In Donald's never ending battle for recognition during the Mickey Mouse Club years, the benay-Albee company (the most famous name in novelty hats), presented the authentic Donald Duck hat. This magazine ad was featured on the back cover of the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine's fall 1956 issue. It's kind of weird how the ad is in color but the kid's face is in black and white.
The tongue-in-cheek humor of the Jungle Cruise in Disney World's Magic Kingdom extends beyond the various boat skippers and their infamous bad joke-filled narrations. Dock elements reveal that the Jungle Cruise boats belong to the Jungle Navigation Co., LTD. which seems to have a rich history of ineptitude. According to postings on the dock, the company is currently seeking the whereabouts of eleven missing boats and nine lost individuals.
The retro-future theme of Tomorrowland in Disney World's Magic Kingdom seems to fade away more with the advent of yet another character-themed attraction. This poster serves to remind us of "the future that never was," the concept behind Tomorrowland's redesign in the mid-1990s. While Buzz Lightyear and Stitch both had elements to justify some degree of inclusion, Mike Wazowski and company are an odd fit in the new attraction's home within the Metropolis Science Centre, outside of which the Recreational Rocket Vehicle Show poster has been displayed.
When I was doing some research for the recent Jack Hannah Four Color post, I stumbled across some information that connected to my slightly earlier post on studio artist Hank Porter. The information related to the Carl Barks/Jack Hannah collaboration on Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, and speculated that Porter was the comic’s cover artist. When Gladstone Publishing reprinted the story in an album format in 1989, they used the original cover illustration from 1942. In their creator credits for that album, they noted that the artist was unknown.
Here’s an interesting piece of 1950s Disneyana.
The book tells the somewhat absurd story of Donald Duck being chased by villainous cowboy Bearclaw Bill, who covets an envelope Donald possesses, containing his birthday present from Daisy. The chase moves across a desert landscape, and then ultimately through Disneyland itself.
And artwork featuring some of Disneyland’s attractions:
And here is a very cool illustration that appears on the inside front and back covers:
The book was written by Disney Studios storyman Milt Banta, whose credits included numerous shorts and features, most notably Donald in Mathmagicland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty. The illustrations were by Neil Boyle, then a young man in his twenties, who would go on to become a successful commercial artist outside of Disney, and later, a renown painter of impressionist oils.
That would be 2719 Hyperion Avenue.
Hallowed ground amidst the produce, canned goods, shopping carts and cigarettes.
In the spirit of today’s other post on the original Disney Studios, formerly located at 2719 Hyperion Avenue, we present another sadly abandoned concept from the ever more infamous Disney Decade.
This one might have you pause for a moment, but ultimately the guitar and amp pretty much give it away. The next time you are waiting to board the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney-MGM Studios, look across the "parking garage" for an interesting tableau. My favorite part? The HONK IF YOU ARE ELVIS bumper sticker on the door of the wall cabinet.
The last fifteen minutes of the 1958 Disneyland episode “Magic Highway U.S.A.” is like an odd holy grail for many fans of both Disney and 1950s futurism. Informally titled “The Road Ahead,” and using limited animation, it demonstrated futuristic transportation concepts to a generation of Americans just being introduced to the Interstate road system.
Rarely seen since its debut, “Magic Highway U.S.A.” was written and produced by Ward Kimball, who was by and large responsible for all of the anthology program’s early Tomorrowland-themed episodes. Its last prime time airing was in 1962. It finally resurfaced in the late 1990s, when it was broadcast a few times on the Disney Channel’s Vault Disney overnight schedule.
The show’s first forty-five minutes are a somewhat dry affair. We are lectured on highway development. Archival footage provided by the University of Michigan shows cars traveling on the unpaved Lincoln Highway circa 1913. And footage provided by the Horseless Carriage Club recreating the efforts of early motorists, while intending to be humorous, just ends up falling flat. It’s all fodder for the fast forward button; it’s that last segment that’s the payoff for the whole show.
If anything is a shining example of 1950s futurism, it is certainly these fifteen minutes. Sleek and stylized, its concepts and images portray a fun and exciting vision of future America. And sadly, so much that it predicted still has yet to be realized nearly fifty years later. We have yet to see the likes of multicolored travel lanes, radiant heat to clear rain and snow, radar screen windshields, giant road builders, atomic reactors that tunnel through mountains, and highway escalators, just to name a few of its high concept innovations.
intrigued by a few minutes of footage from the segment that looped on a display in the “Looking Back at Tomorrow” portion of the ride. Guests usually saw a vehicle being prepped inthe family motorport, and later heard “. . .on entering the city the family separates; father to his office, mother and son to the shopping center,” as the automated vehicle split in two on the screen. Intrigued riders were often curious about where the footage originated. It was a good match; the film displayed that same forward-thinking idealism that Horizons represented, and that EPCOT Center embodied during its first decade of operation.
The film was also a precursor of sorts for many of the ideas illustrated in the presentation Walt Disney made in October of 1966, outlining the company’s plans for Disney World, and specifically his vision of EPCOT. Not unlike "Magic Highway U.S.A.," most of those ideas and concepts also went unrealized.
Cartoon Brew's Amid Amidi has posted some great production artwork from Disney's Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom on his Cartoon Modern blog. Great website (Brew), great blog, amazing book. Take a look if you haven't already.
A series of posters highlight the queue area of Mickey’s PhilharMagic at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Tying in to the music hall theme of the attraction, the posters take well-know Disney characters and feature them in faux promotional pieces for musical acts. The Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf become the Wolf Gang Trio. Hercules’ villain Hades sings Torch Songs. Aladdin’s Genie sings the blues. The Little Mermaid and her sisters form Ariel’s Coral Group. And the Three Caballeros host the Festival de las Mariachas. But perhaps the most appropriate of the posters, befitting the attraction’s concert hall setting and use of “opera glasses,” would be the one that promotes I, Pagliacci, and features one of Disney’s more enormous stars, Willie the Whale.
The “package” films of the mid to late-1940s, Make Mine Music, Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, are in many ways the forgotten children of Disney animated features. Many of the sequences contained in these films have faded from notice, while others have gained some degree of notoriety by being released individually, or by being incorporated into other programming. Such is the case with The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.
Make Mine Music identifies itself as a “Music Fantasy in Ten Parts.” Part Ten is Willie’s tale, and arrives under the heading of Opera Pathetique, the meaning of which becomes clear by the story’s end. Newspapers report of a mystery voice at sea, that is ultimately attributed to our hero Willie. Academics scoff, and one in particular, opera impresario Professor Tetti-Tatti, believes that Willie has swallowed an actual opera singer. He sets off to harpoon Willie, and rescue what he hopes will be his next great discovery.
The short has some great details, especially the use of newspapers and media as narrative elements. Look close at one of the newspapers and you’ll see a smaller headline that reads, “OWNS SINGING SEAL CLAIMS ESKIMO.” The cover of Look Magazine is hilarious--Willie in the Princess role from Aida, which is not one the performances featured in the fantasy sequence.
Disney Legend Jack Hannah is easily one of the veterans of the Disney Studio I admire most. He truly defined Donald Duck in the character's later animated years, and was key in the development of a wide variety of supporting characters, most notably mischievous chipmunks Chip ‘n Dale, and Brownstown Park residents Humphrey Bear and Ranger J. Audubon Woodlore, who all went on to become stars themselves. Today marks the 94th anniversary of Jack’s birth in 1913. In a post from last October, I commented on my two favorite Hannah shorts, Toy Tinkers and No Hunting.
Hannah did a handful of other comic book assignments throughout the 1940s, two of the most notable being the cereal giveaways Donald Duck Pilots a Jet Plane and Donald Duck and the Pirates, the latter essentially being a remake to some extent of Pirate Gold.
. . . comes the next wave of Disney Dollars. They will be arriving at the U.S. parks and Disney Stores on January 12. 
This comic book was a giveaway for a number of years in the mid-1980s to visitors to the Exxon-sponsored Universe of Energy. I picked up a copy at the Energy Exchange in Commnicore East in either 1987 or 1988. The copyright on the cover is 1985.
Long before the advent of camcorders, home movie buffs were given these pointers:
Released on this day in 1937, the Mickey Mouse short The Worm Turns is an exercise in clever cartoon action and gags, gorgeous watercolor backgrounds and brilliant Technicolor. Made in the late 1930s days of the Hyperion Avenue studio, it is a shining example of the outstanding art direction that was a hallmark of much of Disney’s output at that time.
The object of Mickey’s experimenting is to concoct a bravery potion. The ingredients he mixes together are beautifully staged via two wonderful background paintings:
The details are terrific. For example, the recipe for the Courage Builder is quite detailed, and comes from and old bound tome entitled Ancient formulae.
The clever gag of the cat’s nine lives exit, and then subsequent return, to their host. It is especially funny when Life #1 emerges, and then whistles for #2-9 to follow.
There is also Pluto’s squash and stretch encounter with a brick wall. (Check the wonderful details--the NO PARKING crosswalk and the patched flat tire on Pete’s wagon.)
And the neighborhood backdrop to the Pete-Pluto chase is beautiful:
The film has one interesting continuity error. Near the beginning when Mickey removes a cork from a potion bottle with his mouth, it mysteriously disappears a few frames later.
And it is this wonderful piece of Disneyana that she passed on to me.
I had previously read about Porter in the book Disney Dons Dogtags, that spoke to his work on the studio’s insignia unit, but was not familiar with the other information about him that Jeff provided. It was a real delight to learn about one of the studio’s very talented, but largely uncelebrated artists. I did some additional digging and found that Porter was, along with Tom Wood, responsible for the artwork from the Walt Disney pages featured in Good Housekeeping from 1934-1944. Their work there has recently been collected in a wonderful book, Walt Disney’s Mickey and the Gang, published by Gemstone Publishing.
