August 6 - Oliver Wallace

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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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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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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.

October 23 - Dumbo

On this day, in 1941, Walt Disney Studio's fourth animated feature, Dumbo, had its world premier at the Broadway Theater in New York City. With war raging in Europe, the studio had hit hard times. No foreign markets meant that both Pinocchio and Fantasia had failed to turn a profit. In desperate need of money, Walt decided to go cheap and simple. It was a gamble that paid off, both in the short and the long run.

In 1939, Kay Kamen, the head of the licensing department, showed Walt a prototype of a new toy, the Roll-A-Book. The scroll on the toy was a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The entire scroll consisted of eight pictures and a few words of text. It was enough for Walt to want to buy the rights. He originally intended to turn it into a short, but as development of the story proceeded, it became a feature.

When it came time to start animating Dumbo, Walt instructed his team that they had to make this picture on the cheap. Gone were the lush details of the studio's earlier films. The backgrounds were done in watercolors instead of oils. Character designs were simpler and more cartoony. Exacerbating costs was the fact that rough animation was barely finished when the animators went on strike for five weeks starting in May of 1941. The strike was finally settled (not terribly amicably) and the film was finished that fall. The final cost of Dumbo was a mere $950,000 (about 15.8 million dollars today), half of Snow White and a third of Pinocchio.

When Walt went to turn Dumbo over to RKO Radio Pictures, his distribution company at the time, they didn't want it. At just 64 minutes, Dumbo remains one of the studio's shortest features. RKO wanted it either lengthened or cut down to a short or they'd release it as a B-movie. Walt refused all of that and RKO begrudgingly released it as it was. Naturally that turned out to be the best choice.

Dumbo would be the most financially successful Disney film of its decade, grossing 1.6 million dollars (about 26.6 million dollars today). The simple, charming story resonated with movie goers even with (or perhaps because of) the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. Dumbo would be nominated for two Oscars, winning for its score created by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace. It currently enjoys a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's spawned two attractions, a television series in the Eighties and a new live action version set to come out next year. I don't think the story of the little elephant who gets bullied, finds an unlikely friend who gives him confidence and ends up saving the day will ever go out of style and might just be needed more today than ever.

Also on this day, in American history: Op Art