August 15 - Make Mine Music

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On this day, in 1946, the Walt Disney Studio generally released its eighth animated feature, Make Mine Music. As a big chunk of the staff went off to fight the Nazis and most foreign movie markets dried up, the Walt Disney Studio faced dire financial times during World War II. Even with government contracts for military training films, the studio couldn’t continue to make feature length animated films and turn a profit. The solution was to take all the spare ideas that were lying around (mostly unfinished shorts) and cobble them together into  feature length packages. What makes the so-called package films different from Fantasia, which is also a number of shorts put together, is that Fantasia’s segments were specifically chosen for their artistic merit. In other words, that film was a deliberate choice. The package films were born out of necessity and the segments don’t necessarily belong together. That’s why you rarely see the package films in their entirety but you see their segments individually all the time. It’s kind of like the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which works as a concept because the Beatles said it did and everyone accepts that. Just don’t try to figure any other reason.

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The first two package films, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, came out of a goodwill trip Walt and his staff took to South America at the behest of the federal government (and on their dime, I might add). The third package film, Make Mine Music, came into being because of the financial successes of the first two. They might not have been huge money makers, but the package films kept costs much lower than feature length movies and kept cash flowing into the financially troubled studio. Even though the war was officially over by the time Music was released, Disney would release three more package films while waiting for the world markets to recover.

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The original release of Make Mine Music included ten different segments, ranging from a musical exploration of the Hatfield and McCoy feud to a tragedy about an opera singing whale (and if you don’t remember that part as a tragedy, it’s clearly been a while since you’ve seen it). In between those two shorts are a variety of musical genres, including two swing parts with Benny Goodman and his orchestra, a love ballad sung by Andy Russell, a telling of Peter and the Wolf complete with classical score, songs sung by Dinah Shore, the Andrews Sisters and the Ken Darby singers and Jerry Colonna, who would later voice the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, reciting the epic poem Casey at the Bat.

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Make Mine Music was never given terribly wide theatrical release as a whole, but many of its pieces were later re-released to theaters individually. The movie proved popular enough that it grossed over $3.2 million all together on a $1.3 million budget. Which is, again, why the studio released three more package films before getting back up to feature length strength.

It should be noted that later releases of Make Mine Music, especially the first VHS and DVD United States versions, were edited for content. In the All the Cats Join In segment, some brief nudity was removed although it was left in for the Japanese home market. The Martins and the Coys segment was also removed entirely because it was deemed unsuitable for children due to its comic gun play. That segment has been reinserted in subsequent releases.

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.