August 11 - Phil Harris

Image courtesy radioclassics.com

On this day, in 1995, Wonga Philip Harris passed away in Rancho Mirage, California. Phil, as he was known professionally, was born in Linden, Indiana on June 24, 1904. His parents were employed with a circus and he spent most of his formative years in Tennessee, which is where he picked up his signature, albeit slight, drawl. It didn’t take long for Phil to get in on the family act. His father was the Big Top’s bandleader and put his young son on drums. Phil honed his skills under the watchful eye of dear old dad until the mid-Twenties, when he packed up the old drum kit and headed west.

Phil’s first long term professional gig was in San Francisco, California. He formed an orchestra with Carol Lofner, expertly called the Lofner-Harris Orchestra, in 1928. They were actually the first band to play the famous Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California but it their reception at the St. Francis Hotel in San Fran turned into a three year contract. The Lofner-Harris Orchestra broke up in 1932 and the following year, Phil was fronting his own band at the Coconut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

At the same time Phil was getting into the swing of things in LA, he began making appearances on film. In 1933, a short comedy was made about him, sort of. He plays a (fairly) fictional version of himself, playing a few songs at the Coconut Grove and having some comedic encounters with people at a country club in between. Called So This Is Harris!, it actually won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Comedy) in 1934. He also starred in the 1933 hit Melody Cruise, the 1936 short Double or Nothing (also nominated for an Oscar) and 1939’s Man About Town with Jack Benny.

Phil broke into radio in 1936 as the musical director for The Jell-O Show starring Jack Benny (it would quickly be renamed just the Jack Benny Show). In between singing songs like his signature That’s What I Like About the South, it became evident that he was good at throwing off one-liners and he was added to the cast as well. He played a hard drinking (“I’ve never endorsed a single kind of alcohol. Wouldn’t want to slight the others.”)  but genial Southerner who had a nickname for everyone. His moniker for Jack Benny, Jackson, even entered the national conscious and became a popular slang word to call someone, along the lines of dude. Phil remained a part of Jack Benny’s show all the way until 1952.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

Phil would often credit radio with giving him the ability to stop doing tours of one-night gigs and settle down. He also said it allowed him to get married but he was talking about his second marriage, the one that lasted 54 years until his death. His first marriage of almost a dozen years fell apart near the beginning of his run with Jack Benny. Phil met his second wife, actress and singer Alice Faye, at a rehearsal for the radio show and actually got into a fistfight with someone over her (they were both married to other people at the time). Both eventually got divorced and married each other in 1941. Alice began to appear regularly on Jack Benny and the couple got their own situational comedy program, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, in 1948 that aired following Jack Benny until 1954.

Following the end of his steady radio presence (which coincided with the general decline of radio in favor of television), Phil continued to record albums and make occasional film appearances. He had a novelty hit song, The Thing, in the early Fifties. He also starred in the movie version of Anything Goes in 1956 with Bing Crosby, starting a lifelong friendship with the fellow crooner. Phil would gladly guest star on Bing’s short-lived television variety show in the Seventies and took over commentating duties for Bing’s annual Pro-Am Golf Tournament after his friend’s death. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Phil made numerous appearances on television programs including The Dean Martin Show, Burke’s Law, The Steve Allen Show and F-Troop.

Image copyright Disney

Phil burst into the world of Disneyana in a big way in the mid-Sixties. While developing The Jungle Book, Walt met Phil at a party and took a liking to him. Walt suggested that Phil be cast as the ne’er-do-well bear, Baloo, much to the shock of many in his staff who couldn’t figure out why that boozer from Jack Benny should be in a story by Rudyard Kipling. It turned out to be just another case of Walt knowing exactly what he was doing, of course. Phil, for his part, drove the producers crazy with his insistence on ad libbing many of his lines. He said the written ones didn’t feel natural enough. He was born to play the part, however, and that shines through almost every line, especially the scatting duel he has with Louie Prima on I Want to Be Like You.

The appeal of The Jungle Book (and, I suspect, a fear of not wanting to make terribly many changes in the wake of Walt’s death) led to Phil starring in two more Disney animated features in quick succession. His second turn came as Abraham Delacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O’Malley the Alley Cat in 1970’s The Aristocats. He followed that up in 1973 as Little John in Robin Hood. As fun as the latter two roles can be at points, they both feel an awful lot like retreads of Baloo, at least to my way of thinking. But maybe that’s just because I can’t help but sense that both movies have a desperate we-can-do-this-without-the-boss undertone to them, as well. At any rate, you’d be hard pressed to say disparaging things about either performance and the trio of high profile characters should be enough to elevate Phil to Legendary status, right? Well, surprisingly, not yet, but there’s always next year.

Image copyright Disney

Phil’s last song recording happened in the mid-Seventies, his last television appearance was in 1984 on an episode of This Is Your Life and his final movie role was as the narrator in Don Bluth’s 1991 animated film Rock-A-Doodle. In addition to emceeing Bing Crosby’s charity golf event, Phil and his wife, Alice, established performing scholarships at the high school in his hometown of Linden, Indiana and were big supporters of the civic activities in Palm Springs, California. In August of 1995, the brash performer who was described as one of the quietest guys you’d ever meet in private, suffered a fatal heart attack at home. He was 91.

December 24 - The Aristocats

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1970, Walt Disney Productions 20th animated feature, The Aristocats, is generally released to theaters. The Aristocats began life as an idea for a two part episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. It was also going to be a live action production. The project spent a couple of years being rewritten and reshaped until Walt suggested it could be the studio’s next animated feature. And so, in the Fall of 1966, as production on The Jungle Book wound down, development of The Aristocats started in earnest, making this film the studio’s last movie to bear the personal seal of approval from its founder.

Unlike many of its predecessors, The Aristocats is an original script developed by staff writers, most of the work being done by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe. The original concept centered on two servants who stood to inherit a fortune once the family brood of cats was disposed of and their ill-conceived antics to try to make that happen. As time went on, one of the servants, the maid, was dropped and the focus of the story shifted to the cats themselves. Following Walt’s death, the emotional parts of the tale were pared down even more and the picture became more of an adventurous caper, similar to One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which is why The Aristocats is often described as Dalmatians except with cats).

Image copyright Disney

Casting the voice roles for the film followed a pattern that had been established with The Jungle Book and would continue with films like Robin Hood: a few splashy big names along with some tried and true Disney stalwarts. While the part of the villainous butler, Edgar, had been written with Boris Karloff in mind when the project was going to be live action, the role ended up going to veteran English actor Roddy Maude-Roxby. Walt had personally asked Phil Harris to play Thomas O’Malley the alley cat. This would be the second of three roles Phil would play in quick succession for the studio. Eva Gabor was tapped as Duchess, the mother cat and unlikely love interest of Thomas O’Malley. The cast was rounded out by Sterling Holloway, Pat Buttram, George Lindsay, Thurl Ravenscroft and Paul Winchell to drop just a few more names.

Image copyright Disney

The Aristocats also marks another last for the studio. It is the final animated picture that the Sherman Brothers worked on as staff songwriters for the Walt Disney Studio. Robert and Richard had been getting increasingly frustrated with how things were being run after Walt’s death and this movie would represent the last straw for them. Only two of their songs made it into the final product, The Aristocats (which enticed Maurice Chevalier to come out of retirement to sing) and Scales and Arpeggios, sung by Marie. The rest of the songs were written by various folks and include classics like Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat and Thomas O’Malley Cat.

The Aristocats was a financial success upon its release, grossing over $17 million worldwide on a budget of only $4 million. The reviews were generally favorable with many critics giving it three out of four stars. My only complaint about the movie is that some of its portrayals of foreign cultures have not aged well at all (I’m talking to you Paul Winchell). Otherwise, The Aristocats is a fun way to spend an hour and half, even if you might not remember too many of the specifics the next day.

November 8 - Robin Hood

On this day, in 1973, Walt Disney Production's twenty-first animated feature, Robin Hood, made its debut. The idea to make a feature based on the legends of Reynard the Fox date all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was looked at and shelved several times during Walt's life, actually getting an extensive work up once for an unproduced film called Chanticleer and Reynard. In 1970, writer Ken Anderson pitched a plan to merge the anthropomorphic animals from Reynard with the legend of Robin Hood.

As production proceeded on the movie, it ran into several time consuming roadblocks. Anderson wanted to set the movie in the deep south. Disney executives, uncomfortable with comparisons to Song of the South, insisted it stay in England. Then the initial actor cast as Robin Hood, Tommy Steele, couldn't sound heroic enough for the producers and a search for a new lead had to be undertaken. They finally settled on Brian Bedford, a name familiar to fans of Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. There was even lengthy discussions over the legends Merry Men. Anderson felt they were essential to the movie, the producers wanted more of a buddy movie. Little John is the only merry man to make the cut. All these seemingly little delays added up and put production way behind schedule. In order to make up some time, several sequences from earlier films were reused in Robin Hood. The one that is pointed out most often is a scene of Maid Marian dancing just like Snow White did in her movie but dances from The Jungle Book and The Aristocats were also recycled.

The rest of the cast is just as good as the title character ended up being. Phil Harris makes his third Disney appearance as Little John. Peter Ustinov gives a marvelous performance as the villainous Prince John and his more virtuous brother, King Richard. Pat Buttram as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Terry-Thomas as Sir Hiss, Monica Evans as Maid Marian, Roger Miller as the singing narrator, Alan-A-Dale, the list goes on and on.

The initial reviews of Robin Hood were mostly positive, calling it a decent movie with great casting if not quite up to the standards of earlier Disney fare. Reviews since then have dwelt on it's use of recycled material and been somewhat less kind. It was a financial success, taking in 32 million dollars on a budget of 5 million. It even garnered an Oscar nomination for the song "Love," but lost out to The Way We Were.

October 18 - The Jungle Book

On this date, in 1967, Walt Disney Pictures 19th animated feature, The Jungle Book, was released in theaters. Based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, The Jungle Book is also the last animated film from Disney that Walt had a hand in producing as he died several months before it opened. It was also the first animated film in a while that Walt actually paid attention to.

For 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, Bill Peet, a long time animator and story man for Disney, had been allowed to develop the script pretty much on his own. Dalmatians had been a success for Bill and the company, Stone decidedly less so. When his initial script for Jungle Book was closely aligned with the dark tone of the book, Walt told Bill to lighten it up. Bill for some reason refused and subsequently left the company. Walt then took an active interest in developing the story and characters and the improvement of this film over Stone shows it.

In a break with his casting practices of late, Walt decided to hire more well known stars to voice some of the characters in his version of Jungle Book. Comedian and jazz singer Phil Harris was brought in for the role of Baloo, his first of three major Disney characters. Phil would confound the script team by ad libbing most of his lines because, as he put it, the written ones "didn't feel natural." Fellow jazz artist Louis Prima became King Louie. Sebastian Cabot, who also narrated the Winnie the Pooh shorts, was tapped for Bagheera. Also included in the cast were Disney stalwarts like Sterling Holloway, J. Pat O'Malley and Verna Felton, in her last film role. Walt had wanted to cast the four members of The Beatles as the vultures and have them sing the song "We're Your Friend", but when John Lennon refused, the vultures simply became Beatle-esque.

The Jungle Book cost the studio four million dollars to make but was released to critical acclaim and financial success, reaping box office receipts of over 378 million worldwide to date. Several current animators, including Brad Bird and Glen Keane, will tell you that Jungle Book was their inspiration to get into animation in the first place. The movie has spawned an animated sequel, two different live action versions, the Disney Afternoon series Talespin and the animated series Jungle Cubs.

Also on this day, in American history: Candy Cummings