Progress City, U.S.A.

While it was never our intent to become a television listing service around these parts, apparently Turner Classic Movies has decided to become something of a Disney Channel in exile. If they’re going to give us what Disney refuses to, then I’m all for publicizing it and making sure everyone knows to tune in. Last week was Disney science fiction; this week it looks like comedy and live-action/animation hybrids. Good stuff, too:

Saturday, February 9th at 4:15 PM - The Absent Minded Professor (1961)

Saturday, February 9th at 6:00 PM - Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Saturday, February 9th at 8:00 PM - Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Be there, aloha

  

Just a brief post to remind everyone that Walt Disney Pictures releases National Treasure: Book of Secrets today on 3,832 screens nationwide (the film is currently lighting up Rotten Tomatoes with a 35% freshness rating). The upside of all this is that before each screening will be shown the first fruits of Disney’s brand spanking new shorts division, How To Hook Up Your Home Theater. The Goofy-starring short and the shorts program as a whole have been discussed here in a previous post. The advance word on the short is uniformly fantastic - check it out if you can handle a little Nicholas Cage action.

Happy 61st birthday to Song Of The South, the Disney/RKO motion picture that debuted on this day at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. This movie was obviously based on the Uncle Remus stories from Joel Chandler Harris (who in turn wrote them from previously told folk tales), but nonetheless gave us three frequently used characters in Disney parks: Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and my favorite Brer Rabbit.

Obviously, we can ride Splash Mountain to celebrate, or we could sit and sulk about how Song of the South is not yet released in home video format. Eisner and Co. thought it too racially sensitive to release, and I can see why. I do believe that this movie has much more charm than the racial issue though.

There’s been a buzz recently that Iger and Co. are looking to rerelease Song Of the South, and Iger’s even admitted pondering this himself. Let’s hope that soon we will be able to get this movie as next in a long line of the Walt Disney Treasures series.

On this day in 1886 (!), Isaiah Edwin Leopold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he would later run away from home to join the vaudeville circuit, he would change his name to Ed Wynn to save his family the embarrassment of having an actor in their midst. While Disney fans will know Wynn for his later work with the studio, the actor had already lived through several careers before he came to Disney to voice the Mad Hatter for Alice in Wonderland in 1951.

Wynn rose through the ranks of vaudeville to star in the Zigfield Follies as early as 1914; he continued to write, act, and produce on Broadway for decades. He was a popular radio show host in the 1930’s and a TV host in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, winning an Emmy in 1949. As Wynn prepared to retire, his son Keenan persuaded him to try serious acting and he made his debut in Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight on the anthology series Playhouse 90. He would continue to work in film and television until his death in 1966.

Wynn’s vaudeville fame no doubt appealed to Walt Disney, who had grown up while Wynn was a big star on Broadway. Disney was obviously a fan of the old vaudeville stage, and Wynn would appear in Disneyland’s own “Golden Horseshoe Revue” for its 10,000th performance in 1962. Wynn would make eight films for Disney, most prominently Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins, but also The Absent Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, Babes in Toyland, Those Calloways, That Darn Cat!, and The Gnome-Mobile.

This long list of Disney credits gets to something I often think about - the fact that for a great portion of the 1950’s and 60’s, Disney had a fairly steady stock company of actors and filmmakers creating a constant stream of live-action films for the company. While the old studio system was dying elsewhere, Walt was running a shop that centered around contract players and in-studio production talent. While such a system has its benefits and its shortcomings, at its best it can result in a consistent supply of familiar faces producing dependably entertaining films. It requires constant quality control and the occasional freshening though; Disney’s own system would return to bite the studio after Walt was gone. When his eye for quality and urge to push the envelope was lost, decay set in and what was comfortable and familiar in the 1950’s became trite and threadbare by the 1970’s.

Every film geek knows the thrill of seeing some favorite character actor show up in a bit part, and for me that experience began with watching these films as a kid. A lot of actors from this period in Disney history tend to pop up as character actors in other major studios’ films in this and previous eras. Similarly, as a budding film geek it was fun to spot familiar composers, writers, directors, and even set designers and effects technicians from film to film.

While I would never suggest that Disney eschew the urge to continually explore new material and bring in new talent, I’ve always rather hoped that they’d make a return to these early roots and establish a small internal production group that could foster new talent and produce a series of films with a similar continuity. Even an anthology television program, produced for ABC or the Disney Channel and centering on the fictional town of Medfield could provide a reliable source of entertainment and a touchstone with Disney’s past. Keep it interesting, avoid cliche and general cheeseballery, and hire talented people with good ideas - actually think about what you’re making and you can avoid the stream of tapioca that most people think of when they think of Disney post-Walt. How else are kids of the future going to know about 121-year-old vaudevillians?

Happy Birthday, Ed!