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Image courtesy disneydetail.me |
On this day, in 1887, Oliver George Wallace was born in
London, England. Oliver was classically trained as a musician and conductor
in his native Britain before moving across the pond to Canada in 1904 and then
on to Seattle, Washington by 1910. He began honing his eclectic musical
stylings alongside vaudeville acts and silent movies in Canadian theaters and
continued doing so when he moved to America. Oliver is generally credited with
being the first person to play a pipe organ to accompany motion pictures but he
was just as comfortable conducting a house orchestra. He slowly worked his way
down the West Coast, becoming the house organist at San Francisco’s Granada
Theater and then the Rialto Theater in Los Angeles. Along the way, he became an
American citizen in 1914 and composed a hit song, Hindustan, in 1918.
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Oliver’s ability to write popular music, coupled with the
improvisational skills he picked up backing unpredictable silent pictures,
would serve him well when movies began arriving at theaters with their own
music, putting a lot of other organ players out of business. He began his film
score career composing and playing for Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios.
For a great example of his mad organ playing skills, listen to the soundtrack
of Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein.
Then, in 1936, he was hired by the Walt Disney Studio where he would remain
until his death.
Oliver was a natural fit for the world of animation. Because
of his years of experience playing behind silent movies he could create music
to fit any mood or action the animators could come up with, no matter how
outrageous. Over the course of his career, Oliver wrote the scores for almost 140
Disney shorts in every category. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Silly Symphonies,
you name it, Oliver has a credit (or twelve) somewhere in there. One of his
most notable contributions to the Shorts Department (although his short scores
as a whole have been called a virtual textbook for writing music for cartoons)
came during World War II when he composed and
wrote the lyrics for the title song from the Academy Award winning Donald
short, Der Fuehrer’s Face. Spike
Jones and his band would reach #3 on the popular charts with their rendition of
it. Oliver would score another Oscar winning short, the classic Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, a decade
later.
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But don’t start thinking that the multi-talented Oliver was
relegated to just the Shorts Department (even though he was really good at it).
Walt had him conduct the orchestra for the studio’s second feature, Pinocchio, and co-write the score for
the fourth one, Dumbo. He would be
instrumental (literally and figuratively) in developing the songs Pink Elephants on Parade and When I See an Elephant Fly for the
picture. Oliver and his fellow composer, Frank Churchill, would go on to win
the Academy Award for Best Musical Score for their work, the only win that
Oliver received from his five overall nominations. He would go on to contribute
to the scores of Bambi, Make Mine Music,
Fun and Fancy Free, Peter Pan, Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp.
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Image copyright Disney |
As Disney moved into the realm of live action productions,
Oliver took the same journey. It turns out that his talent for scoring animated
shorts translated very well into scoring the documentaries the studio began
making. Most of the 17 shorts in the Academy Award winning People and Places series boast scores by Oliver, including The Alaskan Eskimo, Men Against the Arctic
and Japan Harvests the Sea. He also
wrote the music for a handful of the True-Life
Adventures (most of which were scored by the Legendary Paul Smith), notably
doing Seal Island, the first film in
the series, and Jungle Cat, the last
film. His score for 1958’s White
Wilderness was even nominated for an Oscar, a rare honor for music coming from
a documentary.
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Image copyright Disney |
Outside the realm of non-fiction, Oliver began to build his repertoire
of whimsical and dramatic scores for other Disney projects. He is credited for
his work on Darby O’Gill and the Little
People, Ten Who Dared, Old Yeller (for which he also penned the titular
song) and its sequel Savage Sam, Tonka
and 1963’s The Incredible Journey. As
happened with so many employees at the Walt Disney Studio, Oliver occasionally got
roped into lending his voice to a character in a film. He has two acting
credits with the studio that we know of: Mr. Winky, the gang leader, in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
and the Bandleader in Toby Tyler or Ten
Weeks with the Circus.
When the fellow that the Legendary animator Frank Thomas
once described as a madman who was funny, eccentric, noisy, unexpected and
loved by everyone suddenly passed away on September 15, 1963, the 76-year-old
was still working at Disney full time. Forty-three years later, in 2008, for
his nearly three decades of constantly improving the works of the studio with
his musical genius, Oliver was officially, and most deservedly, declared a
Disney Legend.
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