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.

June 20 - The Reluctant Dragon

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On this day, in 1941, RKO Pictures released the Walt Disney Production of The Reluctant Dragon to theaters. Dragon is based on a story of the same name by Kenneth Grahame, who also wrote The Wind in the Willows, which would also be adapted by the studio several years later. The movie is the first of the so-called package films Disney released during World War II. The war hadn’t reached America’s shores yet, but it was raging in Europe and the foreign revenue stream had all but dried up. Dragon is also the first Disney film to contain a significant portion of live action footage; almost half of its 74 minutes lack any kind of animation at all.

The plot of The Reluctant Dragon is kind of a weird take on a meta-reality theme. It stars Robert Benchley, a popular humorist of the era. For some reason Robert has a nagging need to sell the movie rights for Kenneth Grahame’s Dragon story to the Disney studio (it’s unclear why Robert would be able to sell the rights to someone else’s work, but that’s what is happening). His wife drops him off at the studio on her way to do some shopping (what else do wives do in 1941?) so he can get the deed done. He brushes off his official greeter and begins wandering around the place, unaccompanied (except for the massive camera crew, of course), visiting all the different departments, learning about how animation is produced. Along the way he (and therefore the audience) watches a clip of Casey Jr. in Dumbo as it goes through the Foley sound process, a story reel of rough animation for a new short called Baby Weems, and the first of Goofy’s infamous How to… sports shorts, How to Ride a Horse. Robert’s greeter finally catches up with him and delivers him to Walt’s side. Walt invites Robert into a screening room to watch a film the studio has just finished, which turns out to be the very story Robert was stopping by to sell the rights to, The Reluctant Dragon. When his wife picks him up on her way home, she berates Robert for missing out on selling Walt the rights to Dragon (which he clearly didn’t have the authority to do anyways) causing him to do an impression of Donald Duck’s famous retort, Phooey!

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The Reluctant Dragon was not well received. Part of that was due to the fact that it was released during the bitter animator’s strike at the studio. Part of it was because it wasn’t a new full length feature but a series of seemingly unrelated shorts strung together which confused audiences. It did, however, make money, earning $960,000 on a $600,000 budget. That fact alone set things up for the string of package films Disney released over the next several years. Since its initial release, it’s rare to see Dragon in its entirety, although it was released on both VHS and DVD with limited availability. How to Ride a Horse was rereleased as a standalone short in 1950 and, with the advent of television, both it and the extended Dragon short have been shown numerous times (and included in numerous home video collections) by themselves. One final note about The Reluctant Dragon: it is the only feature film that Walt appeared in. He had appeared on the big screen before, as part of the promotional ads for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Dragon would be his only acting gig until the studio’s anthology series came out on television.

October 20 - Frank Churchill

On this day, in 1901, composer Frank Churchill was born in Rumford, Maine. By the age of four, his family had moved to Southern California. He began his professional music career at 15 the same way many musicians of the time did, as a pianist in a movie theater. After graduating from high school, Frank's parents coerced him into enrolling at UCLA as a pre-med student. He didn't last a year. Bound and determined to make it as a musician, Frank would spend the next few years performing anywhere from honky-tonks in Tijuana to an orchestra in Tuscon. Upon his return to California in 1924, he was awarded a contract with KNX as the radio station's accompanist.

In 1930, Frank became part of the Disney family and began writing the scores for dozens of shorts, including Who Killed Cock Robin, Mickey's Gala Premier and the flypaper scene from Playful Pluto. His most famous composition from this period is the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from 1933's The Three Little Pigs. The song's perky confidence caught on with a nation deep into the Great Depression. When the sheet music went on sale, over 39,000 copies were sold in the first three days in New York City alone.

Based on his successes with the shorts, Walt gave Frank the job of scoring the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Not only did he produce an Academy Award nominated score, but Frank also helped write "Whistle While You Work", "Heigh Ho", and "Someday My Prince Will Come." By helping propel the success of the Snow White with his catchy tunes, Frank propelled his own success within the company. He became the studio's Supervisor of Music.

Frank's next project was 1941's The Reluctant Dragon. Not only did he contribute to the score, but he can be seen in person in the Studio Tour portion of the film. Next came Dumbo. He collaborated with Oliver Wallace on the score and composed the classic Disney ballad "Baby Mine" with Ned Washington. When Oscar time rolled around, Frank shared a nomination with Ned for Best Song and a win with Oliver for Best Score. A year later, he received dual nominations again for Bambi, one for the score he co-wrote with Edward Plumb and the other for his work on the tune "Love Is a Song."

Tragically, his Oscar nominations for Bambi would come posthumously. While working on the film, Frank became severely depressed when two of his close friends and orchestra members died within a month of each other. He began to drink heavily and, on May 14, 1942, committed suicide while sitting at the piano in his Castaic, California home.

Frank's legacy would outlive him by quite a bit. He had already written music for two more films in production at the time, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and Peter Pan, and although the lyrics were never used in Peter Pan, Frank's song "Never Smile at a Crocodile" was. In 1977, he was posthumously nominated for a Grammy Award for the Snow White soundtrack and in 2001 he became an official Disney Legend.

Also on this day, in American history: Eugene V. Debs