March 23 - Norman Palmer

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On this day, in 2013, Norman Palmer passed away in his sleep at his home in Northridge, California. Norm was born on October 7, 1918 in Santa Ana, California the fourth generation of his family to be native to the area. He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1937 and became a projectionist for the Walt Disney Studio the following year. After six months on the job, he moved into the Editing Department and stayed there for the rest of career.

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After helping edit features like Pinocchio and Fantasia, World War II came along and Norman did his patriotic duty, enlisting in the United States Navy. He quickly became part of the Field Photo branch and began working with the likes of legendary director John Ford. He spent most of his tour editing films for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington but he did spend some time on the front as an aerial photographer doing reconnaissance work.

When the war was over, Norman returned to Burbank and resumed his editing duties for Disney. It wasn't long before a young lady in the Ink and Paint Department caught his eye. In December 1947, Barbara Major became Mrs. Norman Palmer and happily remained his wife until her death 52 years later.

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As the Fifties began, Norman made two important contributions to the company. First, he created a whole new genre of wildlife pictures with the Tru-Life Adventure series. His ability to edit thousands of hours of raw footage down into entertaining nature films, perfectly paired with just the right music, set the standard for years to come. It's really his editing that won Oscars for movies like The Living Desert, Water Birds and In Beaver Valley. Second, he took on the potentially thankless task of mentoring the boss' kid. When Roy E. Disney joined his father and uncle's company, he started in the Editing Department and learned everything he needed to know from Norman.

After the Tru-Life Adventures ran their course, Norman continued editing other live action movies for the studio like The Incredible Journey, The Gnome-Mobile and The Shaggy D.A. He also edited more than two dozen episodes of the Wonderful World of Color (and all its later versions) right up to his retirement in 1983. In 1998, for his 45 years of hit making genius in the editing room, Norman was made an official Disney Legend. He also received a posthumous homage in the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine: one of the game's characters is a projectionist named Norman Polk. He was 95 when he died.

January 16 - Roger Mobley

On this day, in 1949, Roger Lance Mobley was born in Evansville, Indiana. The son of a pipefitter and a real estate agent, Roger was one of eight Mobley children. A few years after his birth, the family moved to Pecos, Texas. While there, Roger performed with his older brother and one of their sisters in a singing group called The Little Mobley Trio. When Roger was seven, the family moved to Los Angeles, California and the Trio appeared on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour. The group failed to impress but an agent took notice of Roger and signed him. His first gig was on the NBC series Fury, a western that also starred Peter Graves (of Mission: Impossible fame). After 39 episodes of Fury, his career was on its way.

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Roger spent the next several years appearing on dozens of television shows, mostly westerns like The Virginian and Gunsmoke. He also began getting small roles in a handful of films. In 1964, Roger was cast as Gustav in Disney's version of Emil and the Detectives. Walt was so taken with his performance that he signed Roger to play the title role in a series being developed for the Wonderful World of Color, "Adventures of Gallegher". Gallegher is an amateur sleuth/newspaper reporter and the series of episodes earned an Emmy nomination. It seemed that Roger was destined for even bigger things. In the last known memo that Walt ever wrote, about future television projects, Roger is mentioned in connection with a show centering around the CIA. Unfortunately, the US government had other plans for him.

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At the age of 18, Roger was drafted into the United States Army. He completed parachute jump training at Fort Benning, volunteered for Special Forces training at Fort Bragg and was assigned to the 46th Special Forces Company (Airborne) in Thailand. When the Green Beret returned to the States in 1970, he found out that he only had about $6,000 dollars left of all the money he'd made as a child actor. With a young bride (his high school sweetheart no less) and the beginnings of a family, Roger made the decision to move to Texas and become a police officer.

His acting career was effectively over, but not completely over. He would make two more cameo appearances: in 1979 in Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again as Sentry #1 and as a police sergeant in a 1980 Disney made for television movie, The Kids Who Knew Too Much. He was last known to live in Arkansas, still married to his sweetheart, occasionally making appearances at comic cons, ready to great his fans.

November 2 - Paul Frees

On this day, in 1986, actor Paul Frees passed away in Tiburon, California. Born in Chicago, Illinois on June 22, 1920 with the name Solomon Hersh Frees, Paul was gifted with a four octave voice range. He would use that voice to forge an incredible career in Hollywood although he was almost never seen on any screen, big or small.

Paul started out in vaudeville during the 1930s as an impressionist using the stage name Buddy Green. By 1942 his voice had naturally led him into radio. His career would, like so many careers at the time, take a hiatus for World War II. Paul fought on the beaches of Normandy, was wounded and returned to the States to recover. He enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute thanks to the GI Bill, but was forced to drop out when his first wife's health began to deteriorate and return to radio.

Paul was all over the radio dial during the late Forties and early Fifties. You might hear him as the announcer of Suspense one week and then as a player on Gunsmoke or Crime Classics the next. He even had a syndicated show, The Player, in which he played all the parts.

Starting in the 1950s, Paul began doing extensive "re-loop" work. Basically this meant that Paul would redub the voice of another actor for a movie. Sometimes it was because the original actor was considered to have to thick of an accent, so Paul might redo the entire movie, like in Midway when he did all of Tashiro Mifune's lines. Other times the studio might just need a few lines cleaned up and the original actor wasn't available, so Paul would mimic them for whatever was needed. One of the most famous voices Paul re-looped was most of the falsetto lines that Tony Curtis did as Josephine in Some Like It Hot. Apparently the studio didn't think Tony was melodious enough. While many voice actors worked pretty exclusively with one studio, Paul wasn't picky who signed his paychecks and worked with nine different companies.

Paul has all kinds of classic Disney roles to his credit. One of his first roles was re-looping the role of Eddie the Garbageman in 1966's The Ugly Dachsund. Dick Wessel filmed the role but died before post production was complete so Paul had to rerecord all of Eddie's dialogue. When Disney's anthology television show changed to the Wonderful World of Color, Paul became the voice of Professor Ludwig Von Drake and helped to sell thousands of color sets with The Spectrum Song. Ludwig would become a regular gig, appearing on Color many times and even getting several children's records. Paul would narrate a whole slew of Disney shorts as well, including the classic Donald Duck in Mathmagicland. He narrated a large number of segments for Color and even had a rare live action appearance in The Shaggy Dog as military psychiatrist Dr. Galvin.

Paul's most lasting Disney legacy however, is apparent every time guests enjoy some of the rides in New Orleans Square at Disneyland. He can still be heard as the Ghost Host in the Haunted Mansion and if you hike across the square, you can hear him as several of the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean. His most famous line from the latter attraction is the haunting "Dead men tell no tales." Paul was also used as the original narrator for the pre-show of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at the 1964 World's Fair and was the narrator for the now defunct ride Adventure Thru Inner Space.

Outside of Disney, Paul is best known for roles like Boris Badenov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show for Jay Ward Productions. He did a number of roles in the classic Rankin/Bass specials including the Burgermeister in Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Santa Claus in Frosty the Snowman. Paul worked on the Tom and Jerry cartoons, Mr. Magoo and was the voice of two of the Fab Four for a cartoon series called The Beatles. He also was the voice of several well known characters in television commercials: The Pillsbury Dough Boy, Toucan Sam and the Farmer for the Jolly Green Giant.

After logging hundreds of film and television credits and entertaining millions of people for decades, Paul's run ended tragically. He took his own life with an overdose of pain medication. In 2003, he was paid tribute with a singing bust bearing his likeness as part of The Haunted Mansion film. A more fitting (and less painful to watch) tribute was made in 2006 when he was posthumously made an official Disney Legend for his dozens of contributions to the Disney legacy.

October 27 - Walt Disney's Disneyland

On this day, in 1954, the first Disney television production, Walt Disney's Disneyland, debuted on ABC. As the plans for his theme park proceeded, Walt had his brother, Roy, explore any and every avenue for funding. One way Roy came up with was to provide programming for a television network. The idea almost didn't take hold, CBS and NBC both passed, but finally Roy convinced ABC that it would work. The result was an anthology series that would give Disney some much needed money and advertising and the fledgling network something for people to watch for decades to come.

The original premise of the show was that Walt would come into people's homes each week and give them a taste of what was being built in Anaheim, then present some sort of story for their enjoyment. The opening of the show not only mentioned Disneyland as a whole but named four of the lands that guests would be able to experience once they got there: Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Frontierland. One of the lands would be highlighted each week. For instance, when the Davy Crockett episodes aired, Frontierland was the theme. If a behind the scenes look at Lady and the Tramp was on, the theme was Fantasyland. Tomorrowland night might be a look at the future of cars and a showing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would mean it was an Adventureland show. This format would define the show until the early Eighties, even though the name would change on a semi-regular basis.

In 1958, the name of the show changed to Walt Disney Presents and went from Wednesday nights to Friday nights (for two years) before settling on Sunday nights, a time slot it would occupy for the next 21 years. During this period, Walt promoted anything that needed it, from Sleeping Beauty to any additions to Disneyland. Westerns were popular at this time and Disney obliged with series like "Texas John Slaughter." Some episodes even featured a mix of animation and live action, with Walt having conversations with everyone from Mickey Mouse to Jiminy Cricket.

Big changes came to both television and the show in 1961. While the format stayed the same, the show began airing on NBC, who was the first network to broadcast in color. As a result the show's name was changed to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. The first show featured the first Disney character ever created specifically for television, Ludwig Von Drake, singing a song about all the colors that could now be seen on the screen. It's said that song alone sold more color television sets than anything else that year. Because Walt had the foresight to film everything from the earlier versions of the show in color, saving money and showing reruns wasn't a problem. When Walt died in 1965, he had already filmed the openings for the remainder of the season so the studio went ahead and used them. Following that season, however, everyone realized that to try to replace Walt with a different host would be a mistake and the openings were cut.

By 1969, all three networks broadcast in color, which naturally meant it was time to change the shows name once again. Now called The Wonderful World of Disney, the show would continue to gain in popularity and was ranked in the top 20 shows well into the mid Seventies. A big change to the show during this era was the airing of popular Disney films, edited into special two hour blocks. Unfortunately, as NBC began losing viewership as a whole, the show itself slipped in the ratings. As America's tastes changed throughout the second half of the Seventies, the CBS news show Sixty Minutes began to regularly clobber The Wonderful World.

In 1979, in an effort to save the show, the name was shortened to Disney's Wonderful World. A new disco themed opening was added over a computer created logo. None of that helped. Sixty Minutes remained the new king of Sunday night and by 1981, NBC called it quits. CBS picked the show up, changed the name to Walt Disney and moved it to Saturday nights. By this time there was little new content to air and the show couldn't compete with Diff'rent Strokes and Silver Spoons on NBC. On September 24, 1983, the 29 year run of Disney's anthology show came to an end on network television.

Which didn't mean the show was never seen again. At the time of its ending, The Disney Channel was launched and reruns would appear there for the next two decades. Disney would sort of revive the show in 1986, with the company's new CEO Michael Eisner as host, as The Disney Sunday Movie. My personal favorites from this era were the two Mr. Boogedy halloween films. In 1988, the format would change from a two hour block to just one hour and be called The Magical World of Disney. Both of these versions suffered from lackluster ratings however and the plug was pulled in 1990.

Since 1991, a show called The Wonderful World of Disney (not to be confused with the earlier version of the same name) has aired with less and less frequency on various networks, until Disney purchased ABC where it now resides exclusively. Now mostly used as a format to showcase special events, it is still technically on the air. This gives it the distinction of being the second longest-running prime time television series. The first is another anthology series, Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Also on this day, in American history: The Federalist Papers