August 15 - Make Mine Music

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On this day, in 1946, the Walt Disney Studio generally released its eighth animated feature, Make Mine Music. As a big chunk of the staff went off to fight the Nazis and most foreign movie markets dried up, the Walt Disney Studio faced dire financial times during World War II. Even with government contracts for military training films, the studio couldn’t continue to make feature length animated films and turn a profit. The solution was to take all the spare ideas that were lying around (mostly unfinished shorts) and cobble them together into  feature length packages. What makes the so-called package films different from Fantasia, which is also a number of shorts put together, is that Fantasia’s segments were specifically chosen for their artistic merit. In other words, that film was a deliberate choice. The package films were born out of necessity and the segments don’t necessarily belong together. That’s why you rarely see the package films in their entirety but you see their segments individually all the time. It’s kind of like the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which works as a concept because the Beatles said it did and everyone accepts that. Just don’t try to figure any other reason.

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The first two package films, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, came out of a goodwill trip Walt and his staff took to South America at the behest of the federal government (and on their dime, I might add). The third package film, Make Mine Music, came into being because of the financial successes of the first two. They might not have been huge money makers, but the package films kept costs much lower than feature length movies and kept cash flowing into the financially troubled studio. Even though the war was officially over by the time Music was released, Disney would release three more package films while waiting for the world markets to recover.

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The original release of Make Mine Music included ten different segments, ranging from a musical exploration of the Hatfield and McCoy feud to a tragedy about an opera singing whale (and if you don’t remember that part as a tragedy, it’s clearly been a while since you’ve seen it). In between those two shorts are a variety of musical genres, including two swing parts with Benny Goodman and his orchestra, a love ballad sung by Andy Russell, a telling of Peter and the Wolf complete with classical score, songs sung by Dinah Shore, the Andrews Sisters and the Ken Darby singers and Jerry Colonna, who would later voice the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, reciting the epic poem Casey at the Bat.

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Make Mine Music was never given terribly wide theatrical release as a whole, but many of its pieces were later re-released to theaters individually. The movie proved popular enough that it grossed over $3.2 million all together on a $1.3 million budget. Which is, again, why the studio released three more package films before getting back up to feature length strength.

It should be noted that later releases of Make Mine Music, especially the first VHS and DVD United States versions, were edited for content. In the All the Cats Join In segment, some brief nudity was removed although it was left in for the Japanese home market. The Martins and the Coys segment was also removed entirely because it was deemed unsuitable for children due to its comic gun play. That segment has been reinserted in subsequent releases.