“Oh what a fine party we’ll have when they all arrive, eh my boy?”
Tonight on TCM it’s an all Rankin/Bass feature production evening, with “Mad Monster Party?” getting it’s first prime-time broadcast on TCM, followed by the two other films they did through Joseph E. Levine’s Avco/Embassey Pictures.
First up is the all-time classic “Mad Monster Party?”, one of the greatest animated features of all time, with gorgeous songs by the great Maury Laws and Jules Bass. The voice cast has the greats Boris Karloff and Phillis Diller, Gale Garnett unforgettable as Francesca, and Allen Swift as almost everybody else.
The film has wonderful stop-motion animation, along with great songs, including the title song sung by Ethel Ennis, one of the greatest title songs of all time, simply spectacular. The other musical highlight is “It’s Our Time” sung by Francesca while conspiring with Dracula, a song that if you listen is an unbelievably beautiful love song, though used for scheming in the context of the film, showing the multiple levels that the songwriters were nurturing with their art.
Tonight on TCM it’s an all Rankin/Bass feature production
“We look for the good in them, and we found it didn’t we?”
60 years ago today, on Thursday 5/19/60, Walt Disney’s classic “Pollyanna” opened at Radio City Music Hall. Probably the greatest drama the studio would ever make, it is a glorious film that celebrates life, with an all-star cast, the biggest cast the studio ever put together.
It would earn Hayley Mills a special juvenile Academy Award, the last one issued by the Academy, for her beautiful, nuanced performance, and directed beautifully by the great David Swift, bringing out great joy, but also powerful drama throughout the 134 minute film.
Walt Disney’s “Pollyanna” is as great as film gets.
40 years ago on 4/13/80 “Disney’s Wonderful World” presented “Disney’s Oscar Winners”, an episode that was airing at the time of the airing of the Academy Awards on Monday 4/14/20, back when it was given yearly in April.
It’s a pleasant special showing the history of the studio in earning many Oscars over the decades, with John Forsythe narrating, who was currently the voice of Charlie on “Charlie’s Angels”, this being his only Disney project.
Disney Oscar Closeup
Walt Disney won more Academy Awards than any other filmmaker. There are reasons for it. Dick Van Dyke says in “Mary Poppins”, “When you’re with Mary Poppins suddenly you’re in places you never dreamed of. The most unusual things begin to happen.” The same words could describe what Walt Disney did in his career, the most influential filmmaker in history, touching people around the world from the time they are children till the time of old age.
40 years ago today, on Easter Sunday 4/6/80, I went to see the reissue of Walt Disney’s classic “Lady And The Tramp”, along with the reissue of Walt Disney Productions’ “The Island At The Top Of The World”.
I’d seen “Lady” in 1975, but this would be my first exposure to “Island”, which had been released as the big Christmas Disney film of 1974. A loose remake of “In Search Of The Castaways”, also directed by Robert Stevenson, it stars David Hartman, Donald Sinden, Jacques Marin, Mako, David Gwillim, and Agneta Eckemyr in an adventure of a man searching for his son, traveling across the world, to find him in a lost Vikings world, flying by a dirigible, and encountering challenges from locals from an Arctic civilization. The film has many visual wonders, and a nicely played low-key sense of humor.
With a wonderful score by Maurice Jarre, it would be the last film to be finished by Disney veteran Winston Hibler. I’d see it at the State Theater in Jersey City on Kennedy Blvd, which unfortunately wasn’t a very safe theater at that time, marring the cinematic experience, the only time we’d ever step foot in that theater.
Top of the world entertainment from the Disney studio.
“Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Dr. Sterdivant on sabbatical from the Sorbonne.” “Oh hi, I’m Tim, the ice cream man from Dolly Dixons.”
40 years ago Walt Disney Productions’ comedy classic “The Shaggy D.A.” returned to network television, presented in two parts, a 1976 sequel to Disney’s first live-action comedy, the 1959 classic “The Shaggy Dog”, a whole 17 years later.
Wilby Daniels (Dean Jones) is now grown up and a lawyer with a wife (Suzanne Pleshette) and son (Shane Sinutko) who’s house is robbed twice, and decides to run for District Attorney, against the crooked current DA John Slade (Keenan Wynn) and his crooked partner Eddie Rochack (Vic Tayback). The Lucrezia Borgia ring cursed with magical transformative powers from the museum is stolen by the same two crooks that robbed the Daniels’ house (Dick Bakalyan and Warren Berlinger), and eventually falls into the hands of local ice cream man Tim (Tim Conway) and his girlfriend (Joanne Worley), and the reading of the inscription turns Wilby into Elwood, Tim’s dog. Slade’s henchman Raymond (Dick Van Patten) finds out about the powers of the ring, and the campaign is going to the pound!
“The Shaggy D.A.” is a wonderful, joyous film that incorporates a great cast with an engaging plot for some truly inspired fun. The interview with host Jonathan Daly, the pie fight with Iris Adrian hoping to find the ring for the reward, the nocturnal prowls with Tim to try to get evidence on Keenan Wynn, and the dog pound with John Fiedler and Michael McGreevey as two very unfortunate kennel keepers makes for one of the best comedies the studio ever made. The voices by George Kirby for the dogs in the kennel, with imitations of Bogart, Cagney, Robinson and even Mae West make for one inspired film.
“Smile Darn Ya Smile You know that this big world is a big world after all.”
That is the song and title of one of the early Warner Brothers cartoons, which came out in 1931. In today’s world it’s a little tougher to not be worried about what’s going on in our world and SMILE. My father would always say that positive thinking was so crucial to getting better, possibly the most important ingredient to getting better from ANYTHING.
We all need to keep positive, and try to keep our spirits high. Yes we’re going through something of epic proportions, and it’s hard to know what exactly will happen, but our grandparents (or at least SOME of our grandparents) had to go through the 1918 Spanish Flu, and we’ve gone through essentially 100 years of nothing of that epic nature happening again. There’s a tendency to think that this is a whole new experience to man, but it is just to several generations down that haven’t had such a horrible calamity. It’d be wonderful if it wasn’t happening, and at times this seems like a bad nightmare we’ll wake up from, but we will come out of this. We always do.
In Walt Disney’s classic “The Three Lives Of Thomasina” Patrick McGoohan plays a disillusioned vet who’s lost his wife and despite loving his daughter has lost a lot of his worth and love of living. When he first encounters Susan Hampshire, the local girl who happens to take care of animals at her cottage, she has just found a badger who has been caught in a metal spring trap, and possibly going to die. He looks at it and arrives quickly at the futile conclusion that the badger is beyond help, and that it would be more merciful to put it out of its misery. She insists to him that he has to try; that even if the creature goes through some pain that it’s always worth trying. As she states, “and wonderful to give him his life.” Life is always worth it, no matter what challenges are presented to us.
