August 11 - Phil Harris

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

August 10 - Ken Annakin

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On this day, in 1914, Kenneth Cooper Annakin was born in Beverly, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. As a young man, Ken was in training to be an income tax inspector (the British equivalent of an IRS agent who shows up at your office and starts confiscating things) in the city of Hull when he decided that maybe that wasn’t the life for him. Financed by an unexpected win at the racetrack, he immigrated to New Zealand and spent a good chunk of his twenties bouncing around the world doing whatever work he could find. The onset of World War II drew him back home to England where he joined the Royal Air Force as a mechanic. Ken was injured in the blitz of Liverpool and discharged in 1942 but he didn’t go far. He became a camera operator in the arm of the RAF that was making training films.

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It didn’t take Ken long to graduate to assistant director and then director. His first gig at the helm of a film was for the short documentary London 1942, which showcased the plucky spirit of Londoners under the hardships of war. Three years later, he directed his first feature length project, the 1945 documentary Make Fruitful the Land. As the British war machine began winding down, Ken continued to make new training films for it until the head of the company that produced his documentaries asked him for a favor. They were starting a new studio to produce fictional films, would Ken like to direct one of those? The result, Holiday Camp, was a fairly bland comedy about a Cockney family who encounters mild mayhem on vacation. Holiday was released at exactly the right time, however. It struck a chord with war weary audiences, became a decent hit and spawned three sequels, all of which were directed by Ken. His career in the cinema was now well established.

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Ken worked steadily for the next three decades. He made comedies like 1948’s Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a mermaid, and the 1965 classic Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. He directed thrillers like 1950’s Double Confession with Peter Lorre and 1957’s Across the Bridge with Rod Steiger. He helmed war movies like the comedy Hotel Sahara with Peter Ustinov and David Tomlinson in 1951 and was one of the five directors on the star studded classic, The Longest Day, in 1962. By the mid-Seventies, Ken’s career was starting to slow considerably and he even took a few dips in the smaller pond of television (not nearly the prestigious waters it’s considered today), directing the CBS miniseries The Pirate and a made-for-tv movie called Institute for Revenge.

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Over the course of that career, Ken did several high profile pictures for the Walt Disney Company. His first came in 1952 when Disney produced their first version of The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men. Next came The Sword and the Rose, also starring Glynis Johns (who would be a frequent star of Ken’s over the years), and Third Man on the Mountain, a thriller set in the Swiss Alps which inspired Walt to build the Matterhorn Bobsled ride in Disneyland. Ken’s biggest hit with Disney (and one of his biggest hits period) was the 1960 adventure Swiss Family Robinson, which starred  John Mills (Hayley’s father) and inspired its own walk-through attraction in two Disney theme parks, the Swiss Family Treehouse. For all these contributions to Disneyana, Ken was officially declared a Disney Legend in 2002, only the second director to receive the honor.

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In 1978, near the end of his career, Ken made a physical move to Los Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life. He directed a handful of forgettable films during the Eighties. In 1992, his final project would go unfinished. It was a biopic of Genghis Khan starring Charlton Heston. They were filming in Kyrgyzstan when the Soviet Union fell apart and everyone had to get out of Dodge before they were finished. They never got the chance to go back. Someone bought the footage in 2010, intending to make something out of it, but that film has never materialized either.

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Ken lived his remaining years in Beverly Hills, California, occasionally giving interviews or advising young filmmakers who sought him out. In 2002, he was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contributions to British cinema and also received an honorary degree from Hull University (who was apparently okay with the fact that he’d abandoned the city’s tax inspection needs so many years before). In February 2009, Ken suffered a heart attack one day followed by a stroke the next. He would linger for two more months but never recover. On April 22, 2009, the director of over 50 popular films passed away quietly at home. He was 94.

June 19 - Pat Buttram

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On this day, in 1915, Maxwell Emmett Buttram was born in Addison, Alabama. The seventh child of a Methodist minister, Maxwell spent all of his formative years in the sultry heat of the Yellowhammer State (it’s a woodpecker and the state bird). He graduated from Mortimer Jordan High School in Morris, Alabama and rolled on into Birmingham-Southern College, intending to follow his father into ministry. Instead, in an all too familiar story, he caught the acting bug when he was cast in several productions at the college and changed his mind about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

It’s not entirely fair to blame BSC for Maxwell’s change of heart though, although they did help cement it. On a trip to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, Maxwell was selected from the crowd as a typical Southern visitor to be interviewed on radio station WLS. His comedic observations about the fair were a hit with audiences and resulted in a job offer from the network’s Birmingham affiliate. He worked at the radio station throughout his college years, changing his professional name to Pat. Following his graduation from BSC, Pat moved to Chicago and became a regular on the popular National Barn Dance program.

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In the early Forties, Pat moved again, this time out to Hollywood. At first he was put into rotation as a new sidekick to Roy Rogers. The bad part of that plan was that Roy already had two regular partners and when it was quickly determined that a third one wasn’t needed, Pat was out. The good part was that he was free to team up with Gene Autry, who had returned from doing his duty in World War II and needed a new partner. It was a match made in entertainment heaven. Pat joined Gene on his radio show, Melody Ranch, starred in more than 40 movies with him and the pair even made the transition to television together, co-starring on The Gene Autry Show for five seasons.

Following the end of Gene’s show in 1956, Pat became a popular stand-up comedian, appearing several times on The Ed Sullivan Show, spinning fictional yarns about his ‘relatives’ spread throughout the south. He was also in high demand as a toastmaster and after dinner speaker at various functions around Hollywood. His seemingly gentle lampooning of Tinsel Town’s elite kept the stars coming back for more. In 1965, Pat returned to television with a recurring role as Mr. Haney, slippery salesman extraordinaire, on Green Acres, a gig he enjoyed for six seasons.

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With his distinctive voice (he once described it as the only part of him that didn’t quite make it out of puberty), it’s no surprise that Pat did a fair amount of voice work for the Walt Disney Company. He started in 1970 as Napolean, the hound dog, in The Aristocats. He then played the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in 1973’s Robin Hood. In 1977’s The Rescuers, Pat was Luke, a resident of the bayou known for his special brews. He followed that up as Chief, another hound dog, in The Fox and the Hound in 1981. Seven years later, he showed up in a small role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit officially named Toon Bullet #1 (it’s the one with the white hat smoking a cigar). His last role with Disney (indeed his last role with anyone) was as the Possum Park MC in A Goofy Movie, released almost a year after his death.

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As the calendar turned over into the Eighties, Pat’s acting career was mostly over, with just a handful of projects over the next decade and a half. Which didn’t mean he sat on the front porch drinking lemonade for the rest of his days. In 1982, he founded the Golden Boot Awards to recognize various categories of people who’d worked on Westerns throughout Hollywood’s history. The proceeds from the Golden Boots benefitted the Motion Picture Health and Welfare Fund. He was also active in politics. A lifelong Republican, he became something of a speech doctor for President Reagan, peppering the Gipper’s addresses with down home wisdom and homilies. In 1998, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Pat remained active most of the rest of his life, until January 8, 1994, when his suffering with renal failure came to an end in Los Angeles, California. His final resting place is in his beloved state of Alabama in, of course, the chapel of a Methodist Church.

June 11 - Richard Todd

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On this day, in 1919, Richard Andrew Palethorpe Todd was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Andrew, was a doctor, an officer in the British Army and an international rugby player for Ireland. Part of Richard’s formative years were spent in India, where his father was stationed for a while, with the bulk of his youth taking place in Devonshire, England. Upon graduating from the historic Shrewsbury School, he began studies at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst with the intent of following in his father’s footsteps. That intent didn’t last long and soon he was student at the Italia Conti Academy in London training for a life in entertainment instead. The change in careers put additional strain on an already rocky relationship he had with his mother. When he learned that she committed suicide a year later, he later admitted he didn’t grieve much (a sentiment that would come back to haunt him as we’ll see).
 

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Richard’s first professional gig as an actor came in 1936 in a production of Twelfth Night at the Open Air Theater in Regent’s Park. He bounced around regional theaters for a few years before co-founding the Dundee Repertory Theatre in Scotland in 1939. During the same time period, Richard had begun winning small roles, all of them uncredited, in British films, beginning with Good Morning, Boys in 1937. He would have continued to slowly build his acting career, except for something else that was building at the time: World War II. It turned out that Richard was going to follow in his father’s footsteps after all.


Richard joined the British Army as a commissioned officer in early 1941 as part of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He later became part of the 7^th Light Infantry Parachute Battalion and was among the first British soldiers to land in Normandy on June 6, 1944 as part of Operation Tonga during the D-Day campaign. He was part of the battalion that met John Howard on the Pegasus Bridge near Caen and repulsed several German attempts to retake it. He managed to survive the liberation of France and was honorably discharged in 1946
.

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Upon his return to Britain, Richard once again found himself in Dundee, Scotland and began performing with the Rep once again. His agent arranged for a screen test with the Associated British Picture Corporation and, in 1948, they awarded him a long-term contract. His first film for ABPC was the 1949 crime drama For Them That Trespass. Richard’s performance as the movie’s lead helped make it a moderate success and launched his career on the big screen. Earlier in the year, he’d played a supporting role in a Rep production of The Hasty Heart. When the production moved to London, Richard was moved into the lead role of Cpl. Lachlan McLachlan. That casting change led to his star turn in the Warner Brothers film adaptation that also came out in 1949, costarring Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal. Richard was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for Heart and won Favorite Male Star in the British National Film Awards. 

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Richard followed that up with a string of thrillers, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film Stage Fright, that earned mixed reviews. In 1955, he starred in the two films he is most remembered for. The first, for 20^th Century Fox, was titled A Man Called Peter and cast Richard as US Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall. The second, and even more popular, was The Dam Busters, about the RAF’s mission to destroy key German dams using so-called bouncing bombs. Busters easily became the highest grossing film in Britain that year. Over the next several years, Richard starred in a variety of films, mostly period pieces or World War 2 stories, that were popular but never quite lived up to 1955. 

Richard became part of the Disney family early in the company’s shift to live action movies. His first role came in the second fully live film Disney produced, 1952’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (obviously the title department still had some work to do). Playing Robin Hood himself, Richard was surrounded by a great cast and the film, while not quite up to the level of the previous Errol Flynn version, proved to be quite popular with audiences and critics alike. The following year, Richard and Robin’s director, Ken Annakin, would team up again for The Sword and the Rose. Also starring Glynis Johns (she played Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins), Rose tells the story of Mary Tudor, a younger sister of King Henry VIII. Rose did not do as well as Robin Hood, but was popular enough in Europe to bring Richard back for a third Disney film later that same year. For 1953’s Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, he was once again in the title role and was critically deemed a better than decent Rob. However, Rob Roy, like Rose, didn’t perform up to expectations in the United States and soured Walt on making any more period pieces, thus beginning the era of light comedies that the company excelled at. One other notable aspect to Rob Roy is that it was the last Disney film distributed by RKO Pictures. Everything from that point on was distributed in house by Buena Vista Distribution. For his live action pioneering work in those three films, Richard was declared an official Disney Legend in 2002.

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As the counter-culture vibe took over in the mid Sixties, Richard’s roles began to get fewer and farther between. His solid, dependable and definitely establishment persona fell out of vogue. One highlight from the decade came in 1962 for the star studded The Longest Day. Richard played John Howard, the Major he met up with in real life to defend the Pegasus Bridge, while, in a move that had to add extra layers of surrealism to the shoot, someone else played him. Throughout the Seventies, Richard’s voice could be heard as a reader on Radio Four’s Morning Story in Britain. During the Eighties, he appeared on a handful of television shows including episodes of Silent Witness, Doctor Who and Murder, She Wrote. His final appearance happened well into his own eighties, in an episode of Heartbeat in 2007 on the BBC.



The end of Richard’s life was marred by personal tragedies, when not one but two of his sons (he had five children by three different mothers) committed suicide, Seumas in 1997 and Peter in 2005. He rarely spoke of either incident but both made him think of his mother’s end and how his career ended up with terrible book ends. Richard passed away himself on December 3, 2009 and was buried between his two sons, in a gravesite he’d regularly visited over the last several years. He was 90.

May 25 - Barbara Luddy

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On this day, in 1908, Barbara Luddy was born in Great Falls, Montana. Information about Barbara's early life is scarce, but we do know that she did some singing on the vaudeville circuit as a child and was educated at the Ursuline Convent there in Great Falls. She broke into silent movies in 1925 as Janet in Columbia Pictures' An Enemy of Men. She would appear in several more films over the next few years before becoming a world traveler as part of the cast of an Australian production of Lombardi, Ltd in 1929.

Barbara began a prolific career in radio upon her return to the United States. Her longest running role was as lead female for seventeen years on The First Nighter Program, a show generally credited with being the first to run a different, complete story each week. She starred opposite Les Tremayne from 1936 until 1943 and then opposite Olan Soule until the program went off the air in 1953. Barbara was also part of the cast of the more dramatic Chicago Theater of the Air, played Veronica Gunn in the comedic Great Gunns and appeared on several soap operas, including Lonely Women, The Road of Life and Woman in White. As radio began to give way to television, she had a handful of appearances on early shows like Hazel and Dragnet, but nothing much beyond that.

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Barbara joined the Disney family in 1955 when as the original voice of Lady in Lady and the Tramp. She returned four years later as Merryweather, the blue fairy, in Sleeping Beauty. For 1961's One Hundred and One Dalmatians she brought Rover to life and played the dual roles of Mother Rabbit and Mother Sexton in 1973's Robin Hood. Her longest running role for Disney started in 1966. Debuting in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Barbara brought the mother figure of the Hundred Acre Wood, Kanga, to life for the next eleven years, including the shorts Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too and the combined feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 1977.

Barbara passed away on April 1, 1979 in Los Angeles, California from complications brought on by lung cancer. She was 70 years old.

May 23 - George Bruns

On this day, in 1983, George Edward Bruns passed away in Portland, Oregon. Born on July 3, 1914 in Sandy, Oregon, George took plenty of music lessons as a child. His innate talent was evident early on as it didn’t take him long to master the piano, the tuba and the trombone. He began attending Oregon State Agricultural College (now known as Oregon State University) in 1932 and played with the ROTC band in order to afford the tuition. For some reason, George was an engineering student but he didn’t stay one for terribly long. By the age of twenty, he’d decided to drop out of school to be a full-time musician (every parent’s dream). Luckily for George (and ultimately the rest of us), that plan worked out for once.

For the rest of the Thirties and the first half of the Forties, George played with various local groups in the Portland area. Following World War II, he started his own band (which included Doc Severenson of The Tonight Show fame) and began playing gigs all over the Northwest. The group had to remain based in Portland because George’s regular job was musical director of radio station KEX. He also served as the bandleader in the ritzy Rose Bowl room at Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and would occasionally play trombone on recordings with the Castle Jazz Band.

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In 1949, George moved to Los Angeles craving a bigger music scene than Portland could offer. He played tuba in a jazz band (you heard that right, tuba and jazz in the same sentence), created a night club act with his wife, singer Jeanne Gayle, and got the break of a lifetime. In 1953, George was asked to write the music for a short over at United Productions of America, Little Boy with a Big Horn. His work was impressive enough to grab some attention over at the Walt Disney Studio and he was hired the same year to arrange Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and write new score for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty.

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During production on Sleeping Beauty, Walt discovered he had a small problem in one of the shows that was being created for the Disneyland television show. There was a three and a half minute gap in an episode about this famous frontiersman. Did George think he could maybe write a song to take care of that? So George sat down with lyricist Tom Blackburn and churned out a little ditty called The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The success of that one song would have been more than enough to cement George’s place in Disney history (it certainly was enough to make him the studio’s musical director), but it was only the beginning.

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Over the next twenty years, George would score more than forty Disney films and television shows, starting with the remaining episodes of Davy Crockett. He wrote several songs for the first two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club, including Talent Roundup (with studio nurse Hazel George) and I Want to Be a Fireman. In one four year period, he would receive three Oscar nominations, first for Sleeping Beauty in 1959, then for Babes in Toyland in 1961 and finally for The Sword in the Stone in 1963. His most famous composition (in spite of what fans of Davy Crockett think) is hands down a song that plays on continuous loop at all times somewhere in the world: A Pirate’s Life for Me, penned with the legendary Imagineer X Atencio. His other highlights include the scores of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Absent Minded Professor and The Love Bug. In 1973, George was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for a song he wrote with lyricist Floyd Huddleston, Love from Robin Hood.


After scoring Herbie Rides Again, George retired from the Walt Disney Studio in 1976. He moved back to the Portland area, became a part-time music professor at Lewis and Clark College and continued to compose and play all of the instruments in his repertoire. He did record a new album of jazz music, but it never got much more than local play time. In May of 1983, George suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 68. In 2001, for composing a large chunk of the soundtrack guests hear snippets of all around Disney theme parks in every corner of the world, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend.

February 3 - John Fiedler

On this day, in 1925, John Donald Fiedler was born in Platteville, Wisconsin. When John was five, the family moved across the state to Shorewood. After graduating from Shorewood High School in 1943, he immediately enlisted in the United States Navy and served for the duration of World War II. Following his honorable discharge, John moved to New York City and fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming an actor when he joined the Neighborhood Playhouse.

John's first big professional role came on the radio comedy The Aldrich Family as Homer Brown. He became something of a staple in early television, making his small screen debut as Alfie Higgins on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and then making guest appearances on nearly every anthology show that existed, including two episodes of both The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of his best known television roles came in the Seventies when John was cast as Mr. Peterson, one of Bob's regular patients on The Bob Newhart Show. John spent most of his life as an in-demand guest character on shows covering the decades from Gunsmoke to The Golden Girls and genres from Cheers to Quincy, ME.

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John hit the big screen for the first time in 1957, as nervous little Juror #2 in Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda. He would go on to contribute to such film classics as The Odd Couple, True Grit, Harper Valley PTA and The Cannonball Run. A role that he originated on Broadway and reprised in the movies, was that of Karl Lindner in A Raisin in the Sun. John was so perfect as the seemingly innocuous Improvement Association representative who tries to buy a black family out to keep them from moving into his neighborhood, that he was picked to reprise the role again for a television version in the Eighties.

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Although John has provided the voice for numerous roles for Disney, most people will think of only one when they hear his voice. When Disney released Winnie the Pooh and Honey Tree in 1966, they upset fans by not including Piglet (more on that tomorrow). For the next installment two years later, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, they rectified their error and gave John a character he would play for nearly four decades. He gave voice to everyone's favorite little pig in shorts (Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too), features (Piglet's Big Movie), television shows (Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too) and video games (Kingdom Hearts). From 1968 until 2005, all the dozens and dozens of things that Piglet made an appearance in, John endearingly stuttered him to life.

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But Piglet wasn't the only thing John did for Disney, not by a long shot. He also voiced Father Sexton in Robin Hood, appeared in The Shaggy D.A. as Howie Clemmings, played Deacon Owl in The Rescuers, did Porcupine for The Fox and the Hound, and was the poor guy who threw off the emperor's groove, Rudy, in both The Emperor's New Groove and Kronk's New Groove, the sequel being his final film appearance.

After over sixty years of being the classic "I know that guy but I can't think of his name" character actor, John would succumb to cancer on June 25, 2005 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. Interestingly, his good friend and longtime Pooh co-star, Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger, had passed away the day before. Sadly, neither of them has been declared official Disney Legends as of yet. Looks like Disney has another Pooh snafu they need to fix.

December 25 - Candy Candido

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On this day, in 1913, Jonathan Joseph Candido was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Considering Candy (as he was known) did literally hundreds of voiceovers for pretty much every major studio in Hollywood and was partnered with several stars over the years, it’s surprisingly hard to find even a few nuggets of information about his life. Here’s what I could scrape together.

He was famous for his four octave speaking voice. Candy would frequently start talking in a normal, mid-range voice and then suddenly sound either like a mouse on helium or the lower notes of a tuba. It was this quality that made him perfect for voice work. He spent a few years on the radio program The Jimmy Durante Show. Every week he would utter the phrase “I’m feeling mighty low.” Those four words became so popular with audiences that Candy and Jimmy would record a song with that title and they appeared in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (a sure sign you'd made it, and we’re talking about the words here, not Candy and Jimmy).

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Before his radio career, Candy had played bass (not guitar, the actual big giant bass) and sung for Ted FioRito’s big band and even made an appearance with them in a 1933 Soundie (think of it like an early version of a music video) singing  Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me. A couple of years after that, he sang a duet with Fred Rogers in the film Roberta. Following his radio career, we learn that Candy was funny as he started touring the country with the great straight man, Bud Abbott, after Bud’s first partner, Lou Costello, passed away.

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For Disney, Candy made a number of roles his own over the course of a few decades.  Several of them were, like many of his roles, uncredited. He began with the Indian Chief in Peter Pan in 1953. His last role would be Fidget the Bat in 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective. In between, Candy lent his voice to one of Maleficent’s goons in Sleeping Beauty, some trees in Babes in Toyland, the crocodile Captain of the Guard in Robin Hood, and Brutus and Nero, the crocodiles in The Rescuers. He can also be heard on a handful of Disney attractions. On Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, listen to the devils; pay attention to the goons throughout the Sleeping Beauty Castle walk-through; he’s the graveyard executioner and a low pitched prisoner in the Haunted Mansion; he reprises his role of Indian Chief for Peter Pan’s flight.

After a long career that covered performances in films as diverse as The Wizard of Oz and Heavy Traffic, Candy passed away quietly in his sleep at his home in Burbank, California on May 19, 1999. He was 85 years old.

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.