the Disneyland experience is really the icing. Yes, there are lots of locals, and yes, they are often annoying. Disneyland has a cult-like devotion of people who began going when they were still in the cradle, and these groups descend at night to engage in Rocky Horror-like rituals. Tomorrowland, for example, has a rotating stock of bands who alternate on weekends, and each band has its own non-overlapping fan base who will arrive to see their group perform. Then there are those who arrive just to see Fantasmic!, or World of Color. Recently, roving bands of "Social Clubs" - whose members dress like Orange County bikers with Disney patches - have been causing a stir  amongst Disneyland employees and visitors alike.

This is not new behavior. Sometime watch Disneyland After Dark and pay attention to the teenagers in the Carnation Gardens bandstand near the end - observe how they're all very much clearly engaging in a practiced ritual. The band leader even asks how many have been to the dance before, and it's most of the crowd. That was in 1962. As a East Coast native to whom a place like a Disney theme park never lost its hint of the exotic, I find this all very bizarre, but then I have my own rituals in each park, as do many repeat guests, including tourists. If they want to watch the band play and I want to take ride 762 on the Haunted Mansion, then the nice thing is that Disneyland has room for both of us.

The final thing that bears some repeating, although it's been very well covered online elsewhere, is the park across the street - Disney('s?) California Adventure. I am not one of those who ever felt that DCA was a bad park, although it was and remains very insubstantial compared to Disneyland - but then, of course, most things do. But Imagineering really did a number on the park, and the importance of the proximity of the Disney castle park and a really, really good second gate park is hard to overstate.

I'm not happy with everything in California Adventure, but the stuff that's good is really good. The Buena Vista Street entrance is the first time in a generation that Disney has totally nailed a park's "introductory statement" and it frankly makes the charming Hollywood and Sunset section of the Hollywood Studios in Florida look like amateur night. The Cathay Circle Restaurant at the end of the street is the best meal I've ever had inside a theme park, for what the opinion of someone who takes photos of theme park street lamps is worth. And DCA's marvelous "Golden State" section - the nice wooded part to the right - has really benefited from a conversion to a "vintage" theme.

Even with an inadequately themed boardwalk section, a Hollywood area that needs a lot of work and the much-touted new Cars area which, impressive as it is, does nothing for me, California Adventure is simply the best "Disney second gate" currently operating in the United States. Animal Kingdom is still unique and beautiful, but Epcot is starting to become a lost cause and the sum total of DCA tramples the Hollywood Studios theme park into dust. Ride for ride, meal for meal, and park for park, Disneyland's two parks offer as much to as Walt Disney World's four, and in many cases Disneyland simply does it better. And it's been a treat to be near that, if nothing else.

--

Part Two: Investigations in the Field ~ Anecdotes and Observations

That Darn Song
Now, I'm one of the very few who prefers to Florida Small World to the California original. Some of that may be simply nostalgia, but I do think the Florida show is tighter, more thoughtfully arranged, and reaches its main point very gracefully, whereas Disneyland's is just all over the place. However, it wasn't until I had been on Disneyland's version dozens of times that I realized how crucial one single, easy to overlook element of the Florida version is, and it has to do with that song.

I've never understood the cult of Small World hate generated by that song. Small World is one of my very favorite attractions of all, in either version, and I highly suspect anyone objecting to an attraction advocating for World Peace on the basis of being slightly sentimental. Still, I think I finally understand that the disgust seems to stem from the California version and has spread East via the internet and other media from there.

The California version of the ride is closely related to the 1964 World's Fair version, which was designed, constructed and installed in under a year - a remarkable feat in any era. The main difference between the two is the addition of Mary Blair's simply stupendous facade, clock tower, and topiary garden. The ride enters and exits under the clock tower, so two tunnels have been added to the start and end of the ride. These additions bring a thirteen minute boat ride nearer to the seventeen minute mark - about as long as Pirates of the Caribbean, and longer if there is a backup at the exit, which there nearly always is.

The 1964 model of the ride was also constructed shortly before the time MAPO began to standardize the construction of animated parts and figures. As a result many of the scenery details and animals in the ride are clearly made of papier-mache and glitter, which makes the later 1990s additions to the ride easier to spot as they obviously don't fit in. Of course, this points towards the accelerated timetable of the construction of the Disneyland version, but this also is indicative of a somewhat seat-of-your-pants approach which spills over into all areas - including the music.

My appreciation of the fact that the 1971 version of Small World only uses the English version of the song in its final room was sharpened by months of riding the Disneyland version, where it is used literally everywhere. You hear it in the entrance tunnel - a shortened version, which uses only the refrain. You hear it again in the somewhat extended England section. It's heard yet again in the African section, a full version is heard in the long tunnel between the South America and Pacific Islands room, then a mermaid gets a solo version immediately afterwards. Since 2009 there has then been an America room after that and that's all before the very extended finale room, then an exit tunnel where the shortened, refrain-only version is again used. By the time you're sitting in a backup in the exit tunnel you've been listening to the English version of the minute-long song for over half of your very long ride.

In many ways the 1971 ride is almost instrumental - there's no vocals at all in the Africa or Pacific Islands sections and the vocals are spotty in the rooms where they do appear. I think this makes the ride much easier to enjoy, along with a snappy pace - a mere eight minutes. It sacrifices the weird and wild texture and crazy invention of the 1966 ride, but I think somebody was paying attention in the interval between 1966 and 1971 - the Florida version's Africa room not only sounds the same way the World's Fair room sounded, but just as in the World's Fair ride, the last thing you see before exiting the final room of the ride is a Cowboy and Indian. In Florida it's a powerful moment - by the time you reach them you've forgotten all about the US and the fact that it doesn't have a representative room while China and Russia do. The significance of this makes more sense if we think of Small World as Disney's response to the Cold War, and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was still fresh in the mind of the world in 1964 and indeed in 1971.

In the 1966 Disneyland version, the Cowboy and Indian were restaged to appear midway through the Finale room, potentially weakening the ride's original message as a prayer of goodwill, which was possibly further weakened by the insertion of the America room in 2009. But the original point is still there in Florida, for those who want to see it, and now that we know that this staging was present in 1964 but altered in 1966, the 1971 version of this cowboy and Indian figure looks more like a restoration. I think it's significant that so much was changed between 1965 and 1971, and no matter which you prefer, it's worth looking at both as something that real thought was put into.

Oh yeah, and that song. Somebody clearly thought it was a little overdone long before the rise of the internet.



The Eye of Mara
Indiana Jones Adventure is one of those rides I could ride three times a day at Disneyland and not get sick of - the other two were Matterhorn and Pirates of the Caribbean, by the way. It's undoubtedly a bit oversold, especially to East Coast kids travelling West, but it's still terrific fun and, I think, very funny. I think of Indy as Tony Baxter's secret remake of Snow White's Scary Adventures - complete with an unstoppable adversary, a bunch of skeletons, a big rock that almost crushes you at the end, and a structure that's more frenzied and impressionistic than strictly literal.

A couple weeks ago there was a flap amongst the vocal AP culture about Indiana Jones Adventure. It related to changes introduced in the first scenes of the ride, where some snazzy new projection mapping was applied to the "Mara" idol at the start. This was greeted well; what caused the flap is that in their tinkering, WDI changed the "voice of Mara" sound effect.

Let me explain. The gag of the ride is that you, the rider, aren't supposed to look into the eyes of this big idol placed at the end of a hall, for reasons known only to designers of thrill rides and confusing South Asian deities. Originally, the fact that you had indeed broken this rule was signaled by a strobe light effect inside the eyes, followed by a stream of smoke emerging from them. This was never a terrific effect, but at least it was a visual indication of a key story point. As the years went on the effect became less and less reliable, and as a result the whole reason to send you bouncing around a dark ride became very difficult to comprehend.

In the 2013 version, the idol actually opens its eyes, changes its expression, then does some crazy projection stuff. In order to allow you to see this, the timing of the vehicles and the voice needed to be redone completely, to slow down and allow you to see the crazy projection stuff. As a result, the voice needed to be re-recorded anyway, which WDI did, while simultaneously trying to make better sense of the scene. The original Mara voice was the same low tone throughout, but the new version sounded welcoming at first, then angry when offended.

"Please place a delicious cake in my hands"

While the new effect was praised, the voice was splattered with tomatoes. Forum posts filled with angry comments, online petitions were formed - all of the usual things which occur when the internet is offended. Surprisingly, within ten days Disneyland responded and removed the new Mara lines - not restoring the original lines, but with new versions which sound very similar, and the brief uproar ended.

Was all of this a tempest in a teapot? Absolutely. Did I agree with all of the complaints? Obviously not. Do I think Disneyland did the right thing? Absolutely. While the changes did not impact my enjoyment of the ride, for many they did, and they made their opinions known, at Disneyland actually responded.

This is the sort of thing Walt Disney World can learn from - the dissatisfied customer of today is not the customer of tomorrow, no matter how small the slight, and maybe it's time for the Florida management team to start sweating some small stuff, too. Now let's be clear here - small stuff is not a two billion dollar tech roll out, an abbreviated show, or a new special effect, but it can be an audio track, a sign, a prop, or a meaningful detail. Perhaps the removal of an inappropriate piece of music from Liberty Square or the restoration of some audio to the Tiki Room. Perhaps more. I know that as much as I lament the loss of Horizons from EPCOT, it's really the accumulation of small stuff that bothers me most of all in the end, inside the theme park - a courtyard that was walled off, a bad music choice in a certain area, or the poor replacement of a classic sign. This is the sort of easy, cheap stuff that Walt Disney World should be more attentive to - and especially those guardians of traditions, the Imagineers. More than anything, Walt Disney World can take some time to let us longtime fans know that they watch our opinions as closely as they do our wallets, and the "Mara voice" flap is one example of Disneyland's ability to excel in this arena.

"Hello? A little assistance here??"

Send in the Gripes
Which is not to imply that Disneyland unilaterally does everything better than the kids back in Orlando. For example, not every attraction is in fantastic shape.

The Haunted Mansion is the poster child for this, looking increasingly grubby and worn out with each passing year. This is probably due to the popular Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay, which foists suspect decor on the venerable attraction for a quarter of a year. With two refurbishments a year scheduled, the Holiday overlay probably eats up a substantial portion of this facility's yearly budget, leaving the classic attraction with badly aligned projections, broken effects, and graveyard ghosts who are impossible to see through the gloom.

The Jungle Cruise was also subject to "improvements" in 2005 which were more in-name-only. The Disneyland version has always been a patched-together thing, and the 2005 effects were meant to bring a more obvious climax to the show in the form of a piranha attack. I've never been a big fan of the piranhas, but even worse was some meddling which changed the layout and staging of several scenes, especially the Sunken City, which came in the name of "naturalism". Marc Davis designed these scenes to make more visual sense than actual sense, but the new versions lack any sense of guiding the spectator's eyes and the river simply looks empty and poorly staged. Many of the animals along the Jungle river have painted and peeling paint, and a crocodile figure intended to be swatted at by a gorilla has now been placed to pop out of the water directly at the boats - leaving the gorilla to swat at a floating box with some plastic bananas on it. At least they have a nice queue?

And, yes, then there's the parking. If you are a tourist, Disneyland is supremely friendly to your needs - everything is right there within walking distance. If you are a local, you're going to be parking in either a big parking garage or lot and being bussed in. If you don't want to ride a bus or a tram, then it's a very long walk to or from the park - longer than one any tourist staying in any of the nearby hotels will ever make.

This is extended fallout from the late 90s, when Disneyland had a gang problem - no, a for real, actual gangs would protect their "territory" on either side of Tomorrowland or make out with their girlfriends behind Big Thunder Mountain problem. In those days the park sat just on the other side of a parking lot alongside Katella and an annual pass cost under $90. One of the big reasons why Disney arranged the "Disneyland Resort" expansion in the way that they did was to enclose Disneyland, California Adventure, and their three hotels in as much of a "box" as they could. If you arrive at Disneyland via I-5 north - ie from Los Angeles, Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley, LAX or Bob Hope Airport - you're routed directly into a parking garage without ever seeing Anaheim. It's not quite Walt Disney World but it is pretty hermetic.

Proof that somebody had to design it!

The other reason why parking is a problem is because Disney expected to be servicing mostly tourists arriving in a full car instead of Passholders arriving one at a time in individual cars back when all of this was being planned in the mid-90s. Compounding the problem, plans to demolish the Disneyland Hotel and what became the Paradise Pier Hotel and situate parking in a logical location were "value engineered" out of existence, placing the main parking structure in a location that never would have been chosen. Instead of fixing the long-term problematic layout that grew out of Disneyland's initial construction, the "Resort Area" highlighted these problems. No wonder long-time Annual Passholders were fond of remarking for over a decade that they preferred the parking lot to California Adventure.

And, yes, in the past few years Disneyland has begun to suffer from the very same malady that sucked so much of the character out of Walt Disney World in the late 90s. Main Street USA's west block was reconfigured, and the resulting shops are more "Cheesecake Factory" than "Disneyland". The historic Carnation Plaza Gardens were converted to sell Princess merchandise, albeit very beautifully. As part of California Adventure's simply superb Buena Vista Street area, WDI put together very evocative prop windows filled with vintage and historically significant items, which lasted mere weeks until somebody in management realized that this space can be used to sell yet more Disney stuff. Currently filled with circa-2010 potholders and glowering children mannequins, most of the Buena Vista Street windows are now indistinguishable from those found alongside World of Disney a few hundred feet away.

Andy Castro

Most disheartening to me is what is happening in New Orleans Square, the true themed design heart of the park. Designed to house cute shops dotted along quiet sun splashed courtyards, most of the shops are now indistinguishable from those anywhere else in the park. Worse, they're all being squished together - the Royal Courtyard, my personal favorite, has been closed off to make it only accessible from inside the two adjoining shops, as if guests must be corralled directly towards registers instead of being trusted to browse through shops at their leisure. The area has been given over to Pirate merchandise sales and a tarp has been strung overhead, ruining the view of the upper reaches of this area - ie, making the whole reason to have a courtyard pointless. The Disney Gallery, previously one of the best spots in any theme park, has become the exclusive Dream Suite and is now off limits. The Gallery was exiled to Main Street, where it was simply not the same, and sales suffered. It's now been killed off by the displacement of the Disneyana shop, and relegated to a few square feet of wall space in the corner of the Mr. Lincoln lobby. Even the charming Gephetto Toy Shop in Fantasyland is now history.

Of course the internet is now roiling with debate over the impending loss of the Court des Anges at the heart of New Orleans Square, to be made over into an off-limits lobby for an expanded Club 33, the $7,000-a-year "Gentleman's Club" above the streets of New Orleans Square. This is especially bad news because the Court des Anges is literally the defining example of Disney's attention to detail, so well known and beloved that it has been the site of proposals, family photos, and rituals for decades. Disney themselves promoted it as an example of what sets them apart in the 1981 annual report (left). While I understand that Disneyland stands to make a great deal of money by expanding the Club, turning the entire upper section of New Orleans Square - the most defining feature of the defining section of the defining theme park of the world - into a warren of rooms for Millionaires-Only just reeks of bad faith.



Actually a Museum
Despite being located out there for over a year, I actually did very little writing about Disneyland in my year - just this one photo essay from last November. I took some videos and photos, but mostly I spent a long time getting on Disneyland's wavelength, absorbing it as totally as possible. Similar to my "Shrines of the Magic Kingdom" piece, I got very much in tune with certain areas that simply pop with everything great about theme parks.

There's the New Orleans Square Railroad Station and French Market, where one is directly between two of the greatest attractions ever built, and good food and live music is readily available. Simply sitting and watching the Mark Twain take her last trips of the night while the sun slips down behind the Haunted Mansion is my idea of paradise.

In California Adventure there's the Redwood Creek area, wedged between a raft ride and a hotel but which is replete with bubbling brooks, rushing waterfalls, lush pine and even a nature trail up through the mountain, where rafts crash into mine shafts where bats-eyes pierce the darkness and hot springs gently mist the water's surface. It's the one area of DCA that was perfect when the park was new, and although the park has a lot more great places today, it's still the one nearest to my heart.

Then there's the spot in Fantasyland where tea cups spin underneath Chinese lanterns, the Monorail glides by overhead, Matterhorn bobsleds splash into Alpine lakes and boats depart into Monstro's mouth all in the same little spot. John Hench spoke a lot about making theme parks look welcoming, active. Although elbow room is tight, sitting in this area for a minute or an hour is rewarding.

After years of not "getting it" the past year has made me a devoted Disneyland Hotel fan, and as sad as it was to lose Jack Wrather's remarkable Horseshoe Falls, the fact is that it's the only place in the world right now to find Trader Sam's, the best little thing Disney's done in forever. A potent combination of mixed drinks and themed design nirvana, especially for a former Jungle Cruise skipper like me, Sam's is an escape inside the escape - after an hour in its perpetual twilight where the sounds of vintage Jack Wagner music selections play, it's shocking to stumble outside and find oneself in 2013.

Then there's Snow White Grotto, especially at night, which is one of those places that's so perfect that I'm disappointed that Disney cloned it for Tokyo. And given my list above and article above that, I probably don't have to state my love of the Court des Anges, the Blue Bayou right along the water, or the top room inside the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough.


Even if a year was not long enough to extinguish my love of those places, I don't regret having returned because I do feel like I now know that little extra indescribable thing that Disneyland has and Walt Disney World lost: Disneyland is a museum.

Moreso than nearly any other theme park, Disneyland is replete with weird little details that simply are not repeatable. There's the petrified tree in Frontierland, which not even Walt knew what to make of. There's Lafitte's Anchor in New Orleans Square, which was there by the Golden Horseshoe in 1955 and still warns us not to believe everything we read. There's the replica of the Capitol building made by some guy in the 30s and the displays about vintage fire fighting below the apartment where Walt Disney slept. There's Snow White Grotto, an accident of history, and a bronzed Midget Autopia car below the first Disney monorail track. Everywhere you look there's eccentric touches, weird displays, educational plaques and reminders of the past. Everywhere you look, the attitudes of previous generations have left marks for us to gaze and ponder. Although Disney goes to great length to deny it, this is what museums are.

It's that chill of recognition that I've gotten standing at the foot of the Washington Monument or inside the Smithsonian, that electric spark between you and relevant history. It's very much alive at Disneyland. This is where Steve Martin watched Wally Boag and learned comic timing, right there is where Walt Disney cracked wise with the mayor of New Orleans, over there is where Marc Davis rode a mine train and changed theme design history by not liking it. Magic Kingdom is a darn good theme park, but Disneyland is a national treasure, and every student of themed design, or history, or urban planing, or entertainment art needs to see it, and absorb it, and experience it fully.

--

June 22, 1971 - Scandalous John

To cop a Roy E. Disney-friendly nautical allusion here, if up until now this series has ridden smoothly over various waves and bumps and mediocre movies, with Scandalous John I officially hit the doldrums. Too pleasant, amiable, and decently crafted to dislike, but too sedate to get too excited over, I have nearly nothing to say about this movie. It's a reviewer's nightmare - a professional bore of a programmer.

Scandalous John is the molasses-in-winter paced story of an 80 year old cattle rancher who is forced to go on a "cattle drive" (he intermittently rides the single cow, a bull) to show down with a businessman who's trying to foreclose on his ranch land. Straining for a Don Quixote allusion, he brings along his "ranch hand" Pedro, in absurd traditional Mexican garb, who rides a donkey and gawks at the "scandalous" weirdness that ensues. Although all of the marketing materials for John heavily flog this Quixote-like part of the film, it seems to me at best a minor distraction. For one, Don Quixote was a tragic lunatic in a bitter satire of chivalry, and John McCanless is essentially a noble old timer in the modern world. He's given away nearly all of his ranch to impoverished families, he throws money to Mexican children, and lives in a decaying fort.

What Scandalous John is really about is the vanished world of the West. Pedro is thrown out of his friend's truck at the doorstep of the McCanless ranch; it's the last car we'll see for 30 minutes. McCanless goes through the solemn military rituals of yesteryear - loading his gun, saddling his horse, raising his ranch's flag - before galloping out and hogtying Pedro. Later, he rides his horse into town and rides direct into several modern department stores, allowing several bit actors scenes where they sputter and protest in traditional Disney fashion. In the movie's best scene, McCanless corners his adversary in a train car. One by one he insults his business partners and throws them off the caboose, except an entire Mariachi band whom he pays before throwing off.

The elegiac tone is conveyed from the opening scenes and greatly helps to justify the funeral pace of the proceedings. Director Robert Butler has grown in leaps and bounds since The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes; in John, allowed a more leisurely pace and possibly a freer hand by producer Bill Walsh, he uses Leone-like wide landscape shots and long takes at golden hour to establish the end-of-an-era mood. Extended scenes take place in single shots as Butler lingers and lingers on John and Pedro playing guitar together or reminiscing. Aided by Rob McKuen's sedate, whispery score, the film feels like a lost battle on a lonely field even before the narrative begins.


Weirdly, Scandalous John contains more than a whiff of Once Upon a Time in the West - the themes of modernity vs. wilderness, illegal vs. legal behavior, even a villain on a train are all present in Leone's film. The end of the era theme can be extended by being set in the modern world - men on horseback contrasted with mid-60s menswear stores, pistols with contracts. At one point, John and Pedro end up being mistaken for paid performers at a Ghost Town amusement park; in another they have to "save" a woman from a circling group of deadbeat youth. Two native Americans sit on a nearby couch, drinking beer and watching impassively. That can be a metaphor for the whole film, really: a good idea that doesn't always make a good scene.

June 30, 1971 - The Million Dollar Duck

Is it possible to find something funny without really thinking it's all that funny? Despite never once earning my genuine laughter, I was highly entertained by the infectious weirdness of Million Dollar Duck's comedy. For example: while being pursued by the Treasury Department, Dean Jones is escaping on the back of a telephone utility vehicle's extended maintenance basket. As the chase veers into the long Griffith Park tunnel that would become famous in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future Part II, Jones rides the platform like a surf board and careens it into the wall of the tunnel, sending a shower of sparks onto the windshield of the pursuing government employees. They register only minor annoyance.

That isn't funny, but the combination of things onscreen does, indeed, produce humor - both from forces inside the film but also ones outside the film. The lack of comedy creates a sort of anti-comedy which itself becomes funny, exploited in such modernist anti-comedy best personified by David Wain. I laughed, but I also marveled at the superior weirdness of the moment objectively.

I mean really.

The film doesn't start off weird. An uncreative, poorly animated title sequence credited to Ward Kimball sets zero expectations for fun ahead. The film's dour opening reel establishing the depths of Dean Jones' poverty moves at a snail's pace, not enlivened by Sandy Duncan's borderline-offensive airhead wife (she makes applesauce with garlic!). Jones, in his new 20% longer "Seventies" hair, stares dourly at his college diploma and looks worried when his son keeps demanding a puppy. Yet his fortunes turn around when he brings home an irradiated duck who lays - surprise! - eggs with golden yolks. This leads to Dean to unimagined riches until he - blah blah blah - discovers that what really matters is family. Can you believe Disney's been making this same basic movie for a half century?

Where Million Dollar Duck really takes off is when the film begins to imagine what having a gold-producing duck would actually be like in the 1970s. For Aesop, of course, the metaphorical goose that laid the golden egg was a shortcut to riches - gold was money. But in 1970, in a wealth-obsessed country that's been off the gold standard for nearly four decades, actual pure gold is almost worthless. It has to be refined and traded into the government for cash, and then you need to be able to show where you got it. That's why crooks find it easier to print money than try to manufacture gold. This nearly trips up Jones and his equally cash-strapped friend Lee Montgomery until they discover - haha - that Jones' airhead wife can tell the truth, and nobody will believe her (take that, stupid women!)!

Million Dollar Duck is famous as one of only three films Gene Siskel walked out on during his career, which really makes me wonder if he was assigned Monkeys, Go Home! or The Boatniks, because as far as dumb Disney comedies go this one rates as "almost okay". Unlike in his last two Disney movies, Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit and Love Bug, Dean is actually required to be funny here, and he pulls off some pretty good bits. Still, one wonders if there's ever been a leading man so thoroughly committed to being upstaged by a host of animals and objects than Dean Jones. Had these Disney films continued on would he eventually played second banana to a toaster, or a sea monkey?

The film is most amusing in its sometimes truly bizarre visual gags. The Million Dollar Duck stands on the positive and negative terminals of a car battery and lights up like a lightbulb, which inexplicably impresses two teenage slackers: "Hey, he likes it!". They then go on to use the duck to power a variety of car parts, you know, in the way that teenagers would. In another gag, news of the gold-laying duck causes a worldwide financial panic (for reasons never explained), prompting a call to the treasury department from - gulp - President Richard Nixon?? On cue, a framed Nixon portrait in the office appears to have a stern expression. The juxtaposition of Richard Nixon with such a trite, tired piece of comedy business immediately makes something that isn't funny, funny.


A Nixon impersonator shows up again later during a second flurry of global panic, following a tactless joke where an excited Chinese diplomat announces, again for no reason, that China will be able to make cheap golden eggs made out of plastic (???). I was hoping for a third cameo, but then again when an appearance by Richard Nixon is the comedy highlight of your movie, than maybe your movie has bigger problems than that.

--

This brings us to late 1971. In September, the last touches were being applied to the Magic Kingdom theme park which was the centerpiece of the most ambitious Disney project up until that time: Walt Disney World in Florida. Disney had been heavily promoting Walt Disney World for over two years. All of their 1971 theatrical release posters included reminders of the vacation destination along their bottom, and in early 1971 they had prepared a special promotional film - Project Florida - which was inserted into the middle of a television airing of The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin earlier in the year.


From its earliest days onward, Walt Disney World was a huge success, just as Disneyland had been and would continue to be. Yet October 1, 1971 marks an important moment in the history of the Disney company, in the sense that now, with two outdoor entertainment operations on either side of the United States, Disney's role would increasingly be recreation-oriented. When it was just Disneyland and the Burbank studio, Disney was a movie studio with a remarkable, one of a kind attraction. From October 1971 on, they would be a theme park conglomerate that also made movies. The long shadow that Disneyland and Walt Disney World cast in American popular culture would ensure that more adults and children would be admitted into the world of Disney through Main Street, USA and under a train station than ever again through, say, the white gilded book opening at the start of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The theme park product began to overshadow the film product in influence and longevity.

Yet, despite the name on the place, who really deserves the lion's share of the credit for Walt Disney World is Roy O. Disney, who persisted in his brother's dream when most other companies - emphatically including the Disney of today - would have cut their losses. Roy rode every ride, kept the show going, imported talent and resources into a desolate swamp, and then stood next to Mickey Mouse and dedicated the Magic Kingdom not just to his brother, but to the entire company that had kept the ball rolling in the years since his death. Then he died, two months later.

The company Roy Disney left behind was a company that finally was assured a steady stream of income from Disneyland and Walt Disney World, but also now a split identity, in competition with its own legacy for dominance. 1971 is the year Disney stopped being a little movie studio and began to head towards being a corporation, a vast thing of many faces. And it shed both of the Disney brothers, its founders, along the way.

December 13, 1971 - Bedknobs and Broomsticks

"We live in a world of fakery and false images."

There's something about movies that are almost great, or especially weird, that gets me fired up. While I have absolutely no motivation to go out and defend a nearly flawless film like, to keep our conversation relevant to Disney, Mary Poppins, I have in the past mounted a huge defense in favor of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. In our modern lexicon we call these cult movies - films lacking in some basic DNA that makes them fully accepted by wide audiences, but fervently admired by a niche crowd. Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the only true "cult" film of the Age of Not Believing era we're covering here, and the reason why the series takes its name from this film. Bedknobs is no classic, and its frankly all the better for it.

Bedknobs is often knocked as a sub par Mary Poppins, but I think there's more to it than that. It's true and often repeated that Walt licensed the rights to the rights to the Mary Norton books to use as a possible replacement should Poppins fall through. What isn't much discussed is that Walt didn't have a lot to do with Bedknobs in the end, and I suspect had he been forced to use it he would've ended up pushing the material into the shape destined for Poppins, which itself doesn't have much to do with the P. L. Travers books that were their ostensible source. Walt Disney was one of American cinema's greatest adapters of material, and he used source texts as springboards into his own fascinations. This is why Poppins is stuffed to the gills with turn-of-the-20th-century flavor. Had Bedknobs been made in 1965 instead of 1971, we likely wouldn't even recognize it.


In many ways Bedknobs is a dark reflection of Poppins. While Poppins is relentlessly cheery even in the sooty skies of London, Bedknobs is dim and dangerous. Poppins is episodic, while Bedknobs is a continuous line of action. Poppins pulls together all of those components in the final two reels in an emotional climax that feels miraculous, while the chief threat of Bedknobs - the Nazi invasion - is drearily anticipated from the opening credits onwards. Where Poppins ends with a note of reconciliation, Bedknobs features of collection of war-torn families who tentatively come together. And while Mr. Banks in Poppins exclaims in the opening reel:

"It's grand to be an Englishman in 1910
King Edward's on the throne; it's the age of men!"

..his counterpart in Bedknobs, Emelius Browne, feels his best friend in the world is an unexploded bomb. The social and economic structure Mr. Banks feels such mastery of in Poppins will of course turn against him and chew him up, but he emerges in better family and social standing than ever. The England of Bedknobs teeters on the brink of oblivion. London is being blitzed by the Nazis and the sort of beautiful house we see in Poppins is abandoned, a family very much like the Banks hauntingly absent. Poppins is a film of middle class values affirmed; Bedknobs redeems those low on life's social ladder.

This accounts, I think, for the intense attraction some Disney fans have to Bedknobs. When Disney put out Poppins, it was the astonishing highpoint of the studio's art in the Age of Walt. Deprived of their leader and under assault, Disney was in a similar place as the England of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. A studio in decline made a film about an empire in decline.

To make one last comparison without hopefully over laboring the ways in which Bedknobs is actually a departure from Poppins, it's the treatment of magic. Mary Poppins herself is essentially an enigma, the ways she works largely mysterious. She controls events which only make sense in retrospect, and her emotions are volatile and unpredictable. In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, magic is entirely down to technicals, including equipment, intonation, and word choice. Instead of the beneficent but still opaque Mary Poppins, we have Eglantine Price, who basically amounts to Disney's first female nerd. Her lack of experience and steep learning curve keeps the film emotionally centered on her quest to find the spell of Substutiary Locomotion.


You can tell that many talented people at the Disney Studio worked on and enjoyed Bedknobs enough to campaign for its resuscitation, and the Sherman Brothers stand at the front of that pack. While it's true that their Poppins score benefited immeasurably from the constant rewriting process Walt insisted on that's largely absent from Bedknobs, it's easily their best work this side of that perfect songbook. Songs build over and over on twisty, obscenely clever lyrics in classic Sherman style, usually employing music and song to push the film along steadily unlike the more typical "stop and sing" style songs that populate Poppins.

Actually, if there's a major problem with Bedknobs it's that the Sherman songs aren't quite fully allowed to build and flow in the way they should. Songs with a pleasantly pokey patter like With A Flair are constantly interrupted by dialogue and visual gags in a way that suggests an attempt to "modernize" the otherwise classical material, as if somebody went to see Company a few nights before Bedknobs began production and decided to shoehorn a Sondheim-esque approach into the Sherman songbook. thankfully these songs play uninterrupted on the essential 1971 LP release.

Another change here is the three orphans taken in by Miss Price. Compared to the Poppins kids, obviously cast on their ability to look cute and gape on cue, the Bedknobs kids are refreshingly unsentimental. Charlie, the eldest, is an incorrigible swindler, barely held in check by Carrie. Paul, the youngest, believes in Miss Price's magic, but in the matter of fact way that real children believe in everything. At no point is the illusion of magic dependent on a carefully timed cutaway to the kids gaping, and they play an active role in the movement of the story and the discovery of the spell for Substutiary Locomotion - no passive recipients of magic, them.

Also refreshingly unsentimental is the adventure on the Isle of Naboombu. While the "Jolly Holiday" interval in Mary Poppins - simultaneously the most famous and least essential element of that film - was a pastoral, pastel reverie of cafes and carousels, the Isle of Naboombu is genuinely dangerous. From the alarming and entirely unanticipated introduction of fishing hooks into The Beautiful Briny Sea to the ludicrous soccer match, nothing is there just to be cute - these animals are dangerous, both to the humans and to each other. The animals talk and act like dimwitted thugs and delight in causing physical harm. While supervising director Ward Kimball, well into his "what do we do with you now" career at Disney, can perhaps be attributed to this tonal shift, the animation overall has a tougher edge that we're used to seeing at Disney. In the climax of the sequence, as the Star of Astorath is stolen and King Leonidas lights out after the Brits, there's a tension rarely achieved in Disney films of the era.


A sequence at the center of the film encapsulates everything I find fascinating about this film. Looking for the other half of the Spells of Astoroth, the band of travelers is picked up by a cheap hood in Portobello Road and led to the underground lair of Bookman, played by Sam Jaffe in a one-off scene. Bookman at first seems to be a confused kindly old professor - until the door is locked and the knives come out, at which point he pivots dramatically into a sort of nerd Don Corleone. Bookman opens up whole worlds hidden inside Bedknobs, and is a twisted mirror image of Eglantine Price in his self-interest and obsession with Astoroth. Bookman gives Price and Browne the information they need, but plainly intends the cost to be great. It's a weird little scene in the middle of the movie, but the implications and echoes travel deep. Without Bookman, the effects of Substutiary Locomotion wouldn't be as fascinating as they are - so weird, so feared, yet wonderful to see.

Which brings us to David Tomlinson, the actor on whom the emotional effect of Mary Poppins is most dependent, and as Emelius Browne he's in rare form. A pathetic man on society's lowest rung, Tomlinson brings genuine depth and sadness to Browne's quiet sense of defeat and self-regret. While his big spell-casting scene where he finally has to believe in something doesn't have the same impact as Mr. Banks' big scenes, his journey from charlatan street performer to solider is believable and moving despite being only a small component of the climax.


That extended climax, where the Nazis finally make landfall in the dead of night, doesn't have much of a sense of dramatic weight but it's carried entirely by the deployment of themes recurring throughout the entire film - the characters' perception of themselves as failures, the strength of belief vs skepticism, and the clash of ancient and modern finally comes down to a microcosm of the war as all of British history rallies to attack the German soldiers. The ghost army that descends in the night manages to be rather eerie despite remaining firmly kiddie-friendly, and if the big showdown leans a bit too heavily on the comic blackout gags (it does), the retreat of the Germans brings the film to a satisfying close.


Which brings us to the postscript, where newly motivated Emelius Browne ships off to war to fight for England while the orphans-no-more and Price, a family in the making, will wait at home. This brings back the Old Home Guard, unseen since the start of the film, for a fully earned march off the glory set to Sherman's invigorating military march.

I think this final scene and the Old Home Guard song is especially effective for Disney fans because of the sad underlying awareness that the "Old Home Guard" is as much the old guard of Disney as it is of Pepperidge Eye. 1971 is the official end of line for the "cursory Walt involvement" projects that Disney had been working on since 1968, and the start of a new era: Disney without Walt, without Roy.


Bedknobs and Broomsticks was the most expensive film ever made by Disney at that point and earned back only a slim 17 million at the box office - a far cry from the 75 million that greeted the fairly inexpensive Love Bug. Robert Stevenson would not make another film for Disney for three years, and never another film of this level of charm, ingenuity, and coherence. Bill Walsh, the man responsible for so many of the best live action Disney films, was similarly set back by the financial failure of Bedknobs, and the Shermans would not return to Disney in a regular role until the early 1980s to write songs for EPCOT Center.

When the Old Home Guard marches away at the end of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, what we're really seeing marching away from us is the last of Old Disney, Walt Disney's most trusted collaborators out on one last sunset patrol. Bedknobs and Broomsticks isn't just an overachieving cult film, it's the end of an era. And now Walt Disney Productions, adrift after the death of both Disney brothers, would have to believe very hard, much like Charlie, that there was something wonderful in them, too.

"Who wrote the stories of the old brigade?
Who knows the glories of yesterday's parade?
Who's standing firm in your own front yard?
The soldiers of the Old Home Guard, that's who!
The soldiers of the Old Home Guard..."



For next week: The Biscuit Eater, Now You See Him Now You Don't, and Napoleon and Samantha

"The Age of Not Believing" is a movie review series tracing the history of Disney in the years following the death of Walt Disney. It covers three films a week in an effort to see all theatrical Disney films released between January 1967 and December 1973. The entire series can be found here.

The folly of attempting this series really began to sink in early. Around Week Three, it began to feel like I'd never escape awful dramas like Family Band or lousy comedies like Never a Dull Moment. By Week Five, with King of the Grizzlies and The Boatniks in immediate succession, I was ready to throw in the towel. It seems like most of the people I knew "following along at home" gave up well before then. I don't blame them. Life is too short to watch three Disney movies that you know will be mediocre a week.

It's not like Disney was incapable of surprising me. I was entirely dreadingThe Wild Country, which turned out to be one of the better products of its era. Generally when writing these reviews you expect to see a good one, a bad one, and an okay one. If I see two good ones and a bad one then it's way above average.

This week was way below average. Way way below. So let's make this one mercifully short and plow right on through.

March 22, 1972 - The Biscuit Eater

If there's a cinematic equivalent of a long, drawn out, groan of exhaustion, then The Biscuit Eater is it.

Some time ago on this blog I went into some detail on my "bad movie" criteria. Ever since the publication of The Golden Turkey Awards in 1980, Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space has more or less been the "official" worst movie, despite recent competition from such worthy contenders as Manos: Hands of Fate and Troll 2. Despite this, there's one thing these movies tend to have which in some way invalidates their claim of worse-ness: entertainment value, intentional or not. Plan 9 is just plain fun to watch. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it tolerable. I don't fear the lousy B movie, the cut-out birds of Birdemic, or the offensively stupid; I fear the competent, professional, bore.

The Biscuit Eater is set in what may be the 1930s, in rural Georgia, a landscape dominated by fields, nasty neighbors, folksy black folks, and a gas station that doesn't sell gas. It follows the attempts of two friends to train a cast off dog that's rather inexplicably proclaimed to be Just No Good by nearly everyone in the movie, given the dog's penchant for eating eggs. No biscuits are eaten by the dog at any time, although "biscuit eater" is frequently used as an insult, and in a climactic third-act scene, the main characters themselves do make and eat biscuits.


I can't point to a single thing wrong with this movie that makes it so depressingly mediocre. The cast is fine, it moves quickly, it's even got some okay outdoor photography, but at no point does the film ever seem to have a good reason to exist. Director Vincent McEveety, whom we previously saw at work in Million Dollar Duck, shoots everything in what the French called the plan américain or 3/4 shot. It's the sort of movie that saps you of your will to live.

Biscuit Eater is the sort of film that somebody like John Ford could've made something of in the 1930s - a total movie studio sausage, films with this little going on need some atmosphere to tie everything together, and this film has none of that. Never charming enough to rally our sympathy but not bad enough to entertain or frustrate, Biscuit Eater is 90 minutes you could've spent doing anything else with your life.

July 12, 1972 - Now You See Him, Now You Don't

Since starting this series, I suppose I've become something of an expert on Disney comedies. Not a connoisseur - I don't think you can be a connoisseur of something you don't enjoy. But I've seen enough of them now to pick out their tricks, know their beats, and find some comfort in their redundant tics. Down on their luck heroes? Yep. Absurd plot contrivance? Yes. Zany animal comedy? Sure. Borderline offensive yet remarkably dull stereotypes? Yep. Seen 'em all, multiple times a week.

So it is no small thing when I say that Now You See Him, Now You Don't is one of the Disney studio's funnier comedies. In a style where the humor "highlight" can be something like monkeys wearing wedding dresses or pictures of Richard Nixon, Now You See Him has that rarest of elements - a good script that pays off what we came to see and doesn't waste our time.

Now You See Him plays on our familiarity with the source material, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. In this case it's not so much a sequel as it is remake where some of the principal elements are retained, yet shifted, while others are totally inverted. It's like playing the same basic material upside down and backwards.

Now You See Him begins exactly the way Tennis Shoes did: an adorably scruffy group of teenagers tune in on the board meeting of their deadbeat Dean Higgins while he rants, cuts funds, and complains about money. Suddenly, something goes wrong, and Higgins suspects he's being spied on - the kids must jump into action to steal away the flower arrangement that conceals the walkie-talkie, which goes undetected because apparently Dean Higgins didn't see the first movie. Later in the film they use the same trick on A.J. Arno; apparently Cesar Romero didn't either.


This opening sequence sets us up to expect old tricks in new ways, and the film cherry-picks through Tennis Shoes to find the possibilities left open in that first film. The main plot contrivance, involving the invenion of invisibility paint, occurs at only ten minutes into the film, through a truly Goldbergian series of accidents; one suspects that even if Medfield manages to win the science award, the circumstances leading to the creation of the invisibility paint will be impossible to reproduce. But it's really just one in a succession of appealingly random callbacks, thrown in just because, well, the first movie had that too. Even A.J. Arno returns with a hilariously flimsy explanation: "Weren't you arrested?""Oh that - that was just a mistake."

I must admit, perhaps it's pure desperation that's affecting my judgement. According to my notes, it's been since the last Dexter Riley film that a Disney comedy got a genuine laugh out of me, and that was over a month ago. Perhaps pure comedy starvation caused me to find more to enjoy in Now You See Him than is really there.

What makes these things funny, anyway? The Disney house style is pretty consistent, especially as far as these comedies go: stay pretty wide, make sure the set is lit, make sure the image is in focus, then let Kurt Russell/Dean Jones/Joe Flynn show up and do their stuff. Very often the films are shot in the same places, the same stock sets, and the same furniture pieces show up over and over again. Where variables like the director and cinematographer change, chances are very good that other variables are consistent. Eventually, the simple act of watching these things becomes a secret game between the production team and the audience: which situations will they recycle? Fans of the Roger Corman / Vincent Price "Poe" cycle of films will know the game well: where will Roger put those  twisty red candles he bought in 1959 this time? Is the rubber spider still in one piece?


Walt Disney Productions was pitched on a scale of a family operation, and very often the same few people did the same job for every Disney movie. This means that the same cooks in the same pot tended to come up with a product that was fairly homogeneous. The same editors cuts pretty much everything, the same group of old white guys approved each production. Whomever poor Evelyn Kennedy was, she did the music editing on every single Disney movie I've seen in this series so far. Can you imagine a movie studio with one technician who does the same job for every movie?

The result is that there's not even much of an aesthetic difference between an adventure-drama like Scandalous John and something transparently silly like Million Dollar Duck. They're all just Disney Movies, and Disney Movies circa 1972 are chipper, sluggish, and guileless in an amazingly consistent way.

Now You See Him sometimes feels like the victory lap of the invisibility effects devised for Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The vapor-screen process was nothing new, although the Bedknobs effects are startling, they're just one component of a remarkable climax. The same special effects in Now You See Him are fascinatingly arbitrary, employed for entirely goofy if frankly more amusing ends. Robert Stevenson, Bill Walsh, and the Shermans staged a beautiful parade in Bedknobs; Now You See Him is the baggy pants clown at the tail of the parade. The invisibility effects in Now You See Him are cleverly devised enough to impress while not being good enough to actually dazzle. You spend the film watching these effects in amusement but never once saying "how did they do that??"

However the script really goes to town on the invisibility gag. While Tennis Shoes really just came up with a few excuses to have Dexter use his new human computer abilities, every other scene in Now You See Him is some sort of silly concept of a special effect. The film ends the way every Disney film has ended since The Love Bug: with a car chase, except this time it's Arno and Cookie in an invisible car.

These Disney comedies live or die on making their audience crack a smile. That doesn't make them ambitious or old fashioned or good or bad or anything but frighteningly similar. It may not be noble, but Now You See Him, Now You Don't is one of the most successful of these movies, and if you're in the mood for it, it's exactly what you want.

I wish I could say the same of many other of these.

July 19, 1972 - Napoleon & Samantha

Napoleon & Samantha offers and object lesson in what's missing from the otherwise somewhat similar The Biscuit Eater - both films are set in a vague time period which could be contemporary but seems far away from modernity. Both include (but are not "about") a bond between two children, in this case between a young boy and young girl (Samantha isn't written to be a tomboy but because she's played by Jodie Foster the character does have that edge) and an animal that bonds them. They both feature Johnny Whitaker as the boy.

Let's begin with direction. Biscuit Eater was shot in a deadening succession of medium shots. Absolutely nothing was framed in any way to suggest the feeling of a place - just actors existing in whatever vague environment wasn't blocked out by the contours of their head.

Director Bernard McEveety - father of The Biscuit Eater's  Vincent McEveety - has at least some inclination of what a tripod is for, using a variety of high and low angles, wide shots, and some effective zooms to convey the feeling of the small pacific northwest town the film is set in. The intense traditionalism and isolation  of the community becomes important in the third act, when the town turns against Michael Douglas' (yes, THAT Michael Douglas) youth character Danny.

The first third of this film is terrific. Anchored entirely by Will Geer as Whitaker's Grandpa, the two lead an idyllic life, even accumulating a lion, until Grandpa's health fails him. Geer's death bed scenes are terrific, humane and understanding without being patronizing. Whitaker's empathy with Geer allows him to play several scenes well outside his range and age as Napoleon first processes grief. Napoleon hires Danny from a line at an employment agency because Danny needs $4.50 to buy a textbook, and the adventure begins.


Sadly once Geer exits the film much of the spark leaves as well. Whitaker and Foster end up alone in the wilderness with their pet lion, Major, to help them fend off predator attacks recycled from The Incredible Journey. This film was produced by Winston Hibler and this is Hibler territory for sure, complete with a comedic appearance by stock-footage squirrels.

Once the two kids and one cat crest the mountain to Danny's farm, the film shifts once again, to become the all-Michael Douglas show. At the very least this sequence has the considerable charm of Douglas as the "hippie" kid Danny, and even Buddy Baker's score pulses with sixties rock grooves as Danny is arrested and then escapes from the Cops in a motorcycle-vs-car chase that's appealingly extended.

In the end Napoleon and Samantha rates as "just okay" as far as Disney features go. Films like this put reviewers in a fix: everybody in front of the camera is either young or inexperienced, so it's hard to justify being too hard on them, yet the format of a review demands some sort of appraisal. Johnny Whitaker is memorable but simply isn't a very good actor. Compared especially to the two Disney "stars" he most resembles, Bobby Discoll and Kevin Corcoran, Whitaker simply lacks technique. In the "exciting" bear attack scene he basically ends up shouting and gesturing while the trained lion and trainers do all the dramatic work. Jodie Foster in her first theatrical film brings an interesting edge to Samantha despite being required to trudge around in an appallingly short skirt. Foster would shortly emerge as a remarkable actor, but she's a long way off here even from her teenage roles for Disney in Freaky Friday or Candleshoe. Still, it's alarming to consider that the little girl we see here in Napoleon & Samantha will be playing a child prostitute in Taxi Driver just four years later.

That leaves Michael Douglas, who isn't required to do much and does what he can with a nothing part. Danny is supposed to come off as enlightened and intelligent - in one scene he's introduced reading a book on a tree stump in the middle of a goat pasture - and his crazy chase with the cops is both well-intentioned and fun. This is sub-pre-career Douglas, before even his start as a producer, so we should not judge him too harshly. Napoleon & Samantha may be entirely disposable but for as bad as these Disney movies can get, it isn't too bad.

October 18, 1972 - Run, Cougar, Run (Unavailable)

November 26, 1972 - Chandar the Black Leopard of Ceylon (Unavailable)

Here's another batch of two that we'll not be reviewing because they are, officially, unavailable. Run, Cougar Run appears to be an amiable James Algar animal movie - this time, with no jovial narration, about a mountain lion and her three cubs attempting to escape from a group of hunters. Alfonso Arau, who played Paco in Scandalous John, returns with his formidable guitar to provide the human interest.

This one appears to be a great deal better than the average studio animal adventure, and can be viewed in total on YouTube.

 Chandar, in comparison, has totally vanished.

This is one of those movies that IMDb says exists. Wikipedia mirrors the IMDb information, but aside from those two source-points, this film is totally nonexistent. We know it's another Winston Hibler film and that's about it. The secondary source I've used on this project - Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley's remarkably through The Disney Studio Story - doesn't even mention it despite including every Walt Disney Educational title and every theme park or souvenir movie.

Intrigued, I backtracked to the 1971 and 1972 Walt Disney Productions annual reports, where no mention of Chandar could be found either. Does this film exist?

While we can't say with any confidence than anything titled Chandar, the Black Leopard of Ceylon and produced by Winston Hibler is entirely promising, at the very least the film offers the promise of Sri Lankian landscapes and an escape from the American Southwest/Pacific Northwest where all of these Disney animal adventures are set. More than anything, in an era when information about nearly everything in instantly available and can probably be downloaded, there are corners of film history that the bright light of the digital age has still not illuminated.

Next Week: The Magic of Walt Disney World, Snowball Express, The World's Greatest Athlete, and Charley & the Angel

"The Age of Not Believing" is a movie review series tracing the history of Disney in the years following the death of Walt Disney. It covers three films a week in an effort to see all theatrical Disney films released between January 1967 and December 1973. The entire series can be found here.

December 22, 1972 - The Magic of Walt Disney World

This film was released bundled with Snowball Express, for those who want to recreate the experience at home.

Promoting the theme parks with documentaries is an old idea, going back to at least 1954, but the two Disney theme park theatrical films are really in a class of their own. Relatively widely known today is the terrific 1956 Disneyland USA, thanks to a pristine transfer for DVD in 2008. The 1956 film is great and invaluable, but the one I'd do unspeakable things for a perfect copy of is the 1972 Magic of Walt Disney World. It's the Citizen Kane of theme park promotional films.

For longtime fans of the Florida property, the opening of the film is almost unbearably poignant. Narrated by Steve Forrest in what is bizarrely enough his final Disney gig, as Buddy Baker's melancholy "Walt Disney World" theme rises and the camera soars over a brand new Cinderella Castle, it's impossible to not get a little choked up.

Compared directly to the Disneyland we see in Disneyland USA, which is often unrecognizable, The Magic Kingdom has changed comparatively little since 1972. Things are missing all around - no Tomorrowland, no Pirates, no mountain range - but even a casual visitor would readily identify the bulk of the park. As a result, Magic of WDW has something Disneyland USA doesn't quite rise to, which is nostalgia. It may be because the early years of Disneyland today seem so alien and remote, a park a bit closer in tone and execution to something like Pacific Ocean Park than the space-age wonderland it became. Disneyland USA is consistently mind boggling and through, but it doesn't quite make the leap to lived experience that you get in Magic of WDW.

If you watch enough theme park promotional film of the era, eventually you get to where you've seen all of the same shots over and over. The same basic footage found in From The Pirates of the Caribbean To The World of Tomorrow or Disneyland Showtime ended up being used over and over until well into the late 80s. If you're a fan of theme parks this means you spend a lot of time seeing the same stuff. The film which this is ostensibly the companion piece to is The Magic of Disneyland, a 1968 16mm compilation of all of the best shots of Disneyland in the Disney film library. The Magic of Disneyland is terrific, but for seasoned fans, it's also all literally been seen before.

The Magic of WDW greatly benefits from being entirely new footage and also benefits from  being obligated to cover a wider scope of material in a limited amount of time. The attractions which receive the most luxurious coverage are The Hall of Presidents, Country Bear Jamboree, Mickey Mouse Revue, and Jungle Cruise, where not a single reused shot from Disneyland may be found. By leapfrogging over something like Haunted Mansion, the film is able to spend its time highlighting the recreation and lagoons which have always been Walt Disney World's secret weapons - the shots of the sunlight sinking below Fort Wilderness or a sidewheeler steaming across a dusky Bay Lake are extremely powerful evocations.


The distinctions between what's a great sell and merely a good one are hard to delineate. Perhaps ultimately the most marvelous thing about The Magic of WDW is what's not there as much as what is. With wide, circling shots of the park, the barren Tomorrowland, the empty Frontierland, the dead-end Adventureland are all on full display. The park we see here is similar enough to be affecting but different enough to be novel.

Disney made other terrific promotional films - there's A Dream Called Walt Disney World, from 1981, and A Day at Disneyland, the early 90s in-park souvenir video. A personal favorite of mine is Disneyland Fun, a Sing-Along VHS that has enough of a following to have attracted a DVD release. But for my money none of them quite touch The Magic of Walt Disney World for the indefinable quality that brings viewers there. And it does it all without a single appearance by a Disney character squawking into the camera.

December 22, 1972 - Snowball Express

We've reached a milestone here with Snowball Express: this is the final Dean Jones film in our series, and with the conclusion of this entry we have watched the bulk of his career at Disney.

There's two films he made for Disney before the death of Walt - That Darn Cat and The Ugly Dachshund - and he'll return in a few more years for two more dips into the well, with The Shaggy D.A. and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. In both of those films, Dean is a sort of second banana to another Disney star - a fairly convincing older Kirk Cameron in D.A. and yet another spin as the third ring in a circus dominated by a crazy mechanic and prop vehicle. As a result, it's fair to say that we've seen the section of Jones' career which fixed him in memory as a representative of the era at Disney. With Snowball Express, he passes that honor onto Don Knotts.

Yet looking at the world of performances in Disney films, it's both a better and more diverse field than you may suspect. Take Steve Forrest, who for a few years seems to have been groomed to be a Disney star in the vein of Fred MacMurray - the Classic Dad. He's excellent in Rascal and fine in The Wild Country, But that's where the trail ends before Forrest goes back to TV work. Then there's David Tomlinson, the "secret weapon" packed into Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Other actors did similarly excellent work in less distinguished movies - Brian Keith is terrific in Scandalous John, but that film was a flop and is rarely seen today. And of course Kurt Russell is terrific in everything he's in but we think of Russell's career as a bigger thing than just Disney whereas Dean Jones is thought of exclusively for his time at the Mouse House.

Make no mistake: if this blog series had a mascot, it would be Dean Jones. So what makes him the definitive Disney actor of the era?

Well, for one, I've found that these Disney films tend to rise or fall on a strong leading actor and a sense of some kind of atmosphere. Jones was, strictly speaking, reliable. I feel that calling him "reliable" is almost an insult in light of the work he did in impossible situations: how many other actors could realistically have a reconciliation with a car? Watch the other Herbie movies: plenty of other actors failed where Jones succeeded.

So we can also say that Dean was reliable in ways that were complimentary to the kind of movies Disney made but probably seemed an unmarketable skill set in other studios.

And, Jones had some range. Not a lot, but the movies he starred in didn't require much. He could be dramatic on cue, evoke sentiment, and quietly carry the story with dignity. The actor Jones most often reminds me of is Jimmy Stewart, especially in his younger years. Not a performer of incredible range, with the right material and director Stewart could be incredibly effective, even scary. Jones has a similar physical build, a similar common-guy persona, and a similar skill set.

In that vein, Snowball Express may be the best use of his talents of them all. With no talking dogs, cars, or invisible pirates to distract, Jones carries the entire film, and he does it very well. Paired again with the master of lackadaisical wide shots Norman Tokar and producer Ron Miller, who inexplicably were allowed to continue making films after the abominable Boatniks, Snowball Express is fondly remembered for good reason - it's the most watchable and enjoyable Disney comedy of its era.

A ten minute prologue which begins with a defeated Dean Jones as another Man in the Grey Flannel Suit surrogate and ends with Jones stalking towards the camera shouting "Silver Hill, Colorado!" shows Jones receiving an inheritance and saying goodbye to his hated desk job in a way most of us dream we could. His "Grand imperial Hotel" turns out to be a rambling dump, but he's determined to turn it into a ski resort - against all odds.

That almost everything in Snowball Express works is a surprise. Perhaps enervated by the unusual climate and location, Tokar and cinematographer Frank Phillips create an endless winter, the snowdrifts visually offset by the decaying Hotel Imperial in a way which, bizarrely, puts me in mind of Doctor Zhivago. The art department really went to town on the decaying Hotel Imperial, and that hotel has more atmosphere than the last three Disney movies put together. Johnny Whitaker, who spent most of last week proving that he cannot carry a film alone, provides a perfect comic foil for Jones and his wife Nancy Olson. Harry Morgan is nearly unrecognizable as a washed out drunk living in the barn behind the house. Even the resolution is somewhat surprising - the film allows Jones to lose, over and over, even when we're positive he's about to succeed, only to demonstrate that he's already won.


Snowball Express is a difficult film to write about. It works well, but it's hard to describe any comedy with little on its mind besides good natured jokes without stepping on the jokes by describing them. What can be said is that Snowball is literally the product of plugging together every component that ever worked in another Disney movie into one film. There's an unexpected windfall (Million Dollar Duck) of a property inheritance (Monkeys Go Home), computer antics a'la Dexter Riley, a beleaguered but determined father (Absent Minded Professor), a sassy son (take your pick), a climatic race (The Love Bug), and the grizzled sidekick who saves the day (Blackbeard's Ghost). It shouldn't work at all, it should feel like desperate tire spinning like Million Dollar Duck does, but the unusual location, snappy editing, a funny script, and Dean Jones all conspire to pull it off.


If anything the comparative excellence of Snowball demonstrates that Disney already had all of the elements of a successful version of that one movie they kept making laid out in front of them and for one reason or another failed to capitalize on the constituent parts. Snowball Express makes it all look easy. Along with Now You See Him, Now You Don't it's the most successful and purely enjoyable "Disney Live Action Comedy" of its era.

February 14, 1973 - The World's Greatest Athlete

Comedy is a fickle thing. For every W.C. Fields, Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, or Jerry Lewis, there's a whole herd of comedians waiting in the wings to whom time has not been as kind to. Some are forgotten but still talented, but a great deal have simply been rendered obsolete by social change and taste. A relic like The General may be one of the few silent films of its era to command audience attention, admiration, and money today, but in 1927 it was a bomb. The comedy that beat it at the box office? Hands Up!, a forgotten (and lost) western, roundly praised in tones much more glowing than those afforded Keaton's masterpiece.

I'm saying all of this in the earnest hope that at one point in time, The World's Greatest Athlete was at least... funny. That may be needlessly optimistic. The New York Times wrote of it in 1973 as it inexplicably played at the Radio City Music Hall: "It should be stressed, however, that this ribbing of the Tarzan myth runs a good, clean course that should grab all red-blooded sports fans up to and including the 14-year-old group. It might be added that everyone from coach Amos to Jan-Michael Vincent, in the title role, athletically tries without much success to make all this good-naturednonsense funny."

The World's Greatrst Athelete stars John Amos as a beleaguered college coach on the ropes with his employers who discovers a (white) Tarzan surrogate during a safari to Africa which mostly involves Amos and his irritating henchman Tim Conway standing in front of process screens. If nothing else, it's momentarily heartening to see Amos as the comedy star of a Disney film. Black actors in Disney films prior to this moment appeared in roles ranging from invisible to demeaning, with the exception of James Baskett in Song of the South, and the years between the release of that film and our own time has made appreciating his performance very difficult. Amos' race isn't even a peripheral concern in Greatest Athelete - it only seems to be there to get Amos to Africa where he can discover Nanu, the athletic jungle boy who runs faster than a cheetah. Whatever good will is generated by Amos, however, quickly dissipates as the film introduces an African Witch Doctor, played by Roscoe Browne, in full cartoon mode.

Athlete unspools for a soul-deadening 93 minutes through every expected stock plot situation. The only surprise comes at the one hour point when the Witch Doctor Gazenga shrinks Tim Conway, for no reason whatever, to three inches tall. Conway stumbles around through unfunny situations in impressive "giant size" sets, in a complication that seems to have been invented to get an extra ten minutes into the run time. I laughed at all of this exactly once - in a gag where Conway tries to "muscle into" the frame during a TV interview with Amos, and even that joke was repeated again - and again - and again - grinding what was the only funny, spontaneous moment of the film into submission.

About halfway through this most supremely unfunny of comedies I began to get an alarming feeling that all of this was starting to feel familiar - the endless panning shots, the endless zoom shots, and the endless panning shots that end as zoom shots were too much like something I had seen before.

A quick check on IMDb proved me to be correct - Robert Scheerer also directed the inane, endless Grand Opening of Walt Disney World TV special, a 90 minute extravaganza that reportedly sent Roy O. Disney into a rage. Badly, quickly shot in a Magic Kingdom still under construction and punctuated with lousy wide shots and crash zooms, The World's Greatest Athlete is just what you're looking for if you want more of the comedy stylings from the team behind this:

"Life is a kumquat!""What?""As somebody said?"

And this:

"Come on , Herbie!"

World's Greatest Athlete wears out it welcome at about minute 40 but it keeps on trucking like the titular character. It quickly becomes a sour experience. The tenacity of coach Amos and Conway quickly becomes exploitative and unsympathetic, and we end up wanting to see Nanu return to Africa, which he ultimately does. Amos quits his job at Merrivale and travels to get away - this time to China, which we know because he sits right by the Great Wall, because this film trades almost entirely in generalizations. There, he sees a young Chinese boy who runs faster than a horse, and the see-it-coming-a-mile-away joke complete the cycle as he takes off after the boy to bring him back to America.

I'd like to point out in 1966, Disney changed their plans to feature Louis Armstrong as King Louie in Jungle Book for fear of causing offense by casting a black man as a monkey. This same company made a movie in 1973 where an African Witch Doctor stops a photo shoot to place a bone in his nose. Progress?????

Comedy may be hard, but watching The World's Greatest Athlete is even harder. It features not one funny joke, one amusing scene, or one likable character. It's embarrassing to see Disney trading on the goodwill generated by their name to be passing stuff like this off on the general public.


March 23, 1973 - Charley and the Angel

One of my favorite movie stories: in the early 80s, a young director named Robert Zemeckis had a script for a lighthearted fantasy comedy script he was shopping around town. Every studio turned him down; in the early 80s in the wake of Animal House, the only comedies studios were interested in making were raunchy sex comedies. "Take it to Disney!", every studio suggested. Out of options, Zemeckis took the movie to Disney. Card Walker flipped out. "Are you crazy? You've got this scene with the guy and his mother in the car -- this is incest! We can't make this movie!"

That script was called Back to the Future.

At a certain point from the 60s onward, as movie studios raced to stay ahead of social trends, Disney was the only studio in town for a certain kind of movie. The early 70s was the era of disaster movies, The Godfather, and The Sting. The Exorcist was causing what can be mildly described as mass hysteria in theaters. The highest grossing comedy around was Blazing Saddles. Nothing the rest of the motion picture industry was doing was remotely compatible with Disney's simple comedies.

So for a script like Charley and the Angel to have a shot at getting made it really had to be a Disney movie. As far as Disney movies from the early seventies go, it's a good one, and it dominated the box office throughout Easter 1973. Still, being a Disney film comes with come conditions and Disney sometimes giveth as much as it taketh away. Charley & the Angel compactly demonstrates the upsides and downsides of being Disney in 1973.


Set in the Great Depression at the tail end of Prohibition, Charley features an alarmingly hoarse sounding Fred MacMurray as an uptight hardware store owner who's visited by an angel played by Harry Morgan sent from heaven to deliver his final judgement. Heaven, however, can't quite make up its mind how and when it will do Charley in, and in true Hollywood tradition the imminent end of his life gets Charley to thinking about all the things he wishes he'd done....


You've probably seen one of these movies before, but what you probably don't know is that they have an official name: film blanc, derived from the better known film noir. Both styles emerged from the golden age of Hollywood and both styles deal with folly and mortality, but while film noir is all deceit and annihilation, film blanc is about transcendence, ennobling the human spirit in its darkest moments.

The most famous film blanc of all, and the film Charley & the Angel most resembles, is It's a Wonderful Life, but there are many others. There's the well-remembered Topper and Topper Returns, as well as Blithe Spirit, representing one common variation on the theme that protecting angels are ghosts. Others play on a Faust variation, such as the charming but non-PC Cabin in the Sky, while others such as Peter Ibbetson play on darker themes. Morality is a common thread: Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait beautifully redeems a kind-hearted playboy but makes no judgement on his sexual profligacy.

One reoccurring theme in Film Blanc is heaven-as-bureaucracy. In Fritz Lang's film Liliom from 1934, Charles Boyer ascends to heaven past mechanical-looking angels after committing suicide and finds himself in a celestial duplicate of the Paris police stations he'd haunted in life - down to the same old guy behind the desk with the same defective stamp. Maybe the grand daddy of all films blanc is Powell and Pressburger's over-the-top A Matter of Life and Death, where heaven is some weird black and white stentorian Tomorrowland observatory looking out over a Technicolor world.

There's a bit of this left over in Charley. Charley's angel reports secondhand confusion in heaven as Charley continually avoids heaven's fatal blows, the official decision on his doom, is, as they say, mired in delays. This is exactly the sort of uncertainty films blanc often play with - as the creepy, Nosferatu-like angels in Liliom say, it would be too easy if death were the end of everything.

Not to detract from MacMurray, but Harry Morgan as the angel is nearly the whole show here. Morgan delivers his lines in an amusing clipped dialect that I suppose is intended to recall the era he hails from - the turn of the 20th century. He occasionally offers insight into the afterlife of an angel - he only vaguely recalls his life on earth - and gets into some amusing hi jinx with roller skates. Occasionally only his iconic hat, cane and gloves materialize, briefly turning the film into an Invisible Man movie.

The film gets into murky water the Disney studio is ill-suited to traverse in the final third, when Charley's young boys are encouraged to get jobs and end up running liquor to a speakeasy. The operation is overseen by Richard Bakalyn, who by now has become Disney shorthand for "=gangster". Then the Big Boss unexpectedly arrives to take over the operation and a harebrained car chase ensues, introducing a horrible Vito Corleone impersonation and deflating the easygoing mood.

This is what I mean when I say that Charley & the Angel represents the benefits and drawbacks of Disney in 1973. No other studio would touch a film like this, but Disney is repeatedly stuffing things into Charley just because, well, it's what they do. There's a gangster because, um, it's a Disney movie. There's a lame car chase because, um, it's a Disney movie. One reason why films blanc have found and retained a loyal fan base is because the supernatural subject and heavy atmosphere often bring out the best in film art. The movies aren't just uplifting and lighthearted; the subject matter nearly demands cinematic audacity.

Compared to even a studio sausages like Cabin in the Sky or Peter Ibbetson, Charley is remarkably tamped-down. While it never affects the film badly from the perspective of a Disney film, as a film fan I was disappointed to see promising material end up so predictable. As it stands it's a rare dramatically successful film from this studio in this era, but with a bit more dramatic weight and a director unburdened from the need to make a film of a certain look and house style, Charley could have been exceptional.

The film is based on a book called The Golden Evenings of Summer, which I've looked for details about online, and the book seems to be a Dandelion Wine-style nostalgic reverie with no angels of any kind. If this is true, then Disney deserves credit for building a film up around it that plays well to their strengths just as quickly as we point out their weaknesses. Charley's main pleasures may be atmosphere instead of incident, but it's a fairly pleasant way to spend your evening.

  The Final Week of The Age of Not Believing will be coming soon. The films are One Little Indian and Robin Hood.

 "The Age of Not Believing" is a movie review series tracing the history of Disney in the years following the death of Walt Disney. It covers three films a week in an effort to see all theatrical Disney films released between January 1967 and December 1973. The entire series can be found here.

June 20, 1973 - One Little Indian

That kid's face on the poster pretty well summarizes how appealing this movie is.

On February 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in a bid to raise awareness of their cause and protest the ineffectual American government. It was, in a larger sense, the start of a new era in the United States for an awareness of ongoing discrimination against native peoples.

The Western, the traditional carrier of the Americans vs. Natives dramatic conflict, was dying out, and even if it hadn't been, the general perception of the Wounded Knee protests as a turning point would have made the form totally untenable, except in revisionist westerns.

As it is, Hollywood wouldn't even touch the subject until the early 90s wave of "enlightened" Westerns which either featured exclusively white on white violence (Tombstone) or extended the treacly branch of peace (Dances With Wolves). Disney themselves fanned the flames by producing Pocahontas in 1995, a star-crossed lovers fantasy which just so happened to be set against the backdrop of the European colonization of North America. This time the general American population protested loudly, while some Native groups gave the film a tentative thumbs up for its message of cross-racial cooperation.

Back in 1973, while all this was just beginning, Disney was producing a low budget Western called One Little Indian. Do you think they were using these political events to tap into the zeitgeist and produce a film of lasting meaning? Nope. This is a movie where a guy gets dragged by a camel crotch-first into a cactus.


Starting in medias res, One Little Indian is a well-shot and fast paced adventure that never colors outside the lines. The film is structured as a chase, with military defector James Garner being pursued by a villain who's so poorly sketched we're not even sure why the guy goes to such great lengths to catch his prey. But this is a Western and the driven, obsessive villain has been around since the earliest days of these "oaters".

The One Little Indian of the title, incidentally, isn't so much an Indian as a kid on the lam effecting a handy disguise. There's some vaguely defined objective to his quest - he has to get to a reservation where his mother awaits - but the film blows past this so quickly it never registers as a real end goal. Meanwhile, James Garner is set to be court-martialed for refusing to destroy an Indian village; he's captured and hung but the not-Indian boy manages to destroy the gibbet and save his life. Perhaps seeing an opportunity to cut twenty minutes out of the film, the commanding Army officer decides he's already been hung once and spares his life.

This, incidentally, did happen in real life often enough, but never to my knowledge with this result. Usually they'd go back and keep trying to hang the convicted until it worked.

The real star of the movie is Rosie the Camel, the tempestuous steed Garner chooses to escape with. In what appears to be an awkward attempt to append a Disney cute-crazy animal story to a mediocre Western, Rosie gets the bulk of the better scenes and even dies in the final reel. Although One Little Indian is fast moving and never unpleasant, this conceit just plain doesn't work. We don't care for the camel half as much as the
film thinks we do. Even the poster has the camel as the star, as if the idea of a camel in a Western is inherently hilarious. These are the sort of conceptually mediocre touches that consistently drag Disney product down. "Oh ho ho, look, a camel in a Western!""Oh oh boy, Tim Allen has a spider on his head!"

Bernard McEveety is back in his final film, and to be fair he acquits himself much better than he did in Napoleon & Samantha. Many shots in One Little Indian have a pleasantly Fordian quality, and Jerry Goldsmith (!!!) turns out a decent score which classes the whole enterprise up a good deal.

About halfway through the picture, Garner runs across an isolated farm where Vera Miles and her daughter Jodie Foster are packing up to leave on the next stagecoach following the death of Miles' husband. For an extended sequence at the dinner table, the rest of the film melts away... the not-charming kid, Rosie the camel, the deserter subplot, the need to watch this Disney movie and the entire Age of Not Believing blog series vanishes and we see Garner and Miles, two good actors playing a scene with humanity and warmth. It's old-fashioned film values that work as well today as it did in 1973. It's the sort of simple pleasures that more Disney films could stand to have.



November 8, 1973 - Robin Hood

The early passages of this review concerning the context and development of Robin Hood is indebted to Andreas Deja on his blog Deja View, which is a treasure trove of animation history and theory. I'm honored to be able to present some of his observations and material in this new context.

Robin Hood is very much the inverse of The Aristocats. Aristocats is full of good material that never coalesces into a satisfying whole. Robin Hood is a mixed bag of the inspired and the mediocre which somehow becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I really like Robin Hood, but I'm not really sure why. It's wildly inconsistent. The story is an absolute mess. Of all the Disney feature films, this one feels the most like a Saturday morning cartoon.

Yet posterity has largely reflected my inflated opinion of it. It's the only of the Disney 70s films to be still widely watched. If you asked people to start listing Disney movies they'd eventually hit Robin Hood, well behind the major 90s hits but still ahead of something like The Fox & the Hound or The Rescuers. It's well remembered and it's one of those Disney movies that gets a new video release every few years without having to be retired to the "Vault" to artificially inflate demand.

What's more, in speaking to others about this film, I got fairly near-unanimous agreement: it was generally well liked and mostly acknowledged for not being very good. So, we must ask: what is it about this particular film that manages to overcome its limitations - and the toxic reputation of Disney in the 70s - to work, generation after generation?

We'll get there, but first, I'd like to go back in time to discuss what made this movie what it is. To say Robin Hood was a troubled production may be a mild understatement: it was a mess.

In his episode of the early 80s Disney television show "Disney Family Album", Ken Anderson describes the genesis of the idea this way:

"I thought I'd put everything together. What did the animators most enjoy doing? They most enjoyed working in the manner we did on Song of the South. Where could I get animal creatures that were somewhat like Song of the South and in what kind of a picture? Sort of a charade - a burlesque of some well known fantasy story - like a Robin Hood - ah ha!"

A great deal of Anderson's early development work on Robin Hood is very interesting. Ken worked hard on getting a variety of shapes and forms into his characters - Robin is a small, scruffy fox who is virtually loomed over by the villainous Prince John. The Sheriff of Nottingham is fat but forward-heavy and tall whereas Lady Cluck is short and bottom-heavy wide. Nearly all of the Robin Hood characters have brilliantly iconic silhouettes - shapes that define and sell their personalities.


Ken's early design for Robin has a youthful appearance: a hat too large for his head, thin neck, and long nose (he also wears pants, which the final Robin does not, because what's better than a pantsless criminal?). This early model sheet has the cavalier attitude down pat - I especially like Robin shooting arrows with his feet. In a 1973 interview Milt Kahl casually revealed that they went through eight different models for Robin Hood in the film, and three different voices - Tommy Steele, Brian Cox, and the final choice of Brian Bedford. This early version is clearly the Tommy Steele version.

Now, as cute as these Robins are, to me the champion in the film Robin Hood is Milt Kahl, who animated Robin and Marian and had his fingers in a lot of other character designs and actions as well. Milt's early passes on Robin retained Ken's youthful fox, with an effect that reminds me a bit more of a character we'd see in An American Tail than in a Disney film from 1973. To his credit, Milt fought to push Robin in an older, more handsome direction - with a thicker neck, less pointed nose, and more mature body language. Milt also went to great lengths to retain the sense of an anatomy of a real fox, which he was relatively alone in the production for insisting on. Robin Hood carries the picture on his confident shoulders, which I'm not sure the jangly Tommy Steele version could have. Milt's perfectionism saved the picture.

Equally brilliant although less frequently seen onscreen is Kahl's Maid Marian. A worthy companion of Kahl's other great leading lady - Lady of Lady and the Tramp - Marian manages to be vivacious and romantic despite remaining 80% covered in a ludicrous outfit the entire run time (if you think it's easy to draw over-dressed characters, try it sometime). Kahl improved Anderson's interesting design - which fluctuated radically between a two-eared headdress and a typical princess cone hat - by adding a virginal veil framing her entire upper body, suggesting flowing feminine hair and simultaneously handing himself a nightmare technical job of having to animate loose material flowing and shifting weight. Despite being a floating face and hands inside a dress, Marian has the screen presence of a star. Robin's festive reds and greens contrast and compliment Marian's oranges, pinks and purples. The two have real screen chemistry and are the two most accomplished and interesting character designs to hail from the animation unit in the 70s.

 As a production, Robin Hood is just plain unfinished. In the opening sequence, the animation unit hearkens back to past glories of the Walt era with the traditional "storybook" open; but this turns out to be a ruse. The book that opens is the classic story of Robin Hood - not the story that will be told - and we zoom in, past the text, towards the ornamental rooster at the top of the page. The zoom ends with an abrupt cut to an animated image, strongly suggesting that a planned transitional effect where Allan-a-Dale would've come to life on the page during the zoom was budgeted out for time or money. That's in the first minute of the film, and it's a fairly accurate summary of what's coming.

Past Disney animated films had cut corners. In 1959, Walt wanted to shutter animation production entirely in the wake of the failure of Sleeping Beauty, and the 60s films are full of small scales and smaller ambitions. But Robin Hood has an unprecedented amount of stuff that's recycled, reused, or just plain old jettisoned. The most infamous of these is in the "Phony King of England" number, which has new animation here and there but is mostly made up of action reused from The Aristocats and Jungle Book. There's a small cottage industry made up just of YouTube videos showing splitscreens of these recycled shots, so there's no reason for me to go over them again here.

(Milt Kahl)

What's interesting to me isn't that these shots are retraced animation, it's the suggestion they supply that this sequence was not intended to appear in Robin Hood at all. Written by Johnny Mercer, an enormously talented songwriter with no Disney credits until this one, it's written in a way that suggests an imitation of Roger Miller's three effective folk songs fused with a hoedown sensibility that comes out of nowhere.

"Phony King of England" is funny and effective and it peps up the end of the second act very nicely, but the actual production of the number remains suspicious, especially in light of a discarded expanded (and greatly superior) ending presented on the Robin Hood DVD and Blu-Ray. Not presented on the discs but shown in episodes of Disney Family Album are snippets of animation for this sequence, so we know it at least entered production. At some point it was then removed for a streamlined ending which reprises the exact same "is he dead or isn't he" gag from the end of The Jungle Book and jumps directly to the wedding. To me, "Phony King" looks suspiciously like a late addition to bring the running time back up from this deletion and add a song for Phil Harris. Or, a less conventionally "Disney" film was pushed into a more conventionally successful shape with a low-stakes finale and crazy song.

Maybe one of the most intriguing things about Robin Hood is its complete refusal to play by the traditional beats of the Robin Hood legend. Robin doesn't even have a band of Merry Men in this one; he spends all of his time bumming around in the forest with Little John. There is no traditional quarter-staff fight over the stream; Robin and Little John begin as friends. Instead of a disguised criminal, Friar Tuck is an actual Friar with an actual church and congregation. Will Scarlet is nowhere to seen, having been cut with the rest of the merry men. The geography doesn't even make much sense: we see Prince John, presumably a fixture in London, traveling into Nottingham to collect taxes. Then a castle in Nottingham, housing Maid Marian, suddenly seems to belong to John, as if he's based out of Nottingham. Most versions make it clear that the Sheriff of Nottingham is the local governing official and so the castle presented in the film belongs to him; the Disney version treats the Sheriff as more of a police captain, ie the Sheriff in the traditional American old west style. The film plays less like a standard Robin Hood telling and more like somebody's half-remembered, half made up version of the story.


In a way, however, Disney's alterations go far in making the Robin Hood story less of a specific historical fantasy and much more of a fairy tale, their traditional genre. Nearly every previous screen version of Robin Hood eventually becomes a story of politics; Anglos versus Saxons, rural areas versus city areas, and noble born versus low born. The Disney version dispenses with all that and basically turns the story into a Western. Robin is the good, disguised avenger, like the Lone Ranger. Prince John could easily be a corrupt governor or a congressman. Allan-A-Dale is basically just Roger Miller, voice of the people and wandering folk singer, Bob Dylan surrogate. There's even a stage coach heist. Supposedly Woolie Reitherman disposed of the Merry Men because he wanted Robin Hood and Little John to be like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the process of making this alteration, the film was successfully deformed into an entirely different generic convention. This is why nobody balks at a hoedown in the middle of the movie: it's the same old trope in an unfamiliar setting.


Pretty much the one thing that was carried over intact from the traditional Robin Hood tales is the archery tournament, and in his one case Disney's Robin Hood is very, very close to the scene in the 1939 film, close enough to suggest that somebody remembered it well or had seen it recently. The procession of archers, the disguise, Lady Marian in the box, the splitting of the arrows, and Robin's capture and escape are represented faithfully, even if Errol Flynn did not have a chicken who can double as a line tackle against rhinoceros.

Even so, the Disney Robin Hood gets up to some pretty strange capers. Remembered from the 1939 film was Robin's disguise at the tournament; the fox Robin is practically a master of disguise. Making good use of the potential for crazy outfits and weird accents, the Disney animators turn him into a veritable Professor Moriarty of Sherwood. Ken Andersen's concept art for Robin's disguise as a stork is a visually wonderful contrast between a short Marian and absurdly tall stork; the final animated form simplifies this greatly. Elsewhere, the Disney animators introduce the traditional vaudeville comedy convention of the drag act to the myth. Robin Hood seems to appear in absurd disguises and with crazy voices more often than not. Singular to the Disney version, this hasn't caught on in any other telling of the outlaw myth.

Given all of the above, why does the darn thing work at all? What makes Robin Hood more easily digestible and more popular than any other Disney film of its decade?

That simplicity has drawbacks, but it has benefits too. With the situations entirely stock, the film narrows in on the animated performances like a laser beam. Despite the myriad charms of the film, I think the performances in Aristocats are pretty weak. It's hard to remember a single unique thing
about O'Malley, for example. Robin Hood has terrific heroes and three great, unique villains in a story and setting that's just so-so. Roger Miller's opening "Whistle Stop" tune sets just the right lazy mood: Robin Hood is, as ever, just an excuse to hang out with Robin in the forest. There's no danger because there's no stakes and the arrows always miss.

There's the fact that Robin Hood is easily the most approachable of the Disney films for very very young children. It's the first Disney film I can remember in complete detail. There's nothing really scary and the storytelling is easily comprehensible. Most other Disney films put kids through the emotional wringer, but Robin Hood is lazily companionable.

In the process of extracting a narrative skeleton from Robin Hood, Disney created something new: the idea of Robin Hood as a stock fantasy situation. Largely presented as a historical epic since the pioneering 1922 Doug Fairbanks movie, Disney's version paved the way for a million generic Robin Hood stories since. Muppet Babies Robin Hood. Backyardigans Robin Hood. Veggie Tales Robin Hood. Take your pick. This is why Disney's film feels like a Saturday Morning cartoon to us today; we grew up in the wake of this vastly simplified version of the tale.

Yet really the remarkable accomplishment here is that Disney made a film where talking animal characters have as much on-screen gravity as human characters. Marian is severely underused but she has the charm and magnetic screen image of a beautiful woman. Robin Hood himself was the first animated crush of many young women. This is a real accomplishment on the part of Milt Kahl, suggesting that animation had moved beyond requiring human characters to create audience sympathy. These animated animals are thoroughly human, and thus attractive. They're the first non-human animated characters to have..... sex appeal.


And once we hit on that, we come to the reason why, in the Age of Not Believing, Robin Hood must come last: in a sea of tepid comedies, unadventurous adventures, and tedious formula, Robin Hood is, against all odds, the one film to have a genuine artistic legacy: modern anthropomorphic art.


At this point I have to break the article with a bit of a warning. I'm going to venture down a path that a lot of Disney fans try their best to ignore: the real links connecting the Disney film Robin Hood to the modern-day Furry community. Indeed, just talking about the Furry community is unreasonably difficult, given the various ways in which salacious bad press has gathered around what's more or less just another nerd subset. For several years that was one of my social scenes, and although I did not then nor do I now easily identity as such, I still have many friends who are self-professed Furries. They're not deviants, they are warm, intelligent, interesting people.

The Reputation.

I'm going to try to do this as even-handedly and fearlessly as possible. If you've come this far with this blog series without giving up, you've faced much tougher challenges. This is only about 70% as tough as sitting through Boatniks, for example. Still, this is a crucial part of Disney history that most fans try to rush past, lest the beatific reputation of their company be tarnished. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's a complex and interesting story.

It's worth pointing out, to begin with, that in 1973 there was still no truly commonly understood genre as "furry characters". Indeed, it's very hard to draw a firm line in the sand between Robin Hood and, say, Lady and the Tramp to say "this is where the idea originated". Robin Hood is still very much in the traditional "funny animal" style of Brer Rabbit or Donald Duck - human-like animal critters who could talk and wear clothes. Bugs Bunny is another early "funny animal" who is alarmingly close to the modern understanding of "furry", but then again even Bugs' early design and attitude is a rather obvious lift from another Disney film - the 1935 Tortoise and the Hare.


What can be said about Robin Hood is that its characters mostly do not resemble the strongly humanoid body types of modern "furry" characters, putting them more firmly in the "funny animal" category. Kahl fought to keep Robin's shape expressively foxlike: he has cute short legs and a long, gangling midsection that bounces expressively when he moves. Allan-a-Dale and Lady Cluck are extravagantly avian, and look and move nothing like people in animal suits. Just about the most
humanoid morphic element of any character in the film is its visual treatment of female characters: Robin and Little John don wigs in their gypsy disguises (nowhere else to we see any indication that female characters in this animal world have long hair in the human fashion). Little John also dons fake breasts. Later on we see Lady Cluck, who has an ample bosom, despite being a chicken. Putting boobs on birds may be an unlikely first, but this film went there.

It's interesting to visually compare the designs of Robin Hood with those of their nearest precedent, Song of the South. The animated character designs for Song of the South were done by Marc Davis, who had just come off several years working on Bambi trying to find the appropriate middle ground between animals and people. He went in a super cartoony direction with Song of the South, focusing on contrasting sizes and body types to create three comedy characters in a parable setting. His Brer Fox is basically a lanky guy in a funny hat with a fox head. Fast forward to the 1970s, and Davis is still more adept at anyone at using funny animals in unique ways, although this time it's in theme parks - at Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings. Of course, perhaps the link between Davis' approach and Robin Hood can be attributed to Ken Andersen who worked with Davis on Chanticleer, an aborted "first pass" at an animal-only fantasy at Disney.

Davis sketch - note "real" bear up top.

So it's fair to say that Robin Hood isn't really a "furry" movie in the strictest sense - it's still a funny animal movie, a tradition that runs through the 19th and 20th centuries very strongly. But it's absolutely a turning point, and not just because Lady Cluck had boobs or because Maid Marian was attractive. It's the first time that humanistic animal characters were used in a dramatic situation without undermining its effect.

Now, yes, I know, I've already characterized this film as low stakes and companionable, but at the very least we can say that we are concerned that Robin may not survive his leap into the moat in a way that we are not when, say, Goofy falls off a building. The animals of Robin Hood are both identifiably human and identifiably mortal. And they did set precedents. When Don Bluth left Disney in the late 70s he took the tricks developed in Robin Hood along with him. For Disney, Robin Hood was a one-off fluke and they went back to animating funny but anatomically correct animals in The Rescuers and Fox and the Hound, films much nearer the style of Bambi or Lady and the Tramp. Bluth, conversely, took the confident waggle and body shape Milt Kahl gave Robin and used it for the heroic Justin in The Secret of NIMH.

At that time Disney was still pretty much the only game in town and Robin Hood the only real example of a certain type of funny animal. In discussing their upcoming film An American Tail, Steven Spielberg told Bluth that he wanted it to be a film of humanoid animals, and the example he used was Robin Hood. Bluth begged the contrary - he wanted it to be a film like The Rescuers. Spielberg had to go see The Rescuers first, and then he agreed. It's a little known but telling anecdote from an era when Spielberg was trying very hard to position himself as "The Next Walt Disney".

Back to our main story here, The Secret of NIMH was a seminal event in the nascent furry community, as was the release of Animalympics in 1980. Hopelessly counter cultural to the end, it's hard to even find a timeline of events about the development of the Furry community, but a quick look at this useful article on the Furry Wiki shows that the community was still calling itself the "Funny Animal Fandom" in the mid 70s and wouldn't even develop the word "Furry" until the late 80s. This places it evenly paced with the development of other early nerd groups like Trekkers and comic fans in the mid-70s, and there's always been a lot of messy overlap between Furries, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, D&D, and, yes, Disney fans. We're all part of the same cultural stew.

How did furries organize enough to start developing 'zines by the late 70s and conventions by the early 80s? In the pre internet world how did enough people find each other with an interest that's always been sort of an awkward secret? Well, we can thank Disney for that too.


In the process of researching Walt Disney World I've spoken to enough people who were there and seen enough old photos of Funny Animal Fans at Disney to have gotten an idea of how this happened. First, some context. Back in the early seventies, what we now know as the Entertainment department wasn't as carefully monitored or controlled as it is now: practically anyone who could fit into one of those character suits was pressed into service at one time or another. The daily "parade", known as the Walt Disney Character Cavalcade, was presented throughout the 70s and basically consisted of whomever they could find to throw in an animal suit piling into various Main Street vehicles and heading down the street just doing whatever.  I've spoken to a woman who worked in the Tomorrowland Terrace who left twice a day to be Peter Pan in the parade; she'd run around the parade route, run into shops, whatever.

This means that anyone who was young, clean shaven, and enthusiastic could get a job at Disneyland or Walt Disney World and if if your particular dream was to wear an animal costume, then Disney needed you even more. It was a mecca for young men with a certain set of interests, literally the only place you could be paid to dress up as characters like...... Robin Hood. Furries are famous today for hand-making elaborate mascot outfits and this is the root of this part of the fan community. After all, getting a Starfleet Insignia shirt and Spock ears was no huge feat in the 70s, but where else could you actually be Goofy?

The Furry community coalesced from there, out of these pockets of like-minded individuals who found themselves doing the same thing for the same reason at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.  It's no big secret in Orlando that the city is a prominent Furry Community hub, and one of those reasons is because, them as now, people move across the country for an opportunity to get paid for wearing a Pluto suit.

(The other big component, lest I be accused of dispersing incomplete information, was Sci-Fi conventions. The mid-70s Star Trek cartoon prominently featured Lieutenant M'Ress, a shapely woman with a cat head and tail. The first "Funny Animal Fandom" APA, Vootie, showed on its cover a furry Mister Spock.Themed room parties held at Sci-Fi conventions developed into full-scale specialist events.)

This history is also Disney's history. Although Funny Animal Fans and, later, Furries, are a bigger thing than just Disney, it's rare for a corporate entity to be so heavily involved in the creation of a massive fan group. And Robin Hood is just the middle act of the evolving history of Disney's impact on Furries starting with the Silly Symphonies, on to Song of the South, then Jungle Book and Robin Hood, then The Disney Afternoon and The Lion King, to whatever the next touchstone will be. It's just one word and facet for a part of a basic art genre - anthropomorphic art - that's been around for millennia.

Looking on from the Disney community side of things, I will say this. One thing the Disney community often craves is validation. After all, Disney is often synonymous with "dumbed down", and cartoons with "juvenile". That's why you see Disney people drawing connections to fine art, or urban design - subjects which already have polite company's "seal of approval". To this way of thinking, insisting on the links between Disney fans and the Furry community is counter productive, given the reputation Furries have not just in the wider world, but in other nerd groups. But just like the views that see only infantile simplicity in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or lowbrow carnivals in Disneyland, these views are reductionist and wrongheaded. Even years after the company's ascent to successful corporate conglomerate and cultural touchstone thanks to a wave of Disney films in the 90s, Disney's still kinda an embarrassing thing to like.

I suggest that it's time the early history of the furry community and the influence of Walt Disney Productions on the notion of what a "funny animal" was and what they could be in the 20th century be folded back into the Disney historical narrative. Once we accept that not all furries are crazed sexual deviants the links between Disney and Furry become less creepy and more fascinating. Could John Hench have foreseen the world of the "fursuiting" community his character costumes for Disneyland would help create when he first sat down at the drawing board in the sixties? Could Walt?

Robin Hood and Maid Marian and the film and world they inhabit still stand tall in the Furry pantheon for good reason - they're wonderfully realized characters. The links between the film and the Furry subculture flatter the film, not demean it. The Disney Animation staff made such compelling people out of those animals that even today they can stir interest and recognition in people who otherwise have no interest in anthropomorphic animals.


Hey, it's okay, you can admit it. We're all a little Furry for Robin Hood.

This concludes the main series of posts in The Age of Not Believing. The next post on this blog will be a look back at the entire series, with rankings of best and worst films. There will also be a bonus film review - Superdad. See you then!

Phil Harris, Andy Devine, and Robin.

The experience of a theme park is pretty similar to that of a well-made film, isn't it?

Well, yes it is. But even if we move beyond the convenient fact that this idea is the main crux of most of my writing, it's an comparison worth making because most of the people who created the Disneyland classics were film people. Marvin Davis, Dorthea Redmond, and Harper Goff were brought in from film design to work on Magic Kingdom and Disneyland. And those who came from the Disney Studio's animation department were already working for an organization revered as the most perfectionist and artistically significant of Hollywood's golden age. Film language is coded deep into the DNA of good themed design.

It may be interesting, then, to get outside Disney and think about the subject from the perspectives of filmmakers not imbued with the Disney culture. In this spirit, allow me to introduce Carl Theodore Dreyer.

Now, for those who aren't cinema buffs, it's worth noting that Dreyer is amongst the very few thoroughly, universally canonized film directors; his name is uttered in the same breath as names like Bresson, Ozu, Renoir, and Eisenstein. Practically every film he made from 1928 to 1962 is considered a top-tier masterpiece (even if there were only five!). But the Dreyer whom supplies our upcoming quote is not the grand old man of cinema; these are the words of an up-and-coming director, making an atmospheric drama in Germany in 1924 called Michael.

Michael is fairly obscure, although its status has grown in recent years due to prominent home video releases. Still, of all the great things Dreyer has said about film making over the years, one little comment has kept rolling around in my head for nearly a decade. This is Dreyer speaking to a Journalist about Michael in 1924:

"Isn't it particularly difficult to make a film where atmosphere is decisive while the narrative takes second place?"

"Yes it is. The pictures must be arranged according to the rules of art. It is necessary that the director have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, for instance, a drawing room, must be genuine. And even objects that are not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." [Emphasis mine]

Now, when I first heard this, the idea struck me as absurd. After all, cinema artists from Méliès on have understood the power of cinema's limited frame; it implies an endless space and continuous action much like reality but can significantly exclude anything undesirable. This is why we can still make films set in vintage periods like the Gay Nineties or old west: if you don't point your motion picture camera at those telephone lines off to screen left, then they don't exist. The motion picture frame includes by exclusion. Similarly, anything off-frame that's "seen but only sensed" doesn't exist.

Méliès' set for A Trip to the Moon, 1902

But in another sense, the more I thought about this quote the more sense it made. After all, we all know what it's like to see actors laboring for reality inside a bad or unconvincing set, and so in many ways the cinema set is as much to set the proper atmosphere for creativity as it is to capture on celluloid the apparent image of an imaginary space. In the 1910's, D. W. Griffith broke precedents by insisting on placing real glass panes inside the windows of his sets; they had previously been empty. Why include something the camera or audience won't see?

Yes, the camera won't know that the glass is real, Griffith reasoned, but the actors will, and will adjust their performances accordingly. In 1922's Foolish Wives, Griffith admirer Erich von Stroheim used real glass in windows, real bullets in guns, real water in lakes, and most famously real champagne and caviar in dining scenes - as much as he wanted, for as many takes as it took. Decried by Universal as another frivolous expenditure, we can see here Stroheim leveraging the difference between things seen and things sensed.



But this train of reasoning really began to come together for me last year in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. The ride was stopped and we were all gathered in the portrait corridor waiting for operation to resume. As you probably know, in this scene there are four windows on your left. The first two have the famous "rainy night" effect diorama outside them, but the last two windows have their exterior shutters closed. Lightning still flashes through these, but there's no cool effects to see outside them.

But, but.... if you crouch down next to the second to last window and wait for a lightning flash, you can, in fact, for that split second, see some branches outside the window.... just as you would expect. Why bother with these at all? Hardly any guests would ever notice them, and I bet you'd never bother to look for them if I hadn't just bothered to point them out to you. to the right you can see my most successful attempt to photograph them, and even then they're kinda tough to make out.

I think the main reason those branches are there isn't because they're an "Easter Egg" or some kind a testament to Disney's "attention to detail". I think they're there because they're needed. The first two windows set an expectation for a pattern: trees outside the windows, some spooky fog, lightning. And although the human eye may not be wired to decode on sight what fake lightning flashing outside a fake window may look like, we do know what light passing through branches looks like, and the first two windows set us up to expect some branches outside that window. In other words, almost nobody will see it because it's there, but everybody would sense it if it wasn't. The branches are insurance against a break in the illusion (by the way, yes there are not branches outside the fourth window, but nobody looks at it anyway because the line turns right and there's the busts there to distract you).

User "dland_lover" on MiceChat

The more I thought of it, the more the "branch outside the window factor" seemed to speak less to every-detail perfectionism or foolish consistency as it did to Dreyer's insistence that things "not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." After all, there are few cinematic "magic spaces" where atmosphere is more decisive than in the stylized film world of a theme park.

Take the example of Big Thunder Mountain: the rocks are fake, but the attraction is littered with authentic antique mining equipment. The equipment isn't just about being authentic, however, and it isn't just about it being difficult to successfully build fake mining equipment. The equipment not only validates the stuff that WED did build for the ride - just a bit salted through makes everything look more real - but it validates the mining operation as a real thing, and because the mine is real, the mountain becomes real. If you think you're too clever to be mentally tricked by this, just consider that Big Thunder Mountain is, in fact, almost totally hollow. It's hard to visualize that, isn't it? that's what the value of things sensed rather than seen can add.

For whatever reason, Claude Coats was amazing at knowing exactly how much of the illusory world is needed to carry the illusion and where a few corners can be cut. More than Haunted Mansion, consider his terrific Caribbean seaport in Pirates of the Caribbean, which unlike Mansion's collection of flats and walls really is mostly there. The success of this ride is largely due to Coats' atmospheric direction in both the cavern and town sections.


But have you ever noticed how fully integrated Coats' town is with the action of the pillage narrative? His staging solutions are so simple that it takes a moment to stop and realize that somebody had to sit down and figure out how the whole thing should hang together. His sea-port is designed but it feels organic. Take note of how the location of each action is mirrored by the content of the scene. For example, the town's mayors and magistrates have been rounded up to be interrogated at the town well. The well is in an impressive public space with a central gathering point. This spectacle of indecency to public officials is being performed in the most public area seen in the attraction's fictional town, immediately implying that the Pirates represent not just a physical but an ideological threat. They are upending social structures.

Consider how easy it would've been to change this idea a little bit and lessen the impact. There's no reason why the well has to be in front of Carlos' house; it could've been a bit off to the left and his wife could've popped out of a window to the right. But it wouldn't be as funny or memorable. Would you have made this same exactly right decision if you were forced to design Pirates of the Caribbean from scratch?

Which brings us to my favorite instance of Coats' staging in the ride. Following his dictate of design following narrative, we move to the public market where the village maidens are being auctioned. This is happening directly in front of a huge building labeled "MERCADO". That's probably obvious, you've no doubt noticed it before. But have you ever noticed that you can actually see inside the market?

Yes, we can write this off as just more detail, but why is the detail there? Well, it's because this allows Coats to visually juxtapose the chain of brides with the market of produce behind them: these women are being treated like wares to be quickly consumed by the highest bidder.


But more than that this detail is the sort of thing that make Pirates of the Caribbean a true picture; in Dreyer's words, a unity. It's easy to throw a lot of detail into theme parks and end up with overkill because what's more important than having details is meaningful details. Everything we expect must be present, but nothing we don't expect or don't need to see is needed.

This, I feel, is what contributes to the sense of peace and relaxation experienced at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland, while parks of more recent vintage can feel cluttered, chaotic and unpleasant. There's just enough detail to allow us to suspend our disbelief, but not so much that the parks lose their sense of pastoral simplicity and beauty. Everything looks carefully vetted, designed, and built, compared to the visual chaos of a typical urban "strip".

We associate careful detail with the classic WED period of 1964-1984, but it's been there since the start. How many of you, for however long you've been going to Disneyland, have ever noticed that Sleeping Beauty Castle thoughtfully includes a chapel?


You may have noticed this before; it's one the right side facing Main Street. This is a common enough feature of genuine historical castles to not be noteworthy in and of itself, but due to its placement on the east side of the castle, which is an uncommonly photographed angle, and a half-century of tree growth on the Tomorrowland side, it can be downright tricky to spot it.

But once you do spot it, the real trick is to come back and see the chapel at night. All of the windows on the castle are lit up bright, welcoming yellow... except the chapel, which is lit internally by candlelight.

That's a detail which, to me, moves beyond the traditional "wide, medium, and close shot" methods used by Imagineers, which more lay out guidelines for consistency. To me, the marketplace behind the Auction, the tree branch outside the window, and the candles in the chapel are some kind of as-of-yet unnamed kind of themed design detail, which is the detail inside the detail, the sort of thing that you half don't expect to see but you go looking for anyway and there it is, waiting for you. It creates a satisfaction that goes beyond the normal level of detail presented by, say, a themed door knob. It's the discovery inside the discovery and it makes the false theme park world seem real, and lived in.

It's always been an ongoing project to make theme parks seem more convincingly realistic, especially in the hollow areas of themed facades which all too easily can appear to be the hollow or functional spaces they are. The tradition goes back to the start: this July 18, 1955 photograph from Daveland shows what the earliest WED designers probably thought of as "set dressing":


The "stuff-on-balconies" school reached its apotheosis in New Orleans Square in 1967, of course, but the Magic Kingdom in 1971 included balconies in as many niches as possible, sometimes to great effect. The simple balcony above Aloha Isle in Adventureland, stuffed with wicker chairs and faux foliage, has been firing the imaginations of observers for decades.


Stuff-on-balconies can only go so far, however, and Disneyland's other main method of creating imagined extended space is the "light in the attic" method: lamps in upper windows. There are fewer examples of this in Disneyland than expected, and most of them look pretty much like this:


In 1971, the expanded scale of Magic Kingdom allowed Disneyland's designers to experiment with some of these techniques in a larger scale, and the result is very interesting. Instead of simply placing lanterns behind lace curtains. Magic Kingdom's Main Street has actual rooms in the upper level of its facades.


The rooms, of course, are nothing more than a few feet deep. It's actually a wall which encloses the upper level of the Magic Kingdom's office areas, but some well chosen wallpaper and props and the effect is very beguiling. It's also nearly impossible to photograph; the human eye can very easily distinguish between the various surfaces involved in the depth illusion - a richly patterned wallpaper viewed through an elaborate lace curtain - in ways that the camera eye cannot, but I tried very hard:



In person, this effect is nearly subliminal. I've only noticed it in the last few years, but the illusion that there really are Victorian parlors and drawing-rooms behind those windows is remarkably convincing and only fails from certain angles, which is certainly more than should be expected from details within details within details.

To avoid foolish consistency, however, some of the windows do use the simple Disneyland-style lamp, curtain and cloth, as in this handsome tribute window for Yale Gracey:


Or the beautiful dim pink light overlooking Town Square:



This one doesn't have any light inside it but it does have a full-sized chair and table and very intricate "back wall", which can only be seen by those looking very closely during the day:


The curtains hanging in the windows act as diffusion screens to make the textured rear walls - really only a few feet away from the windows - appear more distant than they are, and the illusion holds so long as the floor and ceiling remain hidden and the wallpaper chosen has small, intricate patterns. It's one of the most successful forced perspective illusions in the park. Elsewhere, in Liberty Square, the space above Liberty Tree Tavern is enlivened very simply but effectively in a window only visible from the courtyard behind the Christmas shop:


A chandelier is hung inside an unfinished attic. From the perspective of the street, the unfinished interior visually translates as the rough beams we expect inside of a colonial tavern, and a whole interior is implied for those who bother to find it:


There are other, less specular uses of lights and props throughout Magic Kingdom, although most do manifest in the traditional "light in the attic" rather than 'implied interior" seen above. However, in 1982 in World Showcase, WED Enterprises took another stab at the illusion and ended up with some interesting effects.

The "lighted windows" are applied with less regularity than throughout Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom is about nostalgia and exploration and so a warm feeling is created through elaborate displays of lights (except in the "dangerous" area of Adventureland). World Showcase is more about culture and its treatment of lighted second floor windows varies more widely: while Germany wants to create a feeling of warmth and gemütlichkeit and so uses many lit windows, the small British village of the United Kingdom pavilion feels almost sleepy at night due to its mostly darkened interiors. Until you get around the back towards the London flats, there's just a lonely lantern burning in one darkened upper window, one of EPCOT Center's most haunting details:


Contrast the United Kingdom with France, represented by Paris. EPCOT's facsimile doesn't just evoke the city of light through use of a boldly lit fountain; the France pavilion works overtime to imply a busting cultural metropolis just behind and beyond those windows and doors. Elaborate, half-glimpsed lights hang in the windows above the entrance to the Impressions de France attraction:


Diffusing curtains make these very hard to make out, but this fictional "upstairs" space is validated by the nearby second floor restaurant facing the water and, facing the United Kingdom pavilion, the upstairs art gallery, sadly long since closed.





 But the best touch, for me, is around the corner down the "provincial" side street. Many of you, no doubt, have noticed the glass-enclosed artist's loft in this area...

photo by Al Huffman

...but how many of you have seen the artist who lives there? If you return at night you can see him painting:


Yes, it's just a little cutout, but to me this is the ultimate example of the "Branch Outside the Window" effect. If you just so happened to see this one detail early in the day, wondered if it was supposed to be an artist loft, then just happened to walk back that way later and had your suspicions confirmed? How many have done that? A few dozen a year?

To me, this is what makes the difference between the sort of detail we've been discussing today and the run of the mill sort of detail which Imagineering can now do with their eyes closed. Very few may notice these sorts of things, but the cumulative effect cannot be undervalued: the impression of an organic world where there is none.

To me this sense of inevitability of these sorts of details is the mark of a great, assured artistic creation. To paraphrase Dreyer, the theme park designer must have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, a theme park, must seem genuine. And even objects that may not be seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the park character.

That's the difference that a great designer makes. The branch behind the window, rarely seen, but always sensed.

Searching through old Disney photos and slides and home movies is often more disheartening than it is fun. Just as the average tourist often returns today with little to show than some shots of the castle, a flash photo of their group's row in a dark ride, and twenty bad photos of fireworks taken on a smartphone camera, so too were the tourists in the early days of Disney fairly uninspired.

Fathers hampered with the limitations of slow lenses and expensive film often shot only the reliable photos, which often meant a view down Main Street, maybe something on the Jungle Cruise, a monorail, and possibly one of the Magic Kingdom's many bands. You expect to get those; everything else is velvet.

What I have to share today is a rare thing: shots from an ambitious, possibly even professional photographer, with a good camera, in the Magic Kingdom in November of 1978. Not every shot is promotional-photo-worthy perfect, but it's rare to simply even see vintage WDW photography of this caliber. Our photographer had a good eye for composition and an interest in architecture, making for much more interesting viewing than your typical vacation snaps. There were too many slides to share everything, but here's a sample of the best and brightest of a remarkable, unusual document.

Let's begin with a batch of images from the Jungle Cruise.


The Gorilla Camp hasn't changed too much in the past 44 years, although there is something to be said for the stark simplicity of the scene's original propping, the simple green crates reflecting an era before the "vintage" theme was applied to the attraction. The mother/baby gorilla figure in the back left of the scene is out for repairs, giving us a clear view of the "WED SAFARI" stencil on the crate. Many of these boxes are still in the scene, now painted to look like vintage wooden crates, and of course the rear box got changed to read "WDI SAFARI".


This is much the same as it is today and, hopefully, as it always will be.


The Sunshine Pavilion with her original authentic thatch - the thatch currently on the building is dye-cute metal. It looked a bit more massive back then before the trees grew to their full height. Note some sort of refurbishment work occuring near the entrance.

I'd also like to point out the worn paint on the handrails in the foreground; visible wear and tear is not a phenomenon exclusive to the last 20 years at Walt Disney World.


The Magic Carpet in Adventureland was a tiny back alley of a shop offering Middle East goods. This was inside the "inner courtyard" of the circle of shops which made up Tropic Toppers, Traders of Timbuktu, Oriental Imports, and the Tropic Shop. In later years, Oriental Imports, The Magic Carpet, and Tropic Shop would be combined into one long store, called Elephant Tales. This store later closed to become a stock room in the early 2000s when Traders of Timbuktu was removed and the space in front of the shop become Argabah Bazaar.

This drop dead gorgeous facade, by the way, is still at Magic Kingdom, but like a lot of things at Disney today it has a giant cartoon tent in front of it.

Again, a view almost unchanged today. Notice the giant patch of fill concrete in the foreground - I bet there was once a funny story about that.

The Ancients fife and drum corp march past the original "walk inside" version of Sleepy Hollow Refreshments, back when its main claim to fame was cold sandwiches and cookies.


The Ancients doing their thing in what now seems to be an amazing number of trees. Splash Mountain would dominate the horizon of the top photo today. WDW has re-engineered the planters in this portion of Liberty Square at least three times to relieve guest flow during parades.


Two especially nice close-ups of graves outside the Haunted Mansion's original family plot. By the time I was going to Walt Disney World, these had been painted in a much more realistic stone wash and subject to enough Florida weather abuse to genuinely shock me, upon working the attraction, that they were actually hollow fiberglass.


As you can see, the 1971 originals looked less than convincing. The new set of gravestones outside the house as part of the controversial interactive queue, by the way, are all genuine stone.


Our only real view of Fantasyland today, but it's a dilly. In the background we can see how throughly forested the area was before the mass removal of trees in the late 90s. This angle also gives us excellent views of the original, much superior color schemes for the Small World tent facades in the 70s, before everything began to drift pink and purple in the 1980s.

Most interesting to me in a clear view of the cobblestone paths that used to zig zag through Fantasyland. The area is a giant sea of red concrete now and the results are unfortunate.


A terrific view of the Flower Market, Bicycle Shop, Hallmark Shop, and Chinese Laundry on Center Street. These guys are usually called the "Fantasyland Pearly Band" in company literature, but the unknown photographer here wrote their name on the slide as the "Jambayala Jazz Band".


This one is usual: it's a view of the spreading trees of the Hub from inside the planter. I'm not sure exactly what the photographer was going for here, but it's sufficiently unusual enough to share.


Our photographer took a few candid park guest photos, including one of a young lady in a hijab, and this is the most interesting to me... grandpa standing by his nephew's stroller wearing the "Youth" size Mickey ears. It's both universal and uniquely Disney.


And early morning view of Main Street, followed by....


...a gorgeous early evening view looking the other way. This framing strongly recalls early Disney promotional photos, enough to suggest that our photographer saw it on a postcard in the Emporium and rushed out to replicate it. I love the sense of the waning Florida evening light and the unstaged boy in the corner sipping a Coke.

Come back next week for a visit to the Walt Disney World Village through the lens of the same photographer!

Boxes of old slides can be full of surprises. I tend to decide to purchase if the seller happens to scan an unusual view, but even the least ambitious amateur photographers of the 70s tended to take a few weird ones. Almost everyone at some point was compelled to break the flash photography rule or take some blurry photos from the train.

So I was pleased to find mixed into the 1978 slides a good number of photos of the Walt Disney World Village. Amateur photos of the Village are exceptionally rare; and while some of the most beautiful professional photos Disney ever published are of the Village, it's valuable to see another view of the place.

Each shop outside the Village had a beautiful handmade sign, and maybe the most distinctive was for Sir Edward's Haberdasher.


Behind the sign, incidentally, we can see sections of the original densely wooded parking lot. Sir Edward's was a menswear store in a very conservative style:



Here's the Empress Lilly from the boat marina. Captain Jack's sits off to the right. This photo, besides affording a glimpse of the Village Marina's old craftwork lanterns, shows how very different the effect of the Lilly once was. Situated where it is, surrounded by trees with nothing but a vast Florida waterway stretching out ahead of it, the effect is beautifully romantic. This was lost in 1989 when all of those trees were taken down for Pleasure Island.


The original winding, pastoral walk to the Lilly. Not even the waterwheel remains today.


Our lady friend returns from last week, less artfully composed. She's standing in front of the Pottery Chalet, which was a sort of housewares super store. The front area as well as a rear interior courtyard was all pots and plants. In the 80s it because the Christmas Chalet and was levelled in the 1990s. World of Disney stands there now.


Entering the Village from the Parking Lot. This appears to be the back of Sir Edwards's, meaning that's the bathrooms on the right. Originally, many of the buildings in the Village were connected by airy verandas and covered walkways like those seen here, allowing products displays to spill outside the confines of the store. The design of the Village was executed by a young team inside WED and is little heralded, but I think the architecture and emphasis on natural colors works beautifully well in the natural Florida environment.


Walt Disney World, and the Village in particular, was instrumental in shaping a stronger sense of food culture and sophistication in Orlando. In the late 60s, just about the best you could get in Orlando was Maison et Jardin in Altamonte Springs and the Columbia downtown. Orlando was a takeout-and-deli town.

Disney, simply by showing up and opening things like gulf coast-inspired continental dining rooms, the Gourmet Pantry where one could buy Kobe beef, and French-Colonial dinner palaces with floor shows changed the local food culture forever. Even today, Orlando boasts an amazing variety of food experiences. Whatever you want, you can get it, and usually in very high quality.

This is probably, more than anything, the thing that may not have happened in quite the same way had Walt Disney lived. Walt liked good food, but his limited palette and eating habits always embarrassed his cronies like Card Walker and Donn Tatum. Those guys were the fine dining mavens and they are the ones who brought that expectation with them from Los Angeles.

The Village opened the first serious wine shop in Orlando: the Vintage Cellar, where Art of Disney is now. They imported the best and brightest available to a swamp, no matter the cost. It was part of the show to the Disney people; to a nascent Orlando food scene it was a gift from God. The demand for wine at this store was so great that Disney began to offer case discounts. They hired an in-house wine expert to give weekend lectures and tastings, and they sent out monthly fliers to the "Cellar Dwellers" club, announcing new shipments and vintages - with quantity limits.


All of these things come rushing to me when I see photos like this of the Village. It's just one example of many. It's not easy to remember that Orlando was once a sleepy town like Ocala is today - incidentally, another place Disney was interested in moving to in the 60s. It was a cow town with an urban center. People liked it that way. Disney's arrival could not have been more disastrous to old Orlando had it been an asteroid.

Walt Disney World may be a cultural juggernaut and a base commercial operation, but it had ambition and beauty, and it changed people's lives. Disney may have abandoned EPCOT, but they did shape a city with projects like the Contemporary, the Village, and World Showcase. I wish Disney had those ambitions today.

When we're inside theme parks, our perceptions change radically. Things which may seem to be noteworthy anywhere else - a perfect sky, for example - become not so important, a mere backdrop to the fabricated reality. One of the sensory perceptions that seems to fade is background detail. When I was young, I'd drive myself to distraction trying to picture every detail of the parks in my mind and become worried I'd not really experienced them if I couldn't - especially the color of the sidewalks. And one of those details that seems to especially fade rapidly for people is background music.

I've noticed that people mostly tend to be dimly aware of musical genre and style inside the parks, and less aware of specific selections. In this way the parks simulate the sensation of watching films: when we see a Western scene on TV we usually hear Western-style music, and Frontierland follows suit. The mind smooths right over it. We're aware that appropriate music plays on Main Street, but most people would not be able to select song titles off a list.

But there's one exception to this, it's a background music loop that everyone notices: the yodeling music.

This may be because of sheer force of novelty. It's very rare to be in an environment in which yodeling is unavoidable, so it's the sort of thing that leaps out at you when you do hear it. Combine this with two attraction queues in which the wait was usually quite extensive - the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the Skyway - and you have a situation where people are going to remember that yodeling, whether they want to or not.

There are, depending on how you count them, three or four distinct Jack Wagner created loops in this category - I call them the "Swiss" loops, and they all share a common, though largely unexplored, ancestry. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to fully explore the subject, but in the meantime let's take an intimate look at the most famous of them: the queue loop for the Matterhorn Bobsleds from 1978.

How Many Swiss Records Can You Have?

This loop comes to us through an authoritative source, which is Wagner himself - it survives as a physical reel to reel magnetic tape. It's circulated in various versions and various states of completeness through the years, the best of which was recently available through Walt's Music. "Best" may be subjective here, as most of the copies of the loop itself - which is a scarce 18 minutes and consists of polka-style music with Jack's overlaid safety announcements - is severely deteriorated. As park testimonial it's invaluable but as a listening experience it's somewhat unpleasant.

For a long time these existed as one chunk of musical material, all apparently from a single, unknown source. The one lead which existed was that one of the tracks was known to have been recorded by Fred Burri, Disneyland's in-house yodeler, and available on his record "Folk Music and Yodeling".

Thanks to Michael Sweeney, RocketRodsXPR, Pixelated, and others at MouseBits.Com, a fuller picture of the Matterhorn queue loop may be assembled.


I think the foundation of this loop is probably the Fred Burri LP, which, if I had to put money on, was probably used as the Matterhorn music in the years before the 1978 rebuild and Jack's loop came in. Jack appears to have gone to some lengths to match and complement the feeling of his selections to the Fred Burri recordings. The Fred Burri record wasn't released by Disney, but under Star Records, but they seem to have ended up with the rights somehow anyway: a Fred Burri selection was released as part of the 2005 "Musical History of Disneyland" box set.

The other two records were already in Wagner's back catalog of music due to his use of them at the Magic Kingdom in the early 70s, and both were courtesy of Capitol Records. Jack used to work for Capitol and had an amiable agreement with certain people inside the company. The records are A Visit to Switzerland and Music of the German Alps.

Disneyland - Matterhorn Bobsleds
Queue Music - 1978 - Comp. Jack Wagner

01. Im Chuchichäschtli
     Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians

02. Alpaufzug Luzarner Chilby [edit]
     Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians

03. At the Source of the Rhine
     Bundner Landlerquintett - A Visit to Switzerland

04. Naughty Boy Ländler
     Landlerkapelle Oberland - A Visit to Switzerland

05. Obervazer-Schottisch
     Bundner Landlerquintett - A Visit to Switzerland

06. Am Trachtefescht
     Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians

07. Schi Scha Schatzeli [edit]
     Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians

08. Der Klarinettenmuckel
     Alfons Bauer - Music of the German Alps

09. Schneidig Voran
     Alfons Bauer - Music of the German Alps

10. By the Bonfire
    Landlerkapelle Barner Mutze - A Visit to Switzerland

Thanks to Michael Sweeney, Pixelated, and Theme Park Audio Archives, I was able to rebuild the 1978 loop in Stereo with much higher aural quality than had previously been available. All of the edits and spacing is closely modeled on Jack's edits as preserved on the Walts Music copy.

Note that this version is slightly longer than the existing source tape copies. I had similar problems in synching up other Wagner loops for reconstruction, but both of these other reconstructions were based on live recordings by Mike Lee. This leads me to suspect that the process of transferring from reel to reel to result in the looping audio cartridges used in park resulted in a slight speed up. Or, for all we know, Jack's turntable just ran slightly too fast!


What is noteworthy when you have the entire source LP playing is how judicious Wagner was in selecting his tracks. A great deal of these 60s "Swiss" LPs consists of "Nature-Yodels", which are spare and almost dissonant to the ear. He definitely knew what he wanted, and edited the Fred Burri tracks to match. Often Fred will sing a few verses (or more) - Wagner dropped it all and got right on with the Yodeling.

Fred Burri, by the way, seems to still be around, although retired. Perhaps if you live in the Seattle area you can hire him to play your next birthday party?

The Alfons Bauer LP is an odd case. Bauer seems to have been promoted to capitalize on the momentary popularity of the zither due to the 1949 film The Third Man, and there's surprisingly little of him on his record. A more apt byline would probably be "Alfons Bauer and his 50 Friends". Regardless, the whole record is up on Amazon, split up not by individual song but by side, which is suspicious to say the least. At least nobody can say it's a bad value!

"A Visit to Switzerland" LP is made up of tracks from various performing groups, as are many of the other "Swiss" LPs Wagner worked with. In Swiss folk music, the name of the group changes depending on how many people are in the group and what instruments are used so that, in this example, a landlerkapelle is different than a landlerquintett. One way to translate Landlerkapelle Barner Mutz would be as "The Berner Bear Band".

Very little information about these artists seems to exist online, but what does exist strongly implies that Capitol was licensing these tracks from local music producers for fairly cheap, as the music was already ten to fifteen years old and had depreciated in value. Some of these tracks, recorded in the 40s, repackaged in America in the 60s, and combined into theme park loops in the 1970s - they still play at Disneyland and Walt Disney World today.

That has to be the most bizarre path to a kind of immortality on record. Who would suspect, generations later, their yodeling would be heard by millions each year - in Fantasyland?

Captain Cook's Hideaway, I thought I was done with you.

Back in June 2010, I wrote - and ammended - a series of articles about Captain Cook's Hideaway, the earliest place for Cast Members to drink in the first ten years of Walt Disney World. Captain Cook's and especially their in-house band, rock-folkies The Salt Water Express, have since risen to something of a place of prominence in Disney circles, thanks to their goofy look and elusive hit single from 1972, "Can You Arrive Alive on 535?"


Footage (and music!) of them even cropped up at the 2011 Destination D event sponsored by D23, where Robert Christopher and Gary Stratton appeared in a mildly traumatic promotional short as pied pipers, leading a group of teenagers on a Magical Mystery Tour to Grad Nite 1975.


I thought I had covered Captain Cook's Hideaway sufficiently. Despite some initial confusion, I even identified where I thought it was located. The lounge is described as follows in a 1973 Vacationland:

"For guests desirous for a dark rendezvous and the strains of a haunting guitar, Captain Cooks Hideaway provides both, as well as an outside patio romantically bathed in soft candlelight."

In many late 70s' souvenir books the following photo appeared, depicting what appeared to be this outside patio:


And working backwards from this photo, I identified an aerial view of the Polynesian Village showing where the patio and thus where Captain Cook's was probably located.


Which, to me, seems to be pretty solid evidence. Well, in the past few weeks I managed to turn up some interesting primary documents from the Polynesian, one of which was a cast member orientation guide from way back in 1971 - far enough back that it was simply called the "POLYNESIAN HOTEL". But the real discovery here was two pages showing exactly where everything was in the Great Ceremonial House and Outrigger Assembly House in 1971.


And - surprise - Captain Cook's Hideaway is in the "wrong" place!


The spot I had previously ascribed to Captain Cook's appears to be filled by the "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse", a child care facility. What's most shocking about this is this space still more or less exists - as the seating area to the Polynesian's cafeteria, still called Captain Cook's. Although the original space appears to have been slightly larger to accomodate a bar, it always has been and continues to be a spot with just a handful of tables weirdly crammed inside it.


Although I'm delighted to learn that this particular space at the Polynesian seems to have always been a tiny room with tables, I was simply agast that this spot in particular was Captain Cook's. This was the hopping Cast Member after-work hangout where Salt Water Express sang about State Road 535? You could hardly fit three more tables in here.


A October 1971 Walt Disney World News also mentions the outdoor patio so there must have been a "spill-over" outdoor section very much like the one that still exists today, only servicing those with alcohol instead of Dole Whips.

I went digging back through my files and found that mentions of the "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" at the Polynesian persist on and off until the mid-70s, when it seems to migrate to the Contemporary Resort Hotel, possibly opening up its original space to an expanded Captain Cook's.

So if Captain Cook's expanded into the old Clubhouse space, then it makes sense that Barefoot Snack Bar would take over the old Captain Cook's space, which is the original arrangement which most of us remember from the late 80s and early 90s. That arrangement still exists today, although the seating area has now taken over the original menswear shop.

I was also able to find a clipping at the Orlando Public Library which mentions Captain Cook's:


53 seats seems like too many for that original 1971 corner location even if they were also counting the patio. Since the article also mentions the Tangaroa Terrace, the family restaurant built in a custom structure outside the Great Ceremonial House in 1974, 53 seats (about fourteen-seventeen tables) may describe the lounge's second location in the former Clubhouse space.

As for Salt Water Express, their story is an interesting one. In March 1975, the Vacation Kingdom's most popular duo moved to the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village to open the lounge attached to the Village Restaurant, hilariously named "THE CHUMMERY":

WHY WOULD YOU NAME SOMETHING THIS

It was such a short lived stint that they may have never played there at all. Disney was advertising their return to the Polynesian Village within a few weeks.

Bob Christopher and Gary Stratton's contract was renegotiated in 1976, at which point they began appearing under the new name "Stratton & Christopher". In-house references to the group (and their popularity) begin to decline from that point onward, and by the late 1970s seem to vanish altogether. In the early 80s they seem to have moved to a well-reviewed restaurant called Limey Jim's at the US-192 Hilton Resort.

They pop up again in California in 1986, filing a trademark on their name and logo which may be viewed here. I haven't been able to find much past that. Besides the few pictures gathered here, no recordings of either Salt Water Express or Stratton & Christopher seem to survive. Which is a real shame - I know I'd love to hear "Can You Arrive Alive on 535?" at least once in my life.

The Polynesian Resort is now in the process of being dramatically altered - a new wing is going up in what was once open lagoon space, the name is reverting to the Polynesian Village, and sections of the hotel are closing one by one for remodeling. Renewal is a constant cycle of life at the Disney hotels, although none feel as sacred or personal to me as the Polynesian. Since the Tambu Lounge was relocated out to the lobby during the refurbishment which changed the original Papeete Bay Veranda into 'Ohana, maybe this newest refurbishment can bring back more vintage Disney names than just the one for the whole hotel.

Too long relegated to an eatery in its former location selling burgers, it may be time to reclaim the name of Captain Cook and attach it to a new Captain Cook's Hideaway, selling stronger stuff than Dole Whips. It would be a nice nod to the past in the one Disney hotel which seems most thoroughly drenched in it.

I've been actively seeking out Walt Disney World history for around ten years now. In relative terms of the community, that makes me a little-bitty baby researcher. It's okay. Ten years sounds like a lot otherwise, but it really isn't, because it's not every day (or even every month) that something cool shows up. Probably the most significant aspect of Disney research isn't so much skill and perseverance as it is sharp observation and luck.

In 2008, Mike Lee turned me onto a Jungle Cruise mystery he'd been contemplating for a long time. I was able to put more information out there, but then out of nowhere this year the mystery was finally unraveled - twice, in rapid succession.

This is more a natural function of the internet age than anything appropriately mystical - even the most obscure facets of Walt Disney World history probably are preserved, somewhere, on some moldering obscure slide in an attic in the Midwest. The place was not obscure. Millions of people saw it in only its first two years, and they were armed with cameras, and home movie film. As more and more people have this film and these slides digitally scanned, more and more (and longer) videos are cropping up. Sometimes you get lucky. A few years ago, a snippet of film of Disneyland's infamous Hatbox Ghost materialized. That was 2011. As far as I'm concerned, 2014 is the Year of the Frog.

I've told this story before elsewhere on the site, but here we go again. At least it'll all be in the same place this time. A true Walt Disney World mystery: The Tale of the Vanishing Frogs!

In a weird way, the frogs never entirely "vanished". Always intended to accompany their significantly less impressive brethren who have managed to survive these 43 years - the giant butterflies - Marc Davis' giant frogs can still be heard  just past Inspiration Falls, although their bodies departed the place sometime around October 1973.

In the beginning, there was a concept drawing.


I've also seen versions of this where Marc wrote on the bottom "Replaces Man-Eating Plants", which at least is a tantalizing option. Now, what's interesting about the Florida Jungle Cruise is how completely faithfully WED replicated Marc's designs in the finished show:

Bottom photo: Joe Shelby

...And when it came to the giant frogs, MAPO was no slouch. The final sculpted frogs, as unearthed by Mike Lee and Dave Ensign, looked even cuter than the concept art.


So basically for about five years, we ("we" meaning the WDW internet community who cares about rubber frogs) have known that a) the frogs did indeed exist, and b) that tourists saw them, but what we didn't really have was any photos of them in situ in the park. We didn't have to wait long.

In May of this year, a mid-1972 silent reel of super 8 film appeared online, painstakingly restored by the webmaster of RetroDisneyWorld.Com. It's a beautiful watch. The colors are vivid, the shadows pop with that "Florida Summer" bright white intensity, the grain is clear and it's the next best thing to being there. Oh yeah, and the frogs are there.


It's just about three frames of footage between Inspiration Falls and the beached canoes, but there's five handsome looking frogs - two adults and three babies. Based on Mike Lee's maintenance schematic diagram, these appear to be the first cluster of frogs which appeared on the right side of the boat in the area that's currently home to a tarp and a skull on a stick.


(That squiggly thing across from the figure location is Inspiration Falls, the arrows indicate the direction the boats travel...)

It also just happens to be the spot I singled out back in 2011 as a possible frog location when I posted this 1973 Jungle Cruise refurbishment slide due to this cluster of men working on... something:


All of this was great news, but of course three frames isn't long enough to see the frogs move, just long enough to know they're there. But the Year of the Frog would not be stopped so easily. Just a few months later, thanks to a lucky eBay find by Brian Miles, a reel of 8mm footage from December 1971, showing what I can only describe as an astonishingly young Magic Kingdom, summonded the Jungle Cruise frogs yet again, for their best appearance yet:


Showing three adults and two baby frogs on a fallen log and tree stump attractively flecked with mushrooms, this frog grouping likely is the one across the river to the right:


(To anyone paying close attention at home, in this case the designation "F22" or "Figure 22" likely refers to the whole piece, ie the sculptural base plus five frogs, with each frog being designated A thru E).

Best of all, there was enough footage this time to get a taste of what these guys looked like in motion. Watch the adult frog's throat pouch inflate and the baby frog's mouth open:


As for the fate of the frogs, Park Operations VP Dick Nunis ordered them removed on the grounds of being "hokey". How these particular figures were singled out to be removed in a ride which, let's be fair, is not exactly known for realism, is unknown. I personally think they set an appropriately whimsical tone at the start of the ride which is more fantasy than reality, but what do I know. Anyway, a scene Marc Davis had designed for the end of the MK Jungle Cruise was repurposed to sit alongside the Walt Disney World Railroad, and one of the baby frogs was reutilized for this purpose:


The crocodiles are still there, but the fiberglass ambphibian has been missing for the past few years as of this writing. Let's hope it one day returns as an unlikely but still interesting remnant of early Magic Kingdom history.

Oh, and if you yourself have home movie footage of Walt Disney World, please consider getting it restored through Todd at RetroWDW's ImageWorks service. The results are beautiful and, best of all, the resulting footage will appear online and add to the growing treasure trove of material. The Jungle Cruise frogs are cool, but they're just one of hordes of early WDW mysteries which can be resolved. Thanks to international renown, a colorful local fanbase and a cadre of researchers who got started in the 1980s, Disneyland in California is very well documented and the reference material is only growing by the day. When the production team behind the recent Disney film Saving Mr. Banks wanted to re-create the look of Disneyland in the 60s, they went to fan sites like Daveland and Stuff From the Park to draw material. Walt Disney World's past is still clouded in time. So if you have the material, do your part. We can build a visual and textual history to rival any other. There may be another Year of the Frog waiting, collecting dust in your own house.

“What we do here is to throw a challenge at you – not a real menace, but a pseudo-menace, a theatricalized menace – and we allow you to win.” - John Hench

Good Morning! If you're reading this on November 16, 2014, then I have news for you: Stitch's Great Escape is now a decade old. This means that Stitch's Great Escape has outlived Delta Dreamflight, the Magic Kingdom Swan Boats, most celebrity marriages, the profitable life span of most feature films, World War II, the original run of Star Wars films and the entire recording career of the Beatles.

I think it's probably safe to say that there may be no single attraction more frequently cited as "The Worst at Walt Disney World" than Stitch, especially now that the original Tiki Room show has been restored and those of us whom are historically minded don't have Under New Management to push around anymore. A similarly low rated show at Disney's Hollywood Studios - The Legend of Captain Jack Sparrow - has come and gone in a less than two year run, which despite being only a few minutes long and standing right next to the most popular attraction in the park was widely detested by nearly every audience that saw it.

As for Stitch, it doesn't take much looking to find people with things to say about it:

"For my money, the worst attraction at MK and top 3 worst in "The World". It's boring, pointless and not worth your time. If I were in charge, this is an attraction that would be gone!"WDWinfo

"Unofficial Guide readers usually rate Stitch’s Great Escape! at the bottom of all Walt Disney World attractions. This comment from a New South Wales, Australia, reader is typical: "My comments on Stitch’s Great Escape! are . . . It STUNK. It was the worst ride at Walt Disney World." TouringPlans.Com

 "With these somewhat intense special effects, this attraction leaves many little ones crying in terror, which is why it's consistently the lowest-rated attraction in the world on ThemeParkInsider.com. But among those who appreciate irreverent mayhem, Stitch has its fans."Theme Park Insider

And two that I think are a bit closer to the core of the apple:

"The reports of chili being burped in your face is true. You are trapped and your shoulders are pressed down in total darkness. HORRIBLE! One hint is that if you DO decide to waste 20 minutes of your life on this crap, sit up really high and make yourself "big" when the shoulder harness comes down. Once it adjusts, sit normally in your seat. Do this or you will have shoulder pain the rest of your trip. And good lord don't take your kids to this! It's too scary and uncomfortable." Yelp

"Stupid. Not a ride. I repeat: not a ride."Foursquare

How did we get to this point? In 2004, Stitch was at the height of his popularity. Stitch merchandise was flying off shelves all across the country - Disney thought he was unstoppable. Stitch's Great Escape marked the quickest turnaround ever between a feature film's success and a major attraction added to a theme park - the only comparable example is Peter Pan's Flight, in the 1950s. We're talking about a character who was a runaway success, poised on the razor's edge of being a genuine phenomenon.

But Stitch's Great Escape was, in many ways, the end, not the beginning. A sea change was underway. The character Disney once thought was the twenty-first century Mickey Mouse fizzled out. And so, on the anniversary of Stitch's most public blunder, it's time to tell his story again, and maybe,  just maybe, discover something new about Walt Disney World's most reviled attraction.

Something You Ate, Sir?

Tomorrowland has always had kind of a weird problem around its entrance. While planning the Magic Kingdom in the 1960s, Disney projected a much different mix of people to arrive at the place than who finally showed up. Disney, for their part, under-estimated the mix of young to old visitors. This is why Magic Kingdom opened with six theater shows and no thrill rides. The need for something thrilling was so acute that Disney marketed the relatively tame Pirates of the Caribbean as a "thrill ride" for 1974.

And so Tomorrowland always had these two gigantic theater shows right at the entrance that weren't ever super popular. Whatever alchemy of location and surrounding attractions is worth, generally you can see about the same number of people wandering into these buildings today as you could in any of the previous tenancies. Disneyland always had a combination of a theater and ride at the entrance to their Tomorrowland, and now has two popular, high-capacity rides on either side, so over there this problem is less apparent. In Florida, the dual shows hide behind a stretch of architecture that maybe a lot of visitors don't even know have experiences inside them.

The original theaters shows in that space, Circle-Vision 360 and Mission to Mars were, depending on your point of view, either laughably dated or pleasantly low key, but in all but the busiest of days were not exactly living up to their capacity potential. Each of the various replacement attractions in these spaces have sought to increase the popularity of these large capacity theaters without totally stripping the interior spaces. Circle-Vision was reworked into the terrific Timekeeper but, much like Circle-Vision, Timekeeper never fully found an audience. Across the way, retained from Mission to Mars were a few simple rooms - a layout essentially unchanged from 1967 - but Imagineering attempted to re-engineer the same basic experience into a teen-friendly thriller: Alien Encounter.


Now, I honestly believe that the Alien Encounter team went into the attraction with the best of intentions. Laughs and scares had traditionally sat besides each other in Disney product, in things like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and the Haunted Mansion. I think the Alien Encounter team wanted to create something like the Disney equivalent of Evil Dead 2 - a crazy, funny, scary roller coaster ride of an experience where laughs turn into screams and back again. The title of the thing even clues us in that maybe it isn't supposed to be taken too seriously - "ExtraTERRORestrial" looks like something that should be on a B-Movie poster in the lobby of the Sci-Fi Dine In.

Of course, things like that are only as scary as you want them to be, and the audience, primed for terror, screamed on cue but mostly just waited through the other material, never thinking about the patent absurdity of the whole thing. On the other hand, the reason why Evil Dead 2 and Dead-Alive can bridge that gap between scary and funny is by going so absurdly far over the top that the fright becomes abstracted and silly. Stick someone with a needle in a movie and the audience squirms; blow them apart in a micowave and you're more likely to get a laugh. Alien Encounter, straightjacketed inside a "hard PG" rating, went about as far as they could, but I often wonder how many audiences really ever responded the way they were supposed to. Even today, most people report that the experience was more terrifying than clever. Bolstered by an urban legend about Eisner demanding that the attraction be closed to make it scarier, audience expectations and Imagineering intentions were playing a losing game from the start.

Disney under Eisner through the 1990s was looking for ways to grow an audience that would stick around after the grade school years - to find ways to turn teenagers and adults into lifelong Disney fans instead of relegating the company to a product  that must be discarded upon the onset of puberty. Through things like The Lion King and Duck Tales, they succeeded, and Alien Encounter, along with Test Track at Epcot, are among the company's more successful teen-oriented theme park installations in this field.

Thoroughly, ostentatiously not for kids, some of the rage heard in the subsequent shuttering of Alien Encounter may also be traced to the betrayal of this group in the favor of a "kid's show". Alien Encounter was, after all, meant for them.

The new Alien Encounter layout replaced Mission to Mars' dual screens in the center of a theater in the round with a teleportation tube in which, thanks to simple stage magic, a crazed alien creature appeared and then appeared to break out of the tube into the theater, an event conveniently staged during a blackout. After roaming around the theater, licking random spectators, drooling, then killing an employee, the alien decides to climb back into the broken tube where a power surge causes it, much like a Gremlin in a microwave, to explode. The show was essentially a "darker", nastier cousin of the "audience abuse" subgenre of Disney 3D films like Honey, I Shrunk the Audience and It's Tough To Be A Bug.

Reviewing the whole thing on YouTube in preparation for this article, I was surprised at both how short and how patently goofy the whole experience was. The logic of the events was flaky, the dialogue stilted and a general sense of being a rather silly TV episode predominated. In retrospect, at the time it was running I was a bit too hard on Alien Encounter. I hated it. I thought it was tacky and tasteless and the whole experience was a mess. But the mold that Alien Encounter popped out of was broken. We will never again see its ilk in these parts. Audiences, for their part, either loved it or hated it. The removal of Alien Encounter in 2003 was as pre-destined a thing as can be imagined, it was literally too weird to live. If you are upset about the removal of Maelstrom in Epcot in favor of Frozen, then you will know this story well: a unique, deeply strange thing goes away, due to be replaced with the Disney Flavor of the Day. And in 2003, that flavor was Stitch.

Keep Circulating the Tapes

Although time has been kind to Lilo and Stitch in retrospect, such that it now appears to be the finest accomplishment of the last wave of traditional Disney animation, at the time there was no real indication that it would become the defining classic of Disney's last gasp of traditional animation. When we talk about what's retroactively called the "Second Golden Age", the key thing to understand is that the Disney animated films were comparatively cheap. The Lion King, for all of the money it has directly and indirectly raked in for Disney in the last twenty years, cost a measly $45 million dollars against a payout of over $750 million. Lion King's nearest competitor for the 1994 box office crown, Forrest Gump, cost $55 million and the third placing film, True Lies, cost over $100 million. In terms of cost versus return, Lion King was an amazing value.

What happened in the years following the success of Lion King is that the price of these animated films began to balloon, while their returns did not grow in step. So while the $448 million return on Tarzan is impressive, it cost $130 million to make, or, it only made a little over 3 times its production cost, instead of 17. So if you're a movie executive just looking at the numbers, then Tarzan was less of a good investment than Lion King.

The model began to break down considerably in 2000. Disney had historically successfully launched their animated movies at the start of the Summer months - kids were now out of school and could celebrate by seeing the newest Disney product. What happened in 2000 was Disney had three very different films all flooding the marketplace at three entirely different times. In the Winter, Fantasia 2000 had a modestly successful run in high end markets and IMAX screens. The traditional Disney Summer spot was taken up by Dinosaur, which, astonishingly enough today, made $350 million, and in December, Emperor's New Groove was in and out of theaters so quickly it built up a reputation that few had the chance to act on.

In short, Disney split the traditional "Whole Family" audience their films catered to into distinct groups with films to appeal to each - parents and serious animation fans, children, and "hip" teens, and the market became disastrously over-saturated. Compared to results like these, Lilo & Stitch was a small movie. In 2002, it was paired with Treasure Planet, which earned less than half of what Stitch did, and didn't even make back its production budget.

In fact, if you look at all of the traditional hand-drawn films Disney released between 2000 (Fantasia 2000) and 2009 (Princess and the Frog), Lilo and Stitch outgrossed them all. What it didn't come anywhere near to replicating was the contemporary success of the Pixar films. Movies like Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo were costing measly $70 or $80 million and were often earning in excess of $500 million. So while we can say that Lilo & Stitch was the most successful hand-drawn animated film of the last decade, to any executive its success was still not successful enough.

What can be said is that it came and went fairly quietly. I remember seeing Lilo & Stitch in a fairy sparsely attended theater in June 2002. It seemed that more people knew the iconic teaser trailers than had seen the film, but what mattered was, those who had seen the film liked it a lot and told their friends. Something underground began to grow.


And then in November 2002 Treasure Planet bombed hard. In order to make up the lost profits, Walt Disney Home Entertainment pulled a lavish 2-disc Lilo and Stitch DVD out of production and dumped a skeletal version on store shelves on December 3, 2002 - six days after Treasure Planet was released. That DVD release moved millions of copies and was probably the thing that graduated Lilo & Stitch from a weird little movie to a cult item..

By Christmas 2002, DVD had gained wide enough acceptance that the prices on both the discs themselves and the players had dropped well into the realm of affordability for young people with disposable income - ie, high school and college kids. For the first time in history, young people could go out and buy a first-release movie on a home media format for about $20.

Bolstered by things like director's cuts and audio commentaries, fans of popular cinema became experts overnight. Lord of the Rings went from widespead success to cultural phenomenon on the strength of DVDs. Cultish box office failures like Fight Club, Donnie Darko and Office Space  became runaway successes. And Lilo and Stitch was a DVD in heavy circulation, passed between friends in high schools. Like Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, a decent commercial success became a cultural juggernaut, and this was one not limited just to children. Adults, kids, teens, men and women were buying up Stitch toys, Stitch plush, and Stitch shirts - a cross-generational, cross-market success. It was a marketing director's fondest dream. And, like Frozen, Disney was not prepared for it.

You have to remember than this was going down in 2002 and 2003. The internet was rapidly populating, but was nowhere near the levels its at today. Movie Studios were still ossified in hidebound tradition - there was no concept of "Viral" marketing and the technology was not yet in place to count things like internet hits on videos that could be shared in controlled ways. Lilo and Stitch was a physical media phenomenon. For fairly little money you could go out and buy the movie your friends had told you about, or they could give it to you and then you could go out and buy it and keep the cycle spinning. The drumbeat was increasing right under Disney's noses. The old guard, in retrospect, over reacted. They ran predictions that, if things continued the way they were, Stitch would overtake Mickey Mouse in popularity.

It's hard to convey exactly how inconceivably meteoric Stitch's rise seemed on the ground in the early 2000s unless you were there. Especially at Walt Disney World, he was there, everywhere, overnight. The Stitch walk-around character was mobbed from park opening to park close. Stitch and Buzz Lightyear set up shop outside the closed Timekeeper attraction in Tomorrowland, and Stitch's line usually rivaled Buzz's. It was common to walk past any Walt Disney World store and see a Cast Member holding a Stitch plush and standing outside as a way to tempt you in. Disney manufactured a Stitch glove and sold it alongside the iconic Mickey glove souvenir, and, for a time, it was more common to see Stitch. You were either in the Stitch cult, or you were not.

You're the Top- But Not For Long

Just as in the case of Frozen and indeed any other thing that rises to intense popularity unexpectedly, some people, of course, immediately took exception to the invasion of the little blue guy. In October 2003, Disney was still playing catch-up with Stitch mania, and Stitch was still permanently stationed outside Timekeeper. The entire Merchant of Venus store, positioned at the exit of Alien Encounter and once the domain of things like "Moon Rocks" and Skippy the Alien plush, was given over entirely to Stitch.

Disney deployed a press release - "Mischief Abounds in Stitch's Great Escape" - on October 10, 2003, a Friday. Inside, they announced that Alien Encounter would close "later this month". It closed on October 13, giving Alien Encounter fans only a weekend to see their show one last time. This, as it turned out, was the thing that codified the anti-Stitch group into a consistent rhetoric. Not only was Stitch not a nice character, and his movie overrated, and he was everywhere, but he had closed a certain new classic... Alien Encounter. Two unrelated camps of fans rallied around one cause and a consistent message: Stitch had to go.

Alarms should have been raised at once by that press release, by the way. In his film, Stitch grows from a relentless, rather nasty egomaniac into a functioning member of a family by learning compassion and the meaning of sacrifice, but for quite a long time the audience is left unsure if Stitch is the hero or villain of the film. Despite the cross-market appeal of the character, audiences are conditioned by the film not to trust Stitch in his six-legged "alien" form, and his opening rampage through a space station is not the reason audiences bonded with him. It wasn't the reason they bought Stitch plush. Despite the massive cross-market appeal, a rare and beautiful thing in any fictional character, marketing zeroed in on Stitch's popularity with Disney's most coveted market: boys between 5 and 12.

Starting in the late 90s , Disney had been actively courting this most elusive of markets, with male-oriented adventure stories like Tarzan and Treasure Planet, but they failed to dominate the pre-hormonal male set in the same way Disney dominated the female set. Disney wanted a young boys' version of a princess dress: something every boy had to have. Maybe it would be a blue alien.

In 2004, ahead of the opening of the attraction, plush toys began to make way for full-body Stitch "flight suit" costumes, ray guns, and bottled containers of "Stitch Boogers". Stitch began to appear on merchandise with a tough look on his face accompanied by the slogan "I'll Give You A Stitch or Two". Those not already turned off by the character's ubiquity and invasion of a Magic Kingdom cult favorite began to cry fowl, too. This was not the character they loved.

Now, it's not as if Disney could not dig themselves out of this situation. In the years following its closure, praising Alien Encounter has become accepted dogma in Disney circles, but the fact remains that it was never a super popular show. Anyone seeking to demonstrate in 2003 that the closure of it would remain a sore spot eleven years later was going to be up against an uphill battle of numerous guest complaints and sparsely attended theaters. Most days of the year one of the two theaters was decommissioned, effectively halving the attraction's capacity. It made little difference, usually you simply had to wait for the holding pen to clear into the first pre-show room to be allowed out of the line. The show was drawing less than half its potential.

I'm not pointing this out to slam Alien, but simply to demonstrate that Disney didn't have much to lose here. Had they successfully renovated Alien Encounter into a show that really connected with audiences, they'd have a real technologically sophisticated hit experience in a spot that's never housed a Magic Kingdom favorite.

I joined the crowds in late October 2004 to see the new attraction. I walked away confused by the experience but impressed but the particulars, but I was basically alone. Audiences hated it. Or, more specifically, they didn't really respond to it. Theaters were deadly silent during laugh moments and failed to respond to the climax. The nervous shuffling of audiences in Alien Encounter became the awkward silence of a comedian bombing terribly onstage. Without the suspense narrative of Alien Encounter, without anything funny to make the experience worthwhile, the show's worst moments became its salient characteristics. Those seat restraints which nobody seemed to complain about in Alien Encounter suddenly became an uncomfortable horror. What was worse, Stitch both spit and burped on you - a disgusting smell which now permeates the building. And, you know, that Stitch was mean and the show wasn't funny. And it wasn't Alien Encounter. Word began to spread rapidly that the show was a dog, and the anti-Stitch/pro-Alien group redoubled their efforts, crowing that they had, after all, told us so.

What Disney did then horrified a lot of people, even those who had not yet taken sides in Stitch's Great Debate. They had Stitch desecrate the very symbol of Walt Disney World - Cinderella Castle.


They also set up a clever, although very strange, promotional display outside World of Disney at Downtown Disney - a Magic Kingdom van, apparently hijacked by Stitch, was "crashed" into a tree at the entrance - a photo opportunity it seems confused than enticed more guests.


Wanted posters appeared all over Magic Kingdom - find Experiment 626.

Perhaps most appallingly for many casual visitors, even the monorail spiels had been updated to hype Stitch. He was heard "driving" the monorail, and announced "Welcome to Stitch Kingdom!" upon arrival in the Magic Kingdom monorail station. And, in what has to be the single most bizarre promotional idea ever actually enacted in Walt Disney World, area music in bathrooms in Adventureland and Tomorrowland was turned off, and replaced with an intermittent vocal soundscape of Stitch opening various bathroom stall doors searching for Lilo. A giant inflatable Stitch balloon at the Transportation and Ticket Center blocked views of Cinderella Castle. There was no escaping the little guy.

Concurrently, the 2006 Walt Disney World merchandise began to appear. This product line had been a tradition at Walt Disney World since 1997, featuring Disney's "Fab Five" of core characters: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto. This basic graphic had traditionally appeared on shirts, bags, blankets - anything you can imagine. In 2005, Walt Disney World added Stitch.


And he wasn't just in the group - he was front and center. Disney stores already overstocked with Stitch plush, Stitch hats, Stitch costumes, Stitch hands, and Stitch pins now had Stitch on what felt like over half of the store.

Perhaps surprisingly, this was the final straw for many. The year 2006-branded merchandise moved fewer units than the 2005 or 2007 units. What seemed, in 2006, to be an all-encompassing Stitch invasion turned out to be.... the end. Now everyone was talking about another new Disney hero who had become a favorite on DVD. Everyone who got off Pirates of the Caribbean had one question: that was great, but where was Captain Jack Sparrow?

That boys market was rapidly shifting towards all things Captain Jack. In mid 2005, an official sequel to Lilo and Stitch appeared in stores. Despite being far nearer to the tone of the original film, Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch failed to evoke the barest ripple of interest. A sticker on the front of DVD promised an endorsement by Lilo and Stitch's original creators, but even fans of what Stitch was instead of what he became failed to show up. The official Lilo and Stitch chronology, continued in a syndicated TV show, came to an end inauspiciously with Leroy and Stitch in 2006, while Captain Jack Sparrow's big screen adventures continue to this day. Disney had mismanaged the Stitch character right into the ground.

Ten Years On: Stitch's Great Escape

The numbers coming out of Stitch's Great Escape from the start were far below expectations. Audiences simply didn't know what to make of the thing. They weren't certain if anything they saw or heard was funny or interesting, and even fans of Stitch were pressed for anything positive to say. And the experience - with fog, lights, loud sounds, and darkness - was still too much for small children. The rising chorus of shrieking children began as soon as the power in the theater failed and continued pretty much until the end of the experience.

And so, starting in January 2005, Imagineering began to go back  into the attraction and mess around with it. In this era, I was in Magic Kingdom a lot and after wandering into Stitch one night and seeing that the show was being tinkered with, I began to see it about once a week for several months. Every 10 days or so, something, even something small, would be different. Alien Encounter had about 3.5 minutes of darkness, and while Stitch brought it down to about a minute, this still wasn't enough. The first change - which is still there to this day - was to bring the Stitch figure back up onto the teleportation platform just before power is restored, moving around rapidly. This didn't seem to have much affect on the scariness quotient of the show, but it did add to the surreal atmosphere.

Next up: the cannon sequence got a new special effect. When Gantu switches on the "Emergency Power", a projected sequence of rotating lights in the ceiling were activated. As the cannons blasted their way around the theater, Stitch could be seen in shadow form projected on the walls by the rotating lights, hanging off scaffolds and scurrying around. This effect was pretty convincing but itself only lasted a few months before being removed.

By far the most bizarre change was only installed for a few short weeks. Imagineering had messed with the sound scape during the blackout before, but perhaps deciding that their intended audience was too scared of the experience, they added two voices to the binaural soundscape of two young boys seated "behind" you. These two entirely synthetic "virtual" kids yammered through the entire show reassuringly, as soon as "Experiment 626" arrived in the theater: "Stitch!""It's Stitch!"

This is frankly most bizarre in that it seemed to work. Children in audiences I saw these shows with were much less panicky than those who saw it before or after this addition. The two helpful kids continued to narrate Stitch's every move during the show, reaching an absurd climax as Stitch bounced around the ceiling: "What's he doing?""He's going to hotwire the teleporter!". If we follow the logic of the attraction at this juncture, Stitch hotwires the teleporter by sticking together two wires that the laser cannons blast free, but since this hadn't happened yet, at least one of these two kids had apparently already seen the show at this point. Talk about a spoiler! After a few weeks, the kids went away too, never to be heard again.

The final significant change was a new ending. Originally, Stitch was seen attacking an Astro Orbiter car full of delighted guests in a poorly animated clip that lasted perhaps six seconds. The extended joke that's there now of Stitch barging into Cinderella's bedroom replaced it. In order to compensate for the longer Cinderella Castle gag, a beat or two of Gantu and the two Galactic Federation technicians at a loss for words was removed from the very end of the show. The castle joke is a better joke, but now the show ends on an even more weirdly noncommital shrug. Audiences feel much the same way.

The damage was done. Improving the show here and there still failed to take into account why audiences didn't like it, which had less to do with the show itself and more to do with what it was to begin with.


Casual visitors and Stitch fans hated it because of what it wasn't - a showcase for a character they learned to love during a redemption arc. Alien Encounter fans hated it because of what it represented - the infintalization of something expressly intended for teens and adults. There was no way Stitch's Great Escape could satisfy both camps, but it failed to satisfy anyone. By remaining beholden to the Alien Encounter show format, Stitch's Great Escape betrayed the audience it was after from the start.

"Infantilization" pretty much hits the nail on the head with everything that's wrong with Stitch's Great Escape. I've seen the show many, many times with audiences of all stripes, and I saw it several times again in preparation for this article, and the moments where it loses audiences are moments when it plays down to them. There's a moment in the first pre-show video where the Grand Councilwoman announces:

"The universe is filled with a wonderful integration of alien societies. However, as in all societies, there are the nice... and the naughty!"

This line invariably sucks the air out the room. Adults, who are probably operating on hazily positive associations with the film, start wondering if they're in for something regrettably juvenile. It's a tension the show never fully resolves. Fairly funny, strange jokes in keeping with the tone of the Lilo & Stitch film sit cheek to jowl with jokes that seem to have been smuggled in from The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. The moment which codifies this perception is the infamous chili-dog belch. For most, it's the moment the show loses them forever. In-theater, you can actually feel the audience's attention draining away following that moment.

Not Made Up!

This is a shame, because for all of the show's juvenile obsession with belching, drooling, spitting, and slobber, it isn't a cheap or poorly done effort. On a strictly technical level, Stitch repeats and improves on most of what Alien Encounter did. There's those two Stitch figures - ten years later, still amongst the best audio-animatronic characters in the United States. If most of Alien played out in darkness (it did), Stitch pushes more heavily in the direction of a show governed by animated figures. The dual laser cannons are as impressive as they are faintly scary, adding a bit of a threat to an already intense experience.

Stitch here and there also clarifies and improves the logic of Alien Encounter. The 1994 WDI team never quite cracked how, exactly, the alien got into the theater. George Lucas apparently suggested that they solve this problem by making the X-S Tech even more obviously evil than they were by revealing that the alien was loosed on the theater intentionally, an idea what seems to have survived over from the plot of Aliens and the movie series which provided the original extraterrestrial life form which inspired Alien Encounter.

As it is, what they ended up with was a teleportation demonstration which is set up, cancelled at the last second, then a second one which is botched, followed by a third successful teleportation of the wrong life form. I doubt that many audience understood any of this. Stitch levels the playing field by initiating a single teleportation in the pre-show room and carrying it into the main show, building up a great deal of excitement along the way.

And, about those shoulder restraints. When you put a word like "TERROR" and "THRILL" on the sign of your attraction and place placards up everywhere warning of an intense experience, audiences are more likely to think of something like the over-the-shoulder restraints from Alien Encounter as part of the scary experience. When you carry over the same technology into something explicitly marketed as more lightweight and whimsical, the discomfort introduced by the restraints becomes more of a problem. It's interesting and telling that audiences only began to complain about the restraints after the show became Stitch's Great Escape.

And then there's the Alien Encounter main show, where a gigantic piece of technology has no auxillary power source. It's pretty implicit in Alien Encounter that Spinlok and Dr. Femus are totally incompetent boobs ("People of earth! Do not worry! As long as those beams are on, the alien can not fly out!"), and Stitch gets even more mileage out of its goofy, grossly inadequate technicians by pairing them with and letting them bounce off the officious Gantu, who - finally, after years of failure by XS Tech - has the presence of mind to activate Emergency Power.

"Chairman Clench doesn't believe in emergency power."

Having spent all that trouble getting the alien into the theater, Alien Encounter couldn't come up with a good way of getting him out again. Streamlining the Alien Encounter show's bones into a prison escape story smoothes all this out, even if it troublingly casts the audience in the role of employees of the antagonists! Alien Encounter was a strong experience book ended by the flimsiest of rationales: blowing up the alien was a funny, appropriately crazy way to end the show, but it never escaped the shadow of its own obvious desperation. And, like the crazy series of accidents that got the alien into the theater to begin with, it was over so quickly many audiences missed it totally.

I don't say all of this to imply that Stitch's Great Escape is in any way faultless or even really all that good, just to suggest that it isn't as bad as it's made out to be. Similarly, the roundly lionized Alien Encounter had more problems than is commonly admitted. But both are bound together in the fact that neither show did justice to its concept.


Today's Emergency is Over

The financial 'afterlife' of films in the theme parks is a very strange thing. Most studio and theatrical films are ephemeral things, and the explosion of the home market has not changed this. Movies like Die Hard are really freaks of nature, evergreen moneymakers. Disney films are traditionally very strong on the secondary market, but when they get into the theme parks they begin to meld and morph into sometimes bizarrely different things.

Take something like the Swiss Family Treehouse, which more people visit in a month than have seen the movie in the past ten years. And yet, it still works and is fully comprehensible to any viewer. This is because the only thing you need to know about the film to enjoy the attraction is right there on the sign - shipwrecked family builds a house. That's it. The attraction allows you to go into the house, and the attraction-tree never really resembled the film-tree in a serious way. The form of the attraction is harmonized with the tie-in film property in a way that has universal, not specific, appeal.

Where Stitch's Great Escape, and all of these movie tie-in attractions in general go wrong, is that they are bound to weirdly specific moments in the narrative of the films to have their effect. Nearly every moment in the attraction is referencing some moment in the film. If you know nothing about Lilo & Stitch besides that it exists, then Stitch's Great Escape is the worst advertisement for it imaginable. It conveys nothing of the tone of the film or the love the character inspires in audiences. Actually, you'd probably correctly infer from the attraction that Stitch is a malicious bastard.

That's probably the real reason Stitch's Great Escape fails to interest audiences, it isn't because of those restraints or that it isn't a ride; that's just shorthand people use to skirt around the real issue, which is that there's no payoff for going to see it. It's a lot of sound and fury for no good reason at all. At least, one could reason if she wished, Alien Encounter was trying to be scary. Stitch's Great Escape has no reason to exist, no onus, besides itself.


This puts us theme park fans in a lousy spot. Defending Stitch's Great Escape, as I've tried to do to some extent in this article, means defending a juvenile source text that doesn't even work for the people it's designed to appeal to. Defending Alien Encounter means casting your lot with a flawed, mean spirited, badly paced show which its own creators wrote into a corner. That's a rigged game if I've ever heard of one.

Sitting across from Stitch at Magic Kingdom is a show I, personally, find even more objectionable - the randomly-placed Monsters Inc Laugh Floor. Yet Monsters has cultivated an audience because it actually delivers on exactly what it promises on the sign: Monsters and family-friendly jokes. If that's what you're in the market for, then that's a good show. Stitch delivers a weird mess of conflicting tones and ideas in a loud, uncomfortable, weirdly unpleasant way. If you do enjoy it, it will be because it's a mess of non sequitur chaos.


What Disney really needs to do isn't to restore Alien Encounter, it's to finally admit defeat in this particular space and tear the whole kit and kaboodle out. After ten years of chili dog stench permeating the entire building, I doubt most of the original walls and interior are salvageable now anyway. It's time to tear it all out and build a ride in there. With the walls removed, there's about as much space in there as in Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, or enough for a well-designed Fantasyland ride. If they really want to fix the entire entrance area of Tomorrowland, they'll tear out the Monsters Inc show too. Through an underground hallway or open-air bridge that connects both, these two show spaces connected have the potential for a first-rate ride through.

As for Stitch, perhaps his day will one day come again. If Stitch's Great Escape marked a point of no return for the character, then ten years on people are starting to once again forget how annoyed they were with him back in the early naughts. Lilo and Stitch's directorial team, driven out of Disney thanks to interference from John Lassetter, have gone on to produce Dreamworks' most critically acclaimed film series, How To Train Your Dragon. Chris Sanders is now an animation autuer, and his films have recognized influences and style. At Disney, Lilo and Stitch was weird outsider art, but it's one that now rests easily inside a larger narrative - not of Disney, but of Sanders.

In 2009, Disney finally issued the lavish Lilo & Stitch DVD they had been putting off for years, and the excellence of the extra material on that disc has deepened appreciation of the special accomplishment Lilo & Stitch represents. In another ten years hopefully it will be remembered as a masterpiece instead of a marketing cautionary tale.

The political infighting Stitch's Great Escape inspired in the Disney community has only increased in the years following its debut. Positions have calcified into doctrines: old school "Foamer" fans against new-school "Dusters". Twenty years of active loyalty building on Eisner's part has turned Disney less into an interest and more into an identity, a life choice. The new stripe of Disney fans root for Disney in the same way sports fans root for the home team, and a slight against Disney is a slight against them personally. Stitch's Great Escape widened the gap precipitously, and "Stitchgate" remains one of the defining moments in the developing community.

And yet despite all opposition the attraction has soldiered on, unloved. It's outlived Alien Encounter but I doubt it will outlive its own troubled legacy. Rarely popular enough to justify a line, Stitch's Great Escape isn't just the lowest rated attraction in the park, but it's the single attraction where the ratings of the entire Magic Kingdom overall turn downward - those who see it rate everything lower than those who don't. Disney usually sweeps things like this under the rug. It's an anormality that it's lasted this long.

So what are we talking about here? An aesthetically orphaned film? A botched secondary market? An unloved attraction? A divisive political issue? No matter which way you cut it, Stitch's Great Escape is a singularity. We will never see anything like it again.

And so while it may be too much to ask theme park fans to enjoy Stitch's Great Escape entirely on the level of content, perhaps it's not too much to suggest that its bizarre, manic tone is not without unique pleasures. Despite its obvious flailings and failings, Stitch's Great Escape whips up a heady blend of unnmotivated insanity and weirdness.

In a Disney World where everything is increasingly safe and homogenized, Stitch's Great Escape is a way-out outlier: too lonely to live, yet too weird to die.

Back in summer 2011, I came across a single file that would more or less determine my hobbies for the next three and a half years. It was a decent quality source copy of the original soundtrack to "If You Had Wings", long thought destroyed. I was enervated. I sat down and, using live recordings and videos of the attraction, worked up a "flow-through" of the ride, capturing the atmosphere and din of the attraction but using source recordings. When it was done I stretched back, relaxed, and thought: "now to do the rest of the park!". I laughed. But I did it.

This hobby has sent me raiding record stores on both coasts, sticking microphones on sticks into highly suspicious places in theme parks, driving across states, begging and pleading, and constantly editing, re-editing, and re-editing. The release of A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World turned out to merely be the start of an even more concerted effort to create Part 2, but I'm pleased to say that after all of the crazy adventures I've had, the end is (almost) in sight. But this wasn't merely a v.2.0 of my first project, no, this turned into another thing entirely. It's Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.

There's a story from the annals of film history that's been rolling through my head since somewhere around early 2012. The story goes that on the set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance", Griffith instructed his camera man Billy Bitzer that for a hugely complicated shot he wanted to crane down from a wide angle to an extreme closeup and - this was the rub - he wanted the entire set to be in focus the whole time. Bitzer replied that this was impossible. Griffith replied: "That's why we're going to do it."

It's a mad quest to want to recreate a flowing audio tour of an entire theme park, but it's even crazier to want to recreate that park as it sounded thirty-five years ago. That was my goal. I wanted to rebuild, using testimony, memory, and research, the sound of the Magic Kingdom as it was well before I was even born. I wanted to hear music unheard since before Ronald Reagan was in office and sounds from attractions long long gone.

I don't know if it's crazier that I tried to do it or successfully did it. And it's coming to you soon.


It maybe doesn't look all that different than the original project, but it is. Nearly every track is significantly longer, more accurate, and presented in vastly upgraded quality. While the original Souvenir clocked in around 2 1/2 hours, the main body of this version is over 4 hours long - and there are 2 additional hours of "Bonus Tracks".

Let's announce some specifics:

Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World
Track List:
   1) Overture
   2) Main Street, U.S.A.
   3) Adventureland
   4) Jungle Cruise
   5) Caribbean Plaza
   6) Liberty Square
   7) Mike Fink Keelboats
   8) Frontierland
   9) Fantasyland
   10) Tomorrowland, Part 1
   11) Tomorrowland, Part 2
   12) If You Had Wings
   13) Magic Kingdom by Starlight
   14) An Evening in the Vacation Kingdom

Bonus Tracks:
   1) Big Thunder Mt. Railroad
   2) The Jungle Cruise (1991)
   3) Liberty Square (1993)
   4) New Tomorrowland (1983)
   5) Main Street, U.S.A. (Christmas)
   6) Magic Kingdom by Starlight (Christmas)

Many things have changed, but many have stayed the same. Avid listeners of my previous version will notice many differences, but none so stark as the "Evening in the Vacation Kingdom",  the crown jewel of the collection. This track finally realizes my original intention to recreate a full night spent in the Contemporary and Polynesian Village sipping cocktails in bars and lounges, hearing nearly forgotten resort area music, and enjoying vintage music acts of Walt Disney World's past.

Other tracks have been fully rebuilt. Main Street, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland, in particular, are almost wholly new and much improved.

You'll notice those "Bonus" tracks. They're intended to allow listeners to customize the experience seamlessly by replacing tracks in their playlist. Except for the Christmas tracks, each of the other Bonus tracks brings the main sequence of music tracks out of the late 70s and forward in time - bringing with them music tracks which will perhaps be more familiar to most listeners.  In this way I was able to offer a wider selection of music without compromising the historical integrity of the main project.

"Bonus" implies an item of secondary importance, but don't be fooled - my Bonus tracks here constitute some of my proudest work on the project. The highlight is definitely the 1983 Space Mountain soundtrack by George Wilkins of Horizons fame, which has finally been restored with all of its cues in the correct order. This will be the first time since 1993 that Wilkins' accomplishment here will be heard in full.

It's all very exciting and I'm very excited to be sharing it with you. So please keep an eye out for Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World - the next best thing to actually being there.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the shiny, new-and-improved Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World. Today marks the end of a 3.5 year journey for me, although I may time and again post updated tracks as new resources become available.


"Another Musical Souvenir" consists of 20 MP3 files of more than 6 hours total Walt Disney World atmosphere tracks. Also included is a gorgeous, lavishly illustrated 28 page booklet that will guide you through the tracks, plus an additional 40 pages of "Expanded Notes" and annotations for those who want to know how it all came together.


If you've ever wanted to step back in time and visit the Walt Disney World of its earliest years, Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World is your time machine. Each track is a flowing, aural landscape which revives the music and sounds of the Vacation Kingdom of the past.

 Inside you can sit in the Central Plaza as swan boats drift by, explore the original Magic Kingdom Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, ride a Skyway bucket over Fantasyland, revisit the RCA Space Mountain, listen to Michael Iceberg play his iceberg machine and ride a monorail to the Polynesian Village for drinks.

 This second version of the original A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World expands on the original, including more than twice the amount of material. Finally the full scope of the project may be heard, and the intended structure restored. Best of all this project comes with six "Bonus Tracks" which offer many more opportunities to include beloved Magic Kingdom music beyond the late-70s scope of the project.

This is a memory meant to be shared, and I hope that "Another Musical Souvenir" both brings back fond memories and inspires others to learn more about the terrific history and legacy of Walt Disney World.