August 31 - Buddy Hackett

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On this day, in 1924, Leonard Hacker was born in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up the son of a garment district worker and a furniture upholsterer, Leonard would have fit right in to the story of High School Musical: he played football and was active in the drama club. He also suffered from Bell’s Palsey, which didn’t permanently affect his appearance but did give him his signature slurred speech. While still in school, Leonard began warming up audiences in various Catskill night clubs as what was known as a tummler, the Yiddish word for tumult maker. He eventually graduated to doing actual stand-up routines in those same clubs, although his debut probably left him questioning his life choices. He later recalled that he didn’t get a single laugh his first time behind the microphone. Luckily, his act quickly improved.

Once Leonard had graduated from New Utrecht High School in 1942, he immediately enlisted in the United States Army. He spent the entirety of World War II as part of an anti-aircraft battery. When the war ended and he returned to the States, Leonard changed his name to Buddy Hackett and jumped back into stand-up. After rewetting his feet at the Pink Elephant club in Brooklyn, he began to make appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas while also returning to the Catskill clubs of his youth (although his name was a little higher on the billing this time around). In 1950, Buddy made his big screen debut in a sports related short titled King of Pins. A how-to piece on the proper bowling techniques, he was featured as the sportsman you didn’t want to emulate. Three years later, Buddy was part of the original cast of Lunatics and Lovers, a play that ran for 336 performances on Broadway (Zero Mostel was his replacement when he went on vacation).

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Lunatics and Lovers gave Buddy enough exposure to land him a couple of television specials and expand his nightclub act. He didn’t return to the movies, though, until a bit from his stand-up act caught the attention of Universal Pictures. Unfortunately, it’s a bit that highlights changing social norms. Presently it would have gotten Buddy fired instead of hired, but the Fifties were clearly a different time. He took a rubber band, put it around his head in such a way that it gave a decided slant to his eyes, affected a thick accent and impersonated a frustrated waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Audiences ate it up. He made a recording of it and Universal put him in 1953’s Walking My Baby Back Home specifically so he could do the bit on film. He even got billing right under the picture’s main stars, Donald O’Connor and Janet Leigh.

I’d like to be able to say that his material got better after Walking, but Buddy became a darling of the talk show circuit pretty much because of his off-color jokes and ribald stories. He made frequent appearances with Jack Paar (including one on Jack’s final night as host of The Tonight Show), Arthur Godfrey, Perry Como and holds the record for the most guest shots on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In 1958, he appeared on the Patrice Munsel Show with his then roommate Lenny Bruce. The significance of that performance is that the duo referred to themselves as the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” predating Saturday Night Live’s usage of the phrase by seventeen years (although why anyone thought putting those two on television together was a good idea is a question for another day).

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In spite of a somewhat profane stand-up persona, Buddy began building a more family friendly career starting in the mid Fifties. He had his own television show for a season, Stanley, which co-starred a young Carol Burnett as his girlfriend and featured a voice only character done by Paul Lynde. With that kind of a cast, you might think Stanley would be a big hit, but it struggled against more established shows in its time slot and failed to connect with audiences. In 1962, he played Marcellus Washburn to Robert Preston’s Harold Hill in the classic musical The Music Man. He teamed up with Mickey Rooney twice: 1961’s Everything’s Ducky and 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And he appeared with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in the second of their beach movies, Muscle Beach Party, in 1964.

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Buddy first joined the Disney family in 1968. As the lovable artist and racer Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug, he was introduced to a whole new generation of fans. Twenty-one years later, Buddy gave voice to the well-intentioned but totally off base seagull, Scuttle, in The Little Mermaid. He would reprise the role in 2000 for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea and for various theme park attractions and shows. For his participation in multiple iconic films for the company, Buddy would be declared an official Disney Legend in 2003, shortly after his death.

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After the release of the The Love Bug, Buddy continued to make frequent appearances just about everywhere. He was a semi-regular on the Sixties version of Hollywood Squares. He made late night audiences laugh on every talk show you can think of. He narrated the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost in 1979 (he was the groundhog in that as well). He spent three years as the spokesman for Lay’s Potato Chips. He booked hundreds of stand-up gigs and eventually had his son, Sandy, as his opener on them. And he took on a handful of big screen roles including himself as Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooged and a pawn shop owner in Paulie.

In the early Nineties, Buddy got bad news from his doctor in the form of a severe heart disease diagnosis. Not only did he refuse to even consider bypass surgery, he also developed diabetes during the same decade. Neither disease seemed to slow him down much for almost a decade. Then, in mid-June 2003, Buddy suffered a stroke that proved to be too much for his ailing body. A week later, on June 30, 2003, the brash comedian who recovered from a laughless debut to enjoy a six-decade long career passed away in his beach home in Malibu, California. He was 78.

August 30 - Fred MacMurray

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On this day, in 1908, Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois. Fred’s performing abilities came down from his father’s side of the family: dad was a music teacher and his aunt spent time on the vaudeville circuit and appeared in a slew of silent films. By 1910, the MacMurray family had moved to the Madison, Wisconsin area, near where his mother had been born. During his adolescence, Fred developed his vocal talents and began playing the saxophone. He earned a full ride scholarship to Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin but failed to graduate. Maybe that was inevitable given his creative tendencies, but his time spent singing and playing with a variety of local bands certainly contributed to his dropping out. Not that it hurt him any in the long run.

In 1930, Fred was a featured vocalist on not one but three songs: All I Want Is Just One Girl with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra and I’m in the Market for You and After a Million Dreams, both with George Olsen’s band. This exposure helped him get into Broadway shows. The first was a musical revue, Three’s a Crowd, that ran for 271 performances starting in October of 1930. Two years later, Fred starred in Jerome Kern’s musical Roberta, alongside Bob Hope and Sydney Greenstreet, all three of them just waiting to become big Hollywood stars. That show ran for 295 performances, ending just in time for Fred to move to California to start his path to stardom as a contract player with Paramount Pictures.

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Fred jumped right into the deep end of movies almost as soon as he got to Hollywood, appearing in seven movies in 1935 alone. Throughout the rest of the Thirties and into the Forties, he worked with most of the heavy hitters in Tinsel Town: Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, the list goes on and on. Part of Fred’s genius was the ability to do just about any role. He could be the smart guy in a comedy, the bad guy in film noir and could hold his own in a musical. Because of his versatility, Fred quickly rose to the top of his profession. By 1943, he was the highest paid actor in town pulling in over $420,000 that year (the equivalent of over $6.2 million today). And most of his best known work was still to come.

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One of the great film noir performances, for Fred or anyone else, happened in 1944 when he took on the role of Walter Neff, the unscrupulous insurance salesman who not only conspires to murder Barbara Stanwyck’s husband but plans to make the insurer he works for pay for it in Double Indemnity. Fred pulled off another less than savory character a decade later opposite Humphrey Bogart as Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in The Caine Mutiny. His third famous go-around as a guy you’d like to punch in the face came in 1960 when he played Jeff Sheldrake, an adulterous businessman vying with Jack Lemmon for Shirley MacLaine’s um… affections in The Apartment. He once reported that women would publically berate him for Sheldrake’s sleaziness following the release of the now classic film. Arguably, though, his biggest roles were much nicer guys and mostly came about through a long relationship with the Walt Disney Company.

The names Fred MacMurray and Walt Disney were first joined together in people’s minds in 1959 when Fred was cast in the studio’s very first fully live action movie, The Shaggy Dog. Playing the father of the titular dog, he was able to help propel the movie to the biggest financial success Disney had ever enjoyed to that point (co-starring with Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk didn’t hurt). I’m not saying this was a key factor in making Fred one of Walt’s favorite actors, but it certainly helped. So did the success of his subsequent films. In 1961, Fred reteamed with Tommy and first played Ned Brainard, nerdy scientist and creator of a super substance called flubber, in the smash hit The Absent-Minded Professor. That performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination, the only time the vastly underrated actor ever got any nomination. Professor was so popular it spawned Disney’s first sequel just two years later, The Son of Flubber, which Fred and Tommy of course returned for. In between the two flubber flicks, Fred and Tommy joined Jane Wyman for a family vacation comedy, Bon Voyage! Three more light hearted comedies followed: 1966’s Follow Me, Boys!, 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire and, finally, 1973’s Charlie and the Angel. Fred’s seven pictures with Disney comprised more than half of his last dozen film appearances and probably more than three quarters of what he’s recognized for today. And those seven pictures became the basis for Fred achieving another Disney first when, in 1987, he was declared the inaugural Disney Legend.

As if appearing in a fair number of hit movies throughout the Sixties wasn’t enough success for one man, Fred was also appearing weekly in a hit television show as well. In 1960, he was cast as Steven Douglas, an aeronautical engineer and widowed father of three sons, on the aptly named My Three Sons on CBS. The series also starred William Frawley (of I Love Lucy fame) and one of Fred’s co-stars from The Shaggy Dog, Tim Considine. For the next five years, My Three Sons was part of the bedrock of ABC’s lineup. When the network declined to pony up for a changeover to color filming, CBS gladly snapped it up, colorized it and ran with it for seven more years, finally ending it in 1972. With 380 episodes, it’s the ranks as the #3 sitcom (in terms of number of episodes) behind The Simpsons and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And yes, just like The Simpsons has become, that final season was kind of unwatchable.

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Fred’s final acting gig came in 1978, during the disaster movie craze. He played the mayor of a Texas town being invaded by killer bees in The Swarm (which was apparently even worse than you can possibly imagine it) and decided to retire. Because, let’s face it, he didn’t need any more money. Not only was he once the highest paid actor in Hollywood, but he’d made some fantastic investments over the years and was estimated to be worth something in the range of $150 million when he died. So retiring to his 1750-acre ranch in Northern California wasn’t a bad deal at all. At least it wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t had a string of severe health problems. Fred, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late Seventies, shortly after ending his career. He beat it, but the cancer recurred in 1987. In the early Eighties, he was diagnosed with a mild form of leukemia, which he lived with for a decade. In 1988, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. He was able to recover about 90% of his movement over the next few years but it didn’t matter in end. In 1991, he contracted pneumonia and that was the final straw for his beleaguered body. Fred passed away in a Santa Monica hospital being treated for the pulmonary disease on November 5, 1991. He was 83.

August 29 - Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant

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On this day, in 1955, the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant opened for business in Fantasyland of Disneyland. At the very beginning of Disneyland, most of the restaurants in the park were sponsored by (and in most cases actually run by) what’s known as third party companies (meaning they aren’t Disney and they aren’t a guest, they’re a third wheel to the business equation). Aunt Jemima, Swift Meats and Carnation, for examples, all had their fingers in the pies sold around Walt’s playground. Which is just one of the many reasons I roll my eyes whenever someone starts grousing about various sponsorship deals at the parks today and decrying the Michael Eisner era of corporatization. Eisner didn’t invent sponsors, folks. Roy Disney did to help pay for stuff, so get over yourselves.

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One of the restaurants that wasn’t quite ready for opening day was the one being sponsored by the Chicken of the Sea tuna company. It was going to be shaped like Captain Hook’s pirate ship, the one that Peter Pan flew back from Neverland. In the frenzy to actually get Disneyland built however, there was a miscalculation in the amount of available room in Fantasyland to keep simultaneous projects going. The Pirate Ship restaurant ended up being constructed behind Main Street USA instead. That of course led to the problem of how to get a giant ship from there into its lagoon nearly half a mile away. There was no longer a clear path to move it by land, so this version of the Jolly Roger got to fly into place as well. Tinkerbell was apparently unavailable to lend some pixie dust to the project so a giant construction crane was use instead.

When the Pirate Ship opened a little over a month after the rest of Disneyland, the restaurant instantly became an icon of the park. Guests could buy tuna burgers, hot tuna pies and tuna sandwiches at the counter service restaurant. Seating was outside around the pond. In 1960, the rather plain pond was turned into a pirate lagoon with the addition of Skull Rock, also based on the movie Peter Pan. The triple waterfall feature, the added vegetation, the sandy beaches strewn with treasure chests and the colored lights at night helped make the ship one of the most popular places to eat, or at least rest your tired feet, in all of Disneyland. All of which wasn’t apparently enough to convince Ralston Purina, who bought out Chicken of the Sea in the early Sixties, to renew their sponsorship.

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By 1969, the Chicken of the Sea mermaid was removed from the ship and the restaurant was renamed Captain Hook’s Galley. For the next thirteen years, the restaurant continued to operate and thrive in its cozy location. Then disaster struck. As Fantasyland was undergoing a major renovation in 1982, it was decided to move the Pirate Ship over to the Small World lagoon in order to improve traffic flow through the area. Unfortunately, the mostly wood structure wasn’t destined to survive that much activity. Parts of the foundation had been replaced by concrete over the years to help survive being partially immersed in water but construction crews discovered that subtle rotting damage to the rest of the structure had taken too much out of it. With nothing budgeted for restoration or for building an entirely new one, the brittle ship was bulldozed and simply disappeared. Some care was taken to pry some of the plasterwork off the ship’s stern but it was improperly secured in the truck that was to haul it away. The truck went over a speedbump too quickly, the plasterwork shifted violently and disintegrated into a thousand pieces.

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While you can no longer enjoy lunch at the beloved restaurant in Disneyland, you can currently pretend that you can in Disneyland Paris. A replica of the Pirate Ship and Skull Rock lagoon opened in that park’s Adventureland in 1992. A restaurant in its own right for nearly twenty years (also called Captain Hook’s Galley), the location no longer sells food but is still an area that can be explored and enjoyed. Now if there was only somewhere nearby to get a hot tuna pie and some root beer…

August 28 - Nancy Kulp

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On this day, in 1921, Nancy Jane Kulp was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The only daughter of a traveling salesman and a teacher, Nancy and her family had moved to the Miami, Florida area by her mid-teens. She graduated from the Florida State College for Women (now known as Florida State University) with a degree in journalism in 1943 and went on to the University of Miami to get a Master’s in English and French. Her academics were interrupted in 1944 when she joined the female arm of the United States Naval Reserve during World War II. She rose to the rank of lieutenant junior grade before being honorably discharged in 1946, returning to school to finish her graduate degree. Nancy married Charles Dacus in 1951 and the couple moved to Hollywood, California where she became part of the publicity department at the MGM studio.

Nancy had barely begun her job at MGM when George Cukor, director of such classics as A Star is Born and My Fair Lady, convinced her that she should be in front of a camera rather than behind a desk. Within months, she made her big screen debut in George’s 1951 comedy The Model and the Marriage Broker. Over the next few years, Nancy appeared in seven more films, mostly comedies, including two more of George’s (The Marrying Kind and A Star Is Born) as well as high profile classics like Shane and Sabrina.  Although she popped up in more than two dozen films over the course of her career, Nancy, like so many character actors of the era, didn’t really shine until she found her way onto our television sets.

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Nancy made her debut on the small screen in 1954 in an episode of the anthology show Lux Video Theatre (they put the word video in there so you wouldn’t confuse it with radio version). By the following year, she was showing off her comedic talents as Pamela Livingstone, a recurring role on The Bob Cummings Show. During the next several years, she had guest appearances on dozens of shows, doing everything from I Love Lucy to Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Maverick. She again enjoyed recurring comedic roles on Our Miss Brooks and Date with the Angels (an early Betty White vehicle). And then, Nancy was lucky enough to discover some bubbling crude and cemented her place in television history.

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In 1962, when the producers of The Bob Cummings Show were putting together a new project, they fondly remembered working with Nancy and decided to cast her in a main role this time around. They cast her as Jane Hathaway, loyal secretary to greedy banker Milburn Drysdale and needed friend to the newly rich Clampett family, on The Beverly Hillbillies. Although technically a side character, Miss Jane appeared in nearly 90% of the shows 274 episodes and earned Nancy an Emmy nomination in 1967. She stuck with the lovelorn assistant right up until Hillbillies was abruptly cancelled in 1971, in spite of its high ratings. And she was one of only three original cast members to reprise their roles for Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, a mediocre-at-best made-for-television movie in 1981.

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Nancy has three entries in the annals of Disneyana. Her first, and most recognizable, came in 1961. She played the beleaguered Miss Grunecker, assistant to camp leader Miss Inch, in the Hayley Mills classic, The Parent Trap. A year later, she had a small role in the comedy Moon Pilot as a space flight nutritionist. Her third and final role with Disney (and her last film role altogether) required her voice only as she brought to life Frou-Frou, the horse that helps get rid of the evil butler Edgar, in The Aristocats.

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Nancy’s career began slowing down as the Seventies rolled on. She did nab recurring roles on The Brian Keith Show and Sanford and Son, as well as several guest spots on The Love Boat, but parts were becoming fewer and farther between. In 1980, Nancy made her Broadway debut stepping into the role of Aaronetta Gibbs in the play Morning’s at Seven. She spent several months with the production, finishing the run of the show in August 1981. For the rest of the decade, she made just a handful of television appearances with her final small screen role being a nun on an episode of the classic sci-fi show Quantum Leap.

As she was contemplating the end of her acting career, Nancy decided to dabble in politics. In 1984, she ran as a Democrat for the United States House of Representatives in Pennsylvania's Ninth District, her home at the time. She knew it was a long shot (the district had voted Republican for decades) but she went for it anyways. The experience was marred when Buddy Ebsen, her old co-star from The Beverly Hillbillies, actually volunteered to campaign for her opponent. She was soundly defeated, getting only slightly over a third of the vote. It was probably the exact same outcome whether or not Buddy participated but it caused a decided rift to form between the two. Buddy later claimed to feel terrible about what he did to Nancy and they sort of made up before her death, but the damage to their relationship had definitely been done. 

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Following her political loss, Nancy became an artist in residence for a while at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania and taught acting. She later moved to Palm Springs, California and became an active volunteer. In 1989, she admitted in an interview that she was a lesbian, sort of. Her marriage had only lasted a decade, ending a year before The Beverly Hillbillies started. When the interviewer, Boze Hadleigh, went to ask about her sexuality since then, she basically said "The question you're looking to ask is do opposites attract? My answer is that I think birds of a feather flock together." It was the late Eighties and that's about as close to coming out that most celebrities could do at the time. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure she would have been a leader in the LGBTQ community. Timing is everything.

In 1980, Nancy was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment for it. Unfortunately, by the beginning of the following year, the disease had spread. On February 3, 1981, it overtook her and the comedienne with the masters degree passed away in Palm Desert, California. She was only 69.

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.

August 26 - Retta Scott

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On this day, in 1990, Retta Scott passed away in Foster City, California. Born on February 23, 1916 in the tiny town of Omak, Washington (it had less than 1,000 residents at the time), Retta and her family moved four hours east to the Seattle area when she was a fairly young girl. Art was her favorite subject in school and she first thought about doing it as a career when, in the fourth grade, she won a scholarship from the Seattle Art and Music Foundation. She was able to stretch that award into nearly ten years of art classes, continuing to get local training well past her 1934 graduation from Roosevelt High School. Her dedication to honing her craft paid off when she then won a second scholarship, this time for three years of study at the famous Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Retta packed up her belongings, moved a couple of states south and set her sights on becoming a fine artist. She ended up making history.

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While at Chouinard, Retta would spend a lot of her free time at the Griffith Park Zoo, just a short distance from the school. Her bold sketches of the animals there caught the attention of one of her professors. He recommended that she apply for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. Retta said no thanks, cartoons did not appeal to her. The professor explained he had more of the type of artistry present in the recently released Snow White in mind and understood, through some contacts of his, that the studio was looking at doing an adaptation of Bambi next. Retta’s expertise with animal drawings would be a natural fit. Retta was finally convinced to apply and, almost to her surprise, was hired.

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Retta began her Disney career in 1938 in the Story Department, a fairly unusual start given that most women at animation studios were almost always relegated to the tediousness of the Ink and Paint Department. Her time spent at the zoo came shining through in her story sketches and character development work. Both David Hand, Bambi’s director, and Walt himself were impressed with the intensity of her drawings. When the movie moved into the actual production phase, Retta was moved into the actual animation department, put under the tutelage of the Legendary Eric Larson and assigned to the sequence where the hunting dogs are chasing Faline. Her amazing work led to a full-fledged on-screen credit as an animator for Bambi, making her the first woman at Disney ever to receive that honor.

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Over the next few years, Retta continued on as an animator for both Fantasia and Dumbo (although she gets no official credit on either of those films) as well as contributing to at least two Donald Duck shorts, Donald’s Snow Fight and Donald Gets Drafted (again sans credit). Retta was working on animating the weasels for the studio’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows when she made an on-screen appearance during the filming of The Reluctant Dragon in 1941 (she presents the film’s star, Robert Benchley with a caricature of him as an elephant). Later that year, as things became increasingly tight for Disney just prior to World War II, she was briefly laid off with a number of other animators, but by the beginning of 1942, she was hired back into the Story Department. She worked on several animated shorts and educational films until she married a submarine commander and retired from Disney in April 1946.

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Retta and her husband, Benjamin Worcester, moved east to Washington, DC where she continued her art career as an illustrator. She would work with the Walt Disney Company several more times over the years, most notably on Little Golden Book editions of Disney movies. Her illustrations for the Cinderella Big Golden Book are what make that book a must have for collectors. She was praised for a picture book that didn't look exactly like the film but yet still felt like it came directly out of it. Other vintage non-Disney Little Golden Books she is famous for include The Santa Claus Book and Happy Birthday.

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In the late Seventies, Retta returned to the world of animation when she was hired by Martin Rosen, a British filmmaker, to help animate The Plague Dogs released in 1980 (it's said to be a pretty decent movie in spite of a terrible title). She moved to San Francisco to work on the picture (having divorced her husband around the same time), teaming up with a youngish Brad Bird (who would go on to direct The Iron Giant and The Incredibles). And even though four decades had passed since the last time she had to prove herself in an animator's workroom, the men in the room were reportedly both surprised by her talents and awed by them. Unfortunately, some things take longer to change than we might like.

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After production wrapped up on Dogs, Retta would join another future member of Pixar, Bud Luckey, at his studio, doing animation for commercials like Cookie Crisp Cereal. She worked there until 1985, when she suffered a stroke that spared her life but robbed her of the ability to produce quality work. She would live quietly for another five years before passing away at her home in Foster City. The pioneering animator who helped open doors for generations of women after her was 74. Ten years later, in 2000, Retta would posthumously be declared an official Disney Legend, for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

August 25 - Tim Burton

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On this day, in 1958, Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California. It’s hard to say what influenced Tim’s decidedly quirky, fairly macabre worldview the most, but the fact that his mother once owned a gift shop themed entirely around cats gives us a good start (although growing up at the epicenter of the entertainment industry would probably have darkened even the perkiest of kids). Tim began experimenting with stop motion animation in his backyard at a fairly young age. He spent a lot of time making soundless super 8 films that could have been spent shoring up his mediocre grades, but then we might not have ever gotten to experience some of my favorite movies.  Tim’s grades were good enough, however, to allow him to move on from Burbank High School to study character animation at CalArts, and really that’s all that matters in the long run.

While at CalArts, Tim wrote, directed and drew the animation entirely by himself for an animated short that caused quite a stir among his fellow students. Stalk of the Celery Monster depicted an unconventional dentist office that employed the titular monster as a sort of dental hygienist. Only fragments of it survive, but in the minute and a half that does, you can see most of the signature Burton aesthetics are already in place. Which really makes what happened next kind of strange: because of the glimmers of strange brilliance evident in Celery Monster, Disney offered Tim an animation apprenticeship.

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At the tail end of the Seventies, Tim started a relationship with the Walt Disney Company that, quite frankly, was doomed from the beginning. Over the next several years, he would be tried out in several different roles, none of which bloomed into anything. He spent time as an animator on The Fox and the Hound. He was moved to the art department and became a conceptual artist on The Black Cauldron, except none of his concepts were ever used (and that film could have used a whole lot of different concepts). He was given storyboard, graphic design and even some art direction work. None of it seemed to fit. And things didn’t get any better when Tim worked on projects of his own.

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In 1982, Tim was able to complete his first short, a stop-motion animated piece called Vincent. It’s a brilliant six minute poem about a little boy who likes to pretend that he is Vincent Price and the best part is that Tim got Vincent Price to narrate it. Disney played it for two weeks in exactly one theater in Los Angeles before the movie Tex (remember that one? Yeah, neither do I). Tim then directed a live action adaptation of Hansel and Gretel for The Disney Channel. Given a distinctly Japanese flavor, the movie features and all Asian cast and culminates in a kung fu fight (even though that martial art is really Chinese) between the siblings and the wicked witch. Disney aired it one time on Halloween 1983 with little warning and no promotion. Tim’s next project was the 1984 live action short Frankenweenie. It’s both a spoof and an homage to the original Frankenstein. Although Frankenweenie was later seen in the United Kingdom in front of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (another film you won’t remember, although this one you don’t want to), it was never shown in the United States, in spite of the fact that it cost nearly $1 million to produce. Those two facts apparently gave whoever in management who didn’t like Tim all the ammunition they needed. He was accused of wasting company resources on a picture that was deemed too scary for kids and fired. The good news for his fans is that the spark that fueled his subsequent fire had already been made.

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Paul Reubens was one of the few people who actually got to see Frankenweenie and he loved it. Paul was looking to put his popular character Pee-wee Herman into a big screen romp of some sort and decided that Tim was just the guy to direct it. Tim in turn asked one of his favorite rock stars, Oingo-Boingo front man Danny Elfman, to write the music. The rest, as they say, is history. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was a bona-fide hit, taking in $40 million on an $8 million budget, putting Paul, Tim and Danny firmly on the entertainment map and Tim and Danny forged a relationship that has seen Danny score all but three of Tim’s films.

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Tim took a breather, directing some episodes of a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and , before moving on to another feature film. He took a quirky script that was languishing around the offices of Warner Brothers, gave it a rewrite with a lot more comedy thrown in, cast a bunch of folks who were relatively unknown (but wouldn’t be for much longer) and spent the most money he’d ever been allowed to, $15 million. The result was Beetlejuice, a classic comedy that grossed over $74 million worldwide and convinced Warner Brothers that Tim was ready for what they called the big leagues: they gave him the greenlight on his version of a Batman movie.

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Tim had been developing his concepts for the Caped Crusader for a couple of years before getting the go ahead. He was making his superhero a much darker entity than the Superman of the Seventies and wasn’t afraid to court controversy. He insisted on making Batman a regular guy who used super gadgets and cast Michael Keaton, who he’d just worked with on Beetlejuice, as his lead over the objections of every fanboy out there who cried over a comedic actor landing the role. Then he cast Jack Nicholson as his villain, who came with a cloud of demands that threatened to overwhelm the production. Tim then had to constantly butt heads with Warner Brothers’ management to keep the tone of the whole thing from getting campy. And then the budget ballooned from thirty million dollars to forty-eight. The whole thing could have been a disaster. But it wasn’t. Batman opened to good critical reviews, Keaton and Nicholson were both praised for their performances and the film grossed over $400 million. Tim was now an established Hollywood director, one that even Disney was willing to listen to.

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As Tim was ramping up production on what is arguably his best film to date, Edward Scissorhands, he couldn’t forget about a little project he’d left behind when he’d been forced out of Disney. It was a three page poem, titled The Nightmare Before Christmas, that he first thought would make a great children’s book but might also work as a half hour television special. He asked around about it and discovered that Disney still owned the production rights to it. However, his former company was interested in talking to him about producing something based on it (isn’t it amazing what success will do for people’s perceptions of you?). Tim was interested but had a magnum opus to finish first. He hired a young Johnny Depp for his lead, converted a Florida subdivision into a giant movie set (in one scene you can see a sign for Publix in the background; that might not mean something to most of you but Floridians love it) and managed to get Vincent Price in for his last major film scene before he passed away. Edward Scissorhands is probably the most autobiographical film that Tim has ever made and is one of his biggest critical successes as well.

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After Edward, Tim found himself with two projects on his plate. At Disney, The Nightmare Before Christmas was becoming a feature length film. At Warner Brothers, a second Batman movie was being developed. Wanting to avoid the tediousness of three years of stop motion animation work, Tim opted to produce Nightmare and direct Batman Returns. He handed the reins of his holiday extravaganza over to another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, who created one of my favorite films of all time. Nightmare did moderately well at the box office in its initial run but has since become a cult classic that seems to continue to grow with each passing year. In a karma fueled twist of irony, Tim’s name, once derided at Disney for being too dark and weird (and therefore easily fireable), had to be put in front of Nightmare’s title in an attempt to draw in his growing fan base. Three years later, Tim and Henry would collaborate again (as producer and director respectively) for Disney’s second big stop motion feature, 1996’s James and the Giant Peach.

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Meanwhile, over at Warner Brothers, Tim demanded and received total control over Batman Returns. The result, much to the dismay of studio executives, was an even darker movie than the first one, with overtly sexual overtones. The sequel was a critical and financial success (albeit at half the rate of the original) but left management too worried about the direction Tim was taking the superhero. For the third installment, they relegated him to the role of producer only and after that he wasn’t even allowed to do that. I’m not saying the franchise suffered because of that decision, but I’m guessing we wouldn’t ever have had to see Batman and Robin if things had gone down differently.

In the decades since leaving Gotham City, Tim has directed 14 more films, all but one of which have been commercially successful. The lone money loser, Ed Wood, is actually one of his biggest critical successes (and a Touchstone Pictures movie). It’s a pretty good film but it’s also a biopic about an obscure director of terrible movies. If you aren’t interested in the subject (and even now, most people would be hard pressed to tell you who exactly Ed Wood is), you just aren’t going to care. Outside of that, Tim’s movies over the years have appealed to a wide swath of the viewing public. Whether you’re interested in summer popcorn fare (Planet of the Apes, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children), quirky bios (Big Eyes) or more of his signature macabre (Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Dark Shadows), he’s done something for just about every taste, a sentiment boosted by the fact that his films have grossed over $4 Billion. That figure has been greatly helped along by the three pictures he’s done for Disney since Nightmare: a live action Alice in Wonderland, an animated Frankenweenie and, his latest project, a live action Dumbo which have a combined box office of nearly $1.5 Billion (and, incidentally, are all kind of remakes that were done in the opposite medium from the originals). There is currently no word on what might be up Tim’s sleeve for his next project, but we know that whatever it is, it will not only be fun to watch, but probably more than a little bit off the beaten Hollywood path and that makes the anticipation just that much sweeter. Happy 61^st birthday, Tim!