May 23 - George Bruns

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

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

Image courtesy vegalleries.com

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

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

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


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

December 14 - Babes In Toyland

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On this day, in 1961, Walt Disney Productions' first live action musical, Babes In Toyland, was released in theaters. The film is loosely based on a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert and was originally conceived of as animated. Walt eventually decided he wanted a movie along the standards of Wizard of Oz and Babes became, in the words of one executive, “a Disney cartoon with live people.” To that end, Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow from Oz, was cast except this time as the villain, Barnaby. The cast is filled out by teen heartthrobs Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello, Disney stalwarts Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcoran and Ed Wynn in the second of his many appearances with the studio.

Image copyright Disney

For the Disney version of Babes, Walt had most of the lyrics from the operetta rewritten and many of the tempos of the songs changed up as well. It may not have been the best choice. Rather than living up to Oz, Babes opened to mainly negative reviews. Generally regarded as juvenile and clunky, even Tommy Kirk refers to it as an oddity at best, although he isn’t embarrassed about it like some of his other work.

While there were several other versions of Babes before this one (including one starring Laurel and Hardy), Disney’s take was the first one to be shot in Technicolor. It’s longest lasting legacy isn’t its music or any of its performances. It’s the fact that the toy soldiers from the film can still be seen every year in the various holiday parades at Disney parks around the world.

November 9 - Ed Wynn

On this day, in 1886, Isaiah Edwin Leopold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Isaiah attended high school only until the age of 15. He then ran away from home, found work as a hat salesman (the job his father held) and eventually found his way into show business. To spare his family the embarrassment of having a comedian in the family, he morphed his middle name into the stage name Ed Wynn.

Ed started out on the Vaudeville circuit in 1903. By the mid Teens, he was starring in the annual Broadway revues, the Ziegfeld Follies, working alongside the likes of W.C. Fields. Ed would appear in several other shows on Broadway, including ones he wrote and directed like 1921's The Perfect Fool.

In the early Thirties, Ed, like many other vaudevillians, made the transition to radio. He was the host of Texaco's The Fire Chief and would even play the role in two movies, Follow the Leader and The Chief. Ed even started his own radio network, the Amalgamated Broadcasting Network, but it went belly up after just a few weeks. The effects on his marriage, his finances and his mental health were all devastating. Ed continued appearing on Broadway and in movies throughout the rest of the Thirties and most of the Forties.

In 1949, Ed made the leap to the small screen, although technically his first appearance was as part of an experimental broadcast in 1936. As the host of one of the first variety shows on television he welcomed comedians such as Lucille Ball, Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges. From 1950-52, Ed also hosted Four Star Revue on a rotational basis with Danny Thomas, Jack Carson and Jimmy Durante. He even got his own show, The Ed Wynn Show, though it only lasted one season.

It was around this time that Ed's son, Keenan (who was also an actor), encouraged him to branch out into more dramatic roles. The two would appear together a number of times over the years. The first time was 1956's Requiem for a Heavyweight. Ed was terrified to do a straight acting gig but shined for the actual performance. The second time was the same year in the movie The Great Man. The final time was, oddly enough, in a 1960 piece about the making of the 1956 Requiem. Ed had established himself so well as a serious actor, he appeared in 1959's Diary of Anne Frank and nabbed an Oscar nomination. One of my favorite television appearance's of Ed's around this time was for The Twilight Zone in an episode that Rod Serling wrote specifically for him, "One for the Angels."

Ed joined the Disney family in 1951 as the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland. Full of wonderfully quotable lines ("Mustard? Don't let's be silly."), Ed's Hatter is a delightful island of fun in a totally surreal film. Ten years later, he would become the Toymaker opposite Annette Funicello in Babes in Toyland. My favorite Disney role of Ed's, though, has to be Uncle Albert in 1964's Mary Poppins. As a child I couldn't help but wish that a fit of laughter would make me flit around the ceiling. Ed would also appear in That Darn Cat!, The Absent Minded Professor (another production with his son Keenan), Son of Flubber and, his final film appearance, The Gnome-mobile, which was released posthumously.

Ed passed away on June 19, 1966 at the age of 79 from throat cancer. Reportedly, Walt Disney, who once referred to Ed as "our good luck charm," was one of his pall bearers. He was made an official Disney Legend in 2013.