August 27 - Mary Poppins

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On this day, in 1964, Mary Poppins had its world debut at a star-studded gala at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California. Walt Disney first became aware of the strict English nanny named Mary Poppins through his two daughters, Diane and Sharon. The girls, about five and three at the time, loved to hear the stories about the Banks children and their adventures with Mary. They even got their father to promise to make a movie about them. So, in 1938, Walt contacted the author of the series, Pamela Lyndon Travers, to buy the rights. Since Travers absolutely abhorred cartoons, and that was all Disney was known for at the time, she sent back an emphatic no. If she thought that would deter Walt from delivering on a promise he made to his daughters, she was thoroughly unprepared for the drama that played out over the next 26 years.

For most of the two decades that Walt tried to convince Travers to sell him the rights to Poppins, things remained pretty low key. He’d ask, she’d say no. He’d ask again, she’d say no again. But as the Disney studio moved into live action pictures and television production, it became increasingly important to Walt that he do a movie based on Travers’ books. It also became increasingly clear that getting Travers to agree to an arrangement was going to be very difficult. Walt was a persistent man when it came to getting what he wanted. Travers was a persistent woman in getting what she wanted. The rock met the hard place and it became a game to see who was going to be ground down first.

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Walt started a full court press on Travers as the Fifties came to an end. He was confident that he could win her over, but he also hedged his bets by developing a similar movie based on books by another English author, Mary Norton, which eventually became Bedknobs and Broomsticks. When he was in England overseeing studio projects being filmed there, he even went so far as to visit Travers at her London home to try to persuade her in person. If Travers hadn’t needed an influx of cash (it had been a while since the Poppins books had been widely popular), she might never have caved in to his requests. In 1961, when the rock could sense that the hard place was ready to crumble, Walt flew Travers to Los Angeles, first class, to sign the papers. She insisted that she have script approval rights. Since Walt, who was clearly more knowledgeable about how movies were made, knew that those rights didn’t amount to much (and that his contractual rights to final print approval trumped them), he agreed. If he’d known the headaches she would give him over the next few months, he might have changed his mind.

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As part of her script approval rights, Travers inserted herself into the pre-production process as intimately and as forcefully as she could. She objected to almost everything that had “been done” to her characters. Mary was too sweet. The colors of the set were all wrong. The Sherman Brothers songs with their nonsense words in them were dreadful. And don’t even get her started on the planned animated sequence or the fact that they’d hired that hack, Dick Van Dyke, in a starring role. There are actual recordings of the planning sessions that Travers was present for and you can clearly hear a woman with severe seller’s remorse in them. Walt may have been patronizingly indulgent of her complaints at the beginning, but by the time she was safely on a plane back to London, he didn’t care if he ever saw her again. He would not be able to make that dream come true.

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Once the script was finalized, actual production began in earnest on Mary Poppins. The stories surrounding that process are enough to fill a book or make an entirely different movie about. There’s the fact that Julie Andrews was only available to do the film because Warner Brother’s declined to cast her in a role she’d originated on Broadway, Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. When awards time rolled around, Julie beat that pictures star, Audrey Hepburn, for the Golden Globe and won the Oscar (which Audrey wasn’t even nominated for). Julie was also three months pregnant when she was offered Mary Poppins, but Walt was so sure of her casting he said production would wait till after the baby was born. Walt was also sure, in spite of Travers’ opinion, of casting Dick Van Dyke as Bert the Chimney Sweep. He was less than enthused about letting Dick play Mr. Dawes Sr., the eldest banker who laughs himself to death. Not only did Dick have to do extensive screen tests in order to secure that role, but he had to make a generous contribution to CalArts as well. His endearingly terrible cockney accent as Bert can only be partially blamed on him as no one bothered to critique it during filming. He has since formerly apologized to Britain and Britain said no worries, they found his accent to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which I can’t quite figure out of that’s a compliment or not).

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All the special effects tricks the studio had learned up to that point were used in Mary Poppins and some new ones showed up as well. The Imagineers were hard at work developing Audio Animatronics for The Enchanted Tiki Room and the 1964 World’s Fair. They also devised the robin that sits on Mary’s finger during A Spoonful of Sugar, except that didn’t go quite as well as planned. There wasn’t enough insulation in the robin’s feet as Julie kept getting fairly painful shocks from the bird (which in turn caused the actress’s famously foul mouth to fire). Luckily that was a short scene that in the end was highly effective.

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It’s impossible to talk about Mary Poppins without mentioning the music. Some of the best work the Sherman Brothers ever did is immortalized in the film, along with tales of several songs that could have been. Richard and Robert wrote a ballad for Mary that they were extremely proud of, The Eyes of Love, that Julie felt wasn’t quite right. Walt agreed and the prized song was cut. The brothers struggled to come up with another song until one of their sons described getting his polio vaccine via a sugar cube and the fantastic A Spoonful of Sugar was born. They wrote a solid version of Let’s Go Fly a Kite that Walt said was great to end a Broadway musical but would never end his movie. Rewritten as a waltz, Kite has become another classic tune. Several songs that were written for Poppins but not used found new life in other Disney projects. West Wind popped up in Big Red, The Right Side became an anthem in the Disney Channel series The House on Pooh Corner and The Beautiful Briny enlivened Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

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And then there’s the song that reportedly became one of Walt’s favorites for the remainder of his life, Feed the Birds. Used to frame the serious moments in the film, Birds became the central theme of Mary Poppins: the fact that Mary comes to teach the children, and through them their father, the lessons of charity and kindness and how it doesn’t take much to render either. Quite often, at the end of a work week, Walt would invite Richard and Robert to his office, ask them how the various projects they were working on were fairing and then drift to the window and quietly say “Play it.” The brothers knew what he wanted and would play Feed the Birds while Walt stared out on a landscape that only he could see. Reportedly, when Richard played Birds as the last song during his mini concert at the dedication of the Partners statue in Disneyland, a single bird dropped from seemingly nowhere, circled the piano and flew back into the clouds. You can’t prove either way whether that was Walt saying hello to his old friend or not, but Richard isn’t the only one who believes.

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As production on Mary Poppins wrapped up and the gala premiere loomed, there was one very conspicuous invitation to it that seemed to have been lost in the mail. The story goes that Walt felt it was fine to invite PL Travers to the London debut, but that she didn’t need to fly all the way to Hollywood for the extravaganza at Grauman’s. Travers disagreed and, much to Walt’s consternation, guilted someone at the studio into letting her come. Thankfully someone warned him of her arrival well before hand and he was able to grit his teeth and smile for the cameras as he escorted her into the theater.

All the Hollywood elite were there for the inaugural screening and everyone loved it. Mary Poppins was almost immediately declared to be Walt’s magnum opus. It enjoyed universal critical acclaim and became the most profitable movie of the year, grossing over $31 million on a $4.4 million budget. The buckets of money reaped from Poppins wouldn’t stay in the studio’s bank account for long, however. A large chunk of it went towards buying a bunch of swamp land in central Florida. When Oscar time rolled around, Poppins not only snapped up Best Actress, but nabbed two statues for its music and two more for visual effects and editing. It was nominated for Best Picture but lost, somewhat ironically, to My Fair Lady.

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In the decades since its release Mary Poppins has enchanted legions of new fans and shows no signs of shedding any of its appeal. Although it isn’t quite truthful to say that everyone initially loved it. At the party after the premiere, PL Travers marched up to Walt and demanded that the animated sequence be removed. Walt stared at her for a beat, said “Pamela, the ship has sailed” and walked away. Travers never authorized another film version of her nanny but by 1977 had apparently come to terms with the wild popularity of the Disney take on it. In an interview that year she admitted she’d seen it a couple of times and while it wasn’t anything like her books, it was a good, maybe even a glamorous, film in its own right. I think the word she was looking for was “great” but I otherwise couldn’t agree with her more.

June 23 - The Enchanted Tiki Room

On this day, in 1963, the Enchanted Tiki Room began serenading guests in Disneyland's Adventureland. As WED Enterprises (today's Imagineering Department) was working on attractions for the 1964 World's Fair, they were also looking for ways to improve Disneyland. One of the technologies they were developing was a kind of robotics eventually trademarked as Audio-Animatronics (we'll see why they got that name in a bit). The first dive into that pool came when Walt brought a mechanical bird back from a trip to New Orleans and set his Imagineers to trying to upgrade its movements. The team then moved on to a figurine that tap danced like Buddy Epsen. They continued to expand their knowledge, making more and more complex figures and systems. Eventually they would wow audiences with a likeness of Abraham Lincoln at the Fair, but first Walt had his whiz kids work up a little something for Disneyland.



Originally, the Enchanted Tiki Room was going to be a Polynesian themed restaurant, filled with birds and flowers that would sing to guests as they ate. The large fountain in the middle of the theater was supposedly going to be a coffee service station. That plan was quickly abandoned in favor of more Audio-Animatronic figures appearing in a full blown show. Underneath the theater, was an enormous room filled floor to ceiling with all the computers necessary to run all the figures. Because of the enormous amount of heat generated by those computers, the Tiki Room became the first building in Disneyland to include air conditioning. While that might entice guests into the show today, it actually wasn't as much of a selling point in 1963; the technology itself was impressive enough to fill the seats.

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By today's standards, the birds, flowers and totems of the Tiki Room are so basic they aren't even sophisticated enough to be considered quaint. But for guests of the time, watching an entire room seemingly come alive by itself was amazing. How did they do that? was a question pretty much on everyone's lips. A lot of folks today probably think they know how they did that, but most of them would only be partially right at best. The clue comes from how the technology was named, Audio-Animatronics. Yes there an electrical impulse that moved something mechanical, but that impulse was actually initiated by sound.

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Each individual movement requires its own channel and each channel requires its own reel of magnetic tape, that's why figures in the Tiki Room are so simple. Less movements means less reels which means less computers that need to stay synched up. Every movement has two positions, a resting place and a moved place. In other words the movement is either on (moved) or it is off (resting). Each reel of magnetic tape has a certain tone recorded on it that, when played, vibrates a metal reed, closing a circuit, sending a pulse of electricity to a pneumatic (or air driven) valve that causes whatever movement it’s connected to (eye blink, wing flap, mouth opening, etc). When the electrical pulse is spent, the movement returns to its resting position and waits for the next one. The tones are laid out on the tape at precise intervals to make, in the Tiki Room’s case, it appear that all the figures are dancing and singing in time with a recorded soundtrack. That’s why it took an entire room of computers, running hundreds of reels of tape to make the whole thing work. Nowadays, of course, we have fancy computing systems with enough power that you could probably run a set up like the Tiki Room from a couple of laptops (and hardly anyone even knows what magnetic tape is), but in 1963 this was top of the line stuff.

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As mind boggling as the technology was, Walt didn’t rely solely on gizmo’s to make the show work. He got the Sherman Brothers to write another earworm, The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room (they were writing their slightly more famous earworm, It’s a Small World, around the same time). He got the best voices he could find for his four macaw stars, half of which actually came from in-house. Wally Boag and Fulton Burley, who played the Mexican bird, Jose, and the Irish bird, Michael, respectively, were regular cast members across the park at the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Frontierland for decades. The quartet is rounded out by Thurl Ravenscroft (who also appears in The Haunted Mansion) as Fritz, the German parrot, and Ernie Newton (who was also the singing voice of Boo-Boo Bear) as Pierre, the French parrot. Walt also had some of his best Imagineers working on how the figures looked, Legends like Harriet Burns and Joyce Carlson. The attention to detail paid off.

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The Enchanted Tiki Room was a hit from the beginning. An extra Audio-Animatronic bird, placed near the entrance in an effort to get people to come see the show, caused traffic jams of guests trying to see just what this new thing was. Interestingly, entrance to the Tiki Room cost an extra 75 cents, supposedly because technically WED Enterprises owned it, not Disneyland, and it was therefore a separate attraction from the rest of the park. The popularity of the show saw an identical version installed in the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World right on time for opening day and Tokyo Disneyland was also Enchanted at its opening. The first two Tiki Rooms are still running just as they did back in the day (we won’t talk about the couple of years that Florida’s version was “Under New Management”), albeit with upgrades in the technology that run them, but Tokyo’s has undergone a complete revision. It’s now a Stitch themed Hawaiian show and no longer uses the original theme song. Speaking of which, you know you’re dying to sing a few verses of it, so All together now, in the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki room, in the tiki, tiki, tiki…

May 28 - it's a small world

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On this day, in 1966, it’s a small world began sending guests on a whimsical journey of international goodwill in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in Anaheim, California. Walt was already under contract for three attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair, when he was approached by Pepsi to create a fourth one. The board of directors at Pepsi knew they were going to have a pavilion at the fair (it would be commercial suicide to not have a presence) but had procrastinated over what they wanted in their pavilion. Hollywood legend Joan Crawford was a member of that board by way of her marriage to the late Pepsi CEO Alfred Steele. She got fed up with the rest of the board’s dithering, asked her friend Walt Disney to come up with something and basically browbeat everyone into accepting whatever was presented, in spite of the fact that Walt would have less than eleven months to produce. Because Walt knew how to bring out the best in people (and had the best people to work with), everything worked out just fine.

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It was decided that the proceeds from the ride would benefit the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) so the basic theme was “Children of the World” and that became its working title as well. Because of the recent international tensions over missiles in Cuba, the theme was expanded to include brotherhood and peace (which may seem like it’s implied in an endeavor based on kids, but it really isn’t). The overall design of the attraction fell to the Legendary Mary Blair, who had already lent her considerable talents to shaping the look of films like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Unlike those projects where she merely influenced things, this overall look would be pure Mary. The simple clean shapes used in deceptively complex ways and the cheerful color palate combined to make a classic ride that endures and delights right up to today.

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Not that Mary didn’t have help along the way. The Legendary Marc Davis, as he did on so many Disneyland attractions, designed the scenes guests would travel through and many of the characters in them. His wife, the Legendary Alice Davis, designed the costumes the dolls wear and the Legendary Rolly Crump took care of the rest of the props and figures. The Legendary Blaine Gibson designed and sculpted the dolls with input from Walt himself, who insisted that every doll, no matter what country it represented, had an identically shaped face. It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who worked on this particular ride have gone on to achieve Disney Legend status (except for Walt himself, who has never been given the award; I know that it would be a fairly redundant gesture, it’s just something that makes me smile when I think about it), they are all that good.

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Which brings us to the music (I can hear some of you groaning already because, let’s be honest, the song has probably been playing in your head since you started reading this article). In its original form, Children of the World was going to have snippets of each country’s national anthem playing near the dolls from that country. It  was a plan that only sounded good on paper. In real life, it was a jumbled up, headache inducing wall of noise. So Walt brought his resident songwriters, the Legendary Sherman Brothers, into the project. He gave them just two guidelines: the song they wrote had to able to be done in a round (so it was infinitely repeatable without a beak) and it had to be easily translated into many different languages. They came back with It’s a Small World, a slow ballad about the universal theme of friendship. Walt said bring me something more cheerful. So they sped their song up considerably and replayed it for the boss. Walt liked the second version so much, he renamed the entire attraction after it. Love it or hate it, the Sherman Brothers’ ultimate ear worm has easily been played over 50 million times over the years making it the most played piece of music ever created, beating out the number two song by over 40 million plays. Of course, the fact that it is playing somewhere in the world at literally any moment of the day helps.

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The success of it’s a small world (and, yes, writing it without capital letters is the proper way to refer to the attraction) at the World’s Fair cannot be undersold. The ride’s high capacity (especially compared to other Fair attractions) meant that there was rarely a line, in spite of the overwhelming number of people who experienced it. Over the course of the two and a half years the Fair ran, over 10 million tickets were sold for small world resulting in over $8 million dollars being raised for UNICEF. At the Fair’s end, it was dismantled, transported back to Southern California and installed in its permanent home. When the Magic Kingdom opened five years later, it included a version of the ride, with the queue area moved indoors. Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland each have their own versions as well, so it’s fairly accurate when Disney claims that the sun never sets on cheerful children of it’s a small world.

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In 1997, Disneyland began a new holiday tradition with their version of it’s a small world. At the end of October, they add in almost a million twinkling lights as well as various Christmas decorations and costumes for the dolls. The soundtrack also gets changed to include international versions of Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls. The holiday version has proven so popular that it’s spread to every other park around the world except one. The Magic Kingdom ride stays unaltered (mainly to keep the change as something unique in the United States to its sister park).

April 9 - A.J. Carothers

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On this day, in 2007, Andrew J. Carothers passed away in Los Angeles, California. I have to admit that I’m guessing at the Andrew part as he’s stubbornly identified as A.J. in every obituary and bio I could find. But since both a son and a grandson bear that moniker, I think it’s a safe bet. AJ was born on October 22, 1931 in Houston, Texas. He showed an aptitude for writing at an early age. One of his favorite stories to tell was how he sold his first work at the age of nine, a mystery story to a fellow classmate for a whopping 15 cents (that’s almost three dollars in today’s money). AJ graduated from Houston’s prestigious Kincaid School in 1950 and moved on to the University of California, Los Angeles for his degree. After graduating from UCLA, he joined the Army in 1955 for a two year tour, most of which he spent in Panama. The highlight of his military service was helping set up the first television station in the Caribbean.

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After being discharged from the Army, AJ returned to Hollywood to begin his career. During the rest of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties, he honed his skills writing episodes of early television shows like The Third Man, Bourbon Street Beat and My Three Sons. It was through his work on the last show that he came to the attention of Walt Disney, who was looking for another writer. AJ signed a contract with the Disney Studio in 1962 and went right to work. His first screenplay was for Miracle of the White Stallions, a movie about the evacuation of the Lipizzaner horses from Vienna during World War II. Over the next few years, AJ worked closely with Walt on several projects for both the big and little screens. He wrote the script for Emil and the Detectives. Like Stallions, Emil was first shown on The Wonderful World of Disney before being released to theaters. He then wrote the 1967 Fred MacMurray comedy The Happiest Millionaire which became the last film Walt had a personal hand in producing. When Walt died during the production of Millionaire, AJ had become so close with the boss that he read a eulogy at his funeral.

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AJ’s relationship continued for another year after Walt’s passing. He wrote the 1968 crime caper Never a Dull Moment starring Dick Van Dyke and Edward G. Robinson. The tepid box office and mostly negative critical response to Moment (as well as the general floundering of studio reeling from its founder’s death) marked the end of AJ’s contract, but not his career by any means.

In 1970, AJ co-created the sitcom Nanny and the Professor, which played on ABC for three seasons (mainly because for the first two it was sandwiched in between The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family).  Thirteen years later, he created another sitcom, Goodnight, Beantown that ran for two seasons on CBS. His biggest hit (and the project he was best known for) came in 1987 with the Michael J. Fox movie The Secret of My Success. In between those projects, AJ not only wrote more than 100 television show episodes and big screen movies, he became something of a speech writer. His biggest client was none other than Nancy Reagan, but his words also came from the mouths of people like John Ritter, Patrick Stewart and John Lithgow.

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One of AJ’s final major projects reunited him with the Sherman Brothers, who had written the music for Never a Dull Moment. The Brothers had written music and lyrics for a stage show called Busker Alley and they turned to AJ for the book. Tommy Tune starred in a 1995 touring production that never quite made it to Broadway. That same year, the Music Center Spotlight Awards began handing out statuettes and they tapped AJ to script their ceremony, which he gladly did every year until 2006. By that time, he’d been diagnosed with cancer and the disease had started taking its toll. Less than a year after his last script was put into production, the man once praised for (almost) singlehandedly continuing the tradition of Southern gentility would pass away at home at the age of 75.

March 5 - Journey into Imagination

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On this day, in 1983, Journey into Imagination began delighting guests in Future World at Epcot Center. The Imagination pavilion was not one of the five that opened October 1, 1982 (although the 3D movie Magic Journeys which played on the side of it did) but, less than six months later, was the first new pavilion. The whimsical design of the area highlighted things most guests had never seen before: a ‘waterfall’ that flowed up instead of down, a fountain that jumped across walkways and a weird purple thing (is it a dragon? Can’t be, doesn’t breath fire. Then what is it? I dunno.) beckoning them inside a double pyramid shaped steel and glass building. Once inside, the journey could begin on one of my most favorite Disney rides to ever exist.

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Journey started with a marvelous Sherman Brothers’ song, One Little Spark, which not only had a new character, Dreamfinder, musically describe all the ways that imagination works but defined just what a Figment is. (So it is a dragon. No, it’s a figment of your imagination, weren’t you listening? I’m gonna call it a dragon.) After inspiring riders with rooms based on everything from movies to books to science experiments, Journey ended by letting guests out into the best part of the pavilion: the Imageworks. Filled with pin tables, blue screens, magical orchestras, musical stepping stones and all sorts of other imagination sparkers, the second floor of the pavilion could entertain kids for hours (and with plenty of benches to sit on, parents didn’t mind the rest stop). All was well in Future World, until dark clouds rolled in on October 10, 1998, shutting out the light of Journey into Imagination forever.

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Things rarely ever stay the same forever, I know that, including classic attractions. After all, The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean have changed over the years (even It’s a Small World gets a holiday makeover each November in Disneyland). But it’s pretty easy to argue that the changes in those rides made them even better. The same cannot be said about what happened to Journey. The Magic Journeys movie next door had been replaced with Captain EO which in turn was replaced by the popular 4D movie Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. In an effort to unify the pavilion, the decision was made to change the theme of the ride to be a tour through the Imagination Institute, an element of Audience. Dreamfinder was completely cut out, Figment was relegated to the barest of cameos and the Imageworks was severely truncated and moved to the ground floor. The length of the ride was significantly cut because of budget constraints and, to be frank, I’m pretty sure I could have done rooms of that ride better with only cardboard and poster paint at my disposal (the pitiful upside-down room, anyone?). When the ride re-opened on October 1, 1999, as Journey into YOUR Imagination (if you have to put one of the words in the name in all capital letters, that should be a big red flag for you), it was an instant bomb. Guest reaction was overwhelmingly negative (Is it just me, or did this ride used to not suck? Yeah and what happened to that little dragon guy? Don’t start with that again.) and the new version limped along for two years, finally gasping its last awkward breath on October 8, 2001.

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The current version of the ride, Journey into Imagination with Figment, is an improvement over the last one, but still pales in comparison to what once was, in my opinion. It’s still a tour through the Imagination Institute (although Honey, I Shrunk the Audience doesn’t exist anymore, so that reference is no longer valid) and Figment is in every scene. But the scenes still lack oomph , the ride is still short and Dreamfinder is still missing. And, to top it all off, the grand old Imageworks on the second floor is still gone (well, at least walled over and gathering dust). What used to be a must do attraction on every tour of Epcot has become a ho-hum area that can generally be skipped in favor of other things. So, if everyone could doff your hats (or raise a glass or something else imaginatively appropriate) and sing along with me, in remembrance (and yes, I know a version of this song is still used but it isn’t the same and you know it): One little spark… of inspiration… is at the heart… of all creation…

February 4 - Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree

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On this day, in 1966, Disney released their first production starring a bear of very little brain, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. Based on the first two chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne's beloved children's book, Honey Tree began a franchise in Disney history that would take on a life of its own, its popularity at times eclipsing everything else in the Disney family. As ubiquitous as the Pooh characters are today, people might not remember that they debuted steeped in controversy, albeit one that Disney brought on itself.

Walt had begun trying to acquire the rights to the Winnie the Pooh stories in 1938. It wasn't until 1961 that he actually got the job accomplished. Initially intending to make a feature film, after the mixed reception that Alice in Wonderland received, he decided to make a featurette and release it with a live action movie. Since most of his focus was on The Jungle Book, he turned the whole project over to Woolie Reitherman asking him to Americanize the characters and punch up the humor.

Woolie took his instructions to heart and decided that the story needed a more down-home folksy resident of the Hundred Acre Wood. That's when Gopher was born. For some strange reason, apparently adding a new character meant one of the old ones had to be left out. And even stranger, Woolie felt that the one that should be left out would be Pooh's best friend (outside of Christopher Robin, of course), Piglet. A move that fans of the books couldn't help but notice and they were not happy about it. Needless to say, Piglet would figure prominently in the second installment two years later, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and would never be left out again.

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Released along with The Ugly Dachshund starring Dean Jones and Susan Pleshette, Honey Tree received mixed to positive reviews. Critics were happy that Disney literally took a page out of the books, a trope that would continue through the series and into the attraction at the Magic Kingdom. E.H. Shepard, the original illustrator of the books, called the new look of the characters a travesty (no surprises there) but A.A. Milne's widow reportedly liked it. Most folks were fairly unanimous in their praise of the songs by the Sherman Brothers.

It would take eleven more years for Walt's plan of a Winnie the Pooh feature to happen. The three shorts that had been released up to that point, Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, were combined together with additional bridging material to create the studio's 22nd animated feature, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. The multitude of shorts, features, television series and video games that have spawned since, just go to show how endearing Milne's tubby little cubby continues to be.

December 24 - The Aristocats

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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).

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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.

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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.

September 9 - Carousel of Progress

On this day, in 1973, the Carousel of Progress ended its run in Tomorrowland in Disneyland.

Walt and his imagineers were incredibly busy in the months, and in some cases years, running up to the opening of the 1964 New York World's Fair in Queens, New York. They were creating four different attractions for three different companies and one state. The project that Walt was most excited about was the one being created for General Electric's Progressland Pavilion: the Carousel of Progress.


Early in Disneyland's history, plans were made to expand Main Street, USA with an "International Street" and an "Edison Square." The highlight of Edison Square was to be a show, sponsored by General Electric, chronicling the advancement of electricity usage in the home. As often happened with Walt's ideas, the technology of the time period was inadequate to making them a reality, at least to the standards Walt wanted. The expansions never happened and the show was shelved but not forgotten.

Several years later, GE came to Walt again, wanting to do something for the upcoming World's Fair.  This was music to Walt's ears. Remember that show we wanted to do a while back but couldn't? Well, now we can. Will it sell lots of GE appliances? Then we love it. And that's the story of how Walt got GE to pay for the further development of Audio-Animatronics. Seriously. The Enchanted Tiki Room already existed, but its figures were fairly simple and the show developed for the state of Illinois' pavilion only involved one. GE's show would involve dozens of figures on multiple stages. The real progress in animatronics would happen here and on GE's dime.

Walt spent more of his time tinkering with this attraction for the Fair than any other. He asked the Sherman Brothers for a song to help bridge the time between scenes. They came up with the classic "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow." They based it on Walt's enthusiasm about the future and technology and believed it to be his theme song. Walt had Roger Broggie and Bob Gurr design a moving theater that would bring guests from scene to scene, rather than making people get up and walk between theaters. He got the last singing cowboy, Rex Allen, to play Father, the show's narrator. And he constantly tweaked and fussed and tweaked the whole thing some more. All that attention payed off.

The final show, Carousel of Progress, was one of the biggest hits of the Fair. Even though 200 people were seated for a new show every four minutes, a capacity of over 3,000 people an hour, the line frequently grew to over an hour long. An extended, covered queue had to be built next to the pavilion to keep waiting guests out of the summer sun. Everyone loved the show, not least GE executives.

After the Fair closed in October 1965, plans were made to move the Carousel of Progress to Tomorrowland in Disneyland, which was currently being made New. It would re-open July 2, 1967, several months after Walt's death. It would also survive its cross country move relatively intact, the biggest change being the removal of any references to a now obsolete GE marketing campaign. As the 1970s began, however, the audience for Carousel began to dwindle and GE began complaining it wasn't getting a big enough bang for its sponsorship buck. It asked if perhaps the attraction could be moved again, to the Florida Project, where maybe some new customers would get the chance to see it. And so Carousel of Progress made the journey back to the east coast, sort of.

Unlike the minor changes that had been made between the Fair and Disneyland, the Walt Disney World version of Carousel would be something kind of familiar but at the same time completely different. The first and last theaters had featured "Kaleidophonic Screens", silver screens that lit up in patterns like a kaleidoscope. Rather than fix the technical problems that had started to develop with them, the new version just hung curtains. The Sherman Brothers were asked to write a new theme song. They wrote one, "The Best Time of Your Life", but still thought the original song was better. The entire voice cast was changed and the audio re-recorded. And the fourth scene, the one depicting the near future, was given an update. GE signed a new ten year sponsorship agreement and the new Carousel of Progress open in January of 1975.

Over the years since then, Carousel of Progress has drifted along in its back corner of Tomorrowland. The fourth scene was updated again in in 1981. When the sponsorship agreement ran out in 1985, all references to GE were taken out, except the logos on several of the appliances. In 1993, the attraction received another major facelift, including a new voice cast, the reinstatement of the original theme song and another update to that pesky fourth scene. Since 2001, Carousel is technically listed as a seasonal attraction, although it runs pretty much every day. There are constantly rumors that it will close permanently and Disney constantly denies those rumors.

Those who know me, know that I'm a Disney traditionalist, so it may surprise some people that my personal opinion on Carousel is that it's time to let go. I know that Walt hoped the attraction would never close but I also know that when something wasn't working, he didn't keep it around for nostalgia's sake. Otherwise you'd still be able to ride mules at Disneyland. Beyond the fact that the audiences just aren't there anymore, it's a show that is impossible to keep current well. Maybe if the whole thing were rewritten whenever the fourth scene needed updating, it would be okay. But to have the third scene set in the 1940s and then suddenly jump 70 years for the fourth only highlights how dated the whole thing has become. And that's not Progress.