Television and I grew up together. This is our story. Seventh in a series.
The Arcadia was up the street and down a block from my grandparents’ house on Depot Street. Either my mother took me to Snow White, or it was one of the times that I walked to the Arcadia in the charge of older children, a trusted brother and sister, neighbors on Depot Street. I’d like to think it was my mother, because she had seen this movie when it first came out in 1938, when she was 18. She named it in the diary she kept for most of January 1939 as one of her top ten movies of the previous year. When I saw it in 1952, it was only the second time it had been back in theatres since then.
I saw other Disney movies and cartoons at the Arcadia and the Manos Theatre in Greensburg, but memories of those are tangled up with learning about them on the television show that over the decades would go by several different names, but which began in 1954 as Disneyland.
Disneyland the TV show was my strongest connection to Disney stories, and those stories were a major feature of my childhood. Walt Disney’s reputation has been shaken in more recent years, particularly for his involvement in the Blacklist. And those stories look different now, not only in aspects that are questionable today. Some didn’t appeal to me, but on balance, Disney and his company’s creations and the discoveries they led to, were constructive elements of my cultural education, and my childhood in general, including its quotient of joy.
In the early 1950s, the movie industry was terrified of television. It seemed that box office numbers were dropping in proportion to the growing number of TV sets in American homes. But the industry still had hopes of crushing this fledgling competitor. For as late as 1953, the TV listings in the Pittsburgh dailies were still considerably smaller than either the radio listings or the movie theatre ads.
The big movie studios principal weapon was denying their recent films and their big stars from appearing on the home screen. Even as television prospered with older movie content, and made new stars of B movie actors and bit players like Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd, the studios stuck to their strategy. If they could hold out just a little longer…
The Walt Disney Company meanwhile was a Hollywood anomaly. Long before Disney became the behemoth of Hollywood, a conglomerate prospering on creations of companies it bought and absorbed, it was a modest movie studio that released only cartoon shorts and the relative few features it made.
Snow White became the biggest box office hit of any Hollywood film to that time. But several animated features that followed didn’t do as well. The studio’s fortunes were further stymied by World War II, which cut out lucrative foreign markets except the UK, where Disney movies could be shown but their profits were frozen until after the war, and even then could only be spent within Great Britain.
In the early 50s, the company began using those sequestered profits to make some live action movies in the UK. They did well, and Walt Disney wanted to do more. Then television came calling.
Disney knew the standard Hollywood argument: that if people could get high quality images-and-sound entertainment at home, they wouldn’t be buying tickets at the box office to see it in theatres. (This was the era, by the way, when movie theatres were installing—and bragging loudly about—air conditioning, as well as experimenting with 3-D, smell-o-vision and Cinerama.)
So when all three TV networks were wooing him, he imposed an unusual condition: he required that the network contribute a sizeable investment in cash and loan guarantees for Disneyland, the park.
In the early 1950s, a family-friendly theme park was as unknown as an animated feature film before 1938. Nobody believed the park was going to work. CBS and NBC passed. (Apparently the Dumont network, already on life support, wasn’t considered.) ABC was almost as small as Dumont but having recently merged with United Paramount movie theatres, it had some cash. As a major Hollywood movie name, Disney would give ABC instant credibility. It was worth the risk. They made the deal in March 1954.
In 1954, a gallon of gasoline at the pump cost 29 cents (which was paid in cash to the attendant who filled the tank, while wiping the windshield.) A loaf of bread at the corner grocer was about 20 cents, a quart of milk was a quarter. First class postage was three cents. The average cost of a new house was $1700. So basically, Back to the Future.
I was in the third grade. My classmates and I had just eagerly lined up for our first polio shots, with the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in nearby Pittsburgh, who had ended this grim cause of fear for all children.
The show opened with Tinkerbell from Peter Pan flying in sparkly orbit to the plaintive voice of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio, singing “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…”
Walt Disney himself was the onscreen host. The first episode introduced the series, and then moved to the world most associated with him: the animated stories of Fantasyland.
Fantasyland: From Alice to Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
The second show was devoted to Alice in Wonderland, his animated feature originally released just three years before. It was an appropriate choice, for Alice was Disney’s first fantasyland star in the 1920s, even before Mickey. The young animator produced a series of short Alice comedies which (like the contemporaneous Fleischer “Out of the Inkwell” cartoon series) combined live action and animation. The live action stars of the first, called “Alice’s Wonderland” were Alice (a very 1920s child) and young Walt himself, setting up the premise as the animator of the wonderland Alice would inhabit.
The serendipitous event that made Alice possible was an unpredictable byproduct of one of Walt Disney’s darkest hours. After years of pleading with management, Disney animators finally organized into a union and went on strike in 1941. Walt Disney, who worked closely with his creative teams and organized his studio to encourage personal relationships in ways familiar now as a prototype for high tech company campuses, was furious. He became convinced the union was a Communist conspiracy, and reportedly testified to that view even years later, when he named names to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Walt Disney refused to negotiate, so he saw a picket line of angry animators and their families and sympathizers on his studio lot, while work on the upcoming animated feature Dumbo slowed to a crawl. So he accepted a longstanding request from the State Department for a goodwill tour of South America. He was gone a month, during which his brother Roy Disney, who ran the studio business, came to an agreement with the union that met his animators’ initial demands.
When Disney revived the Alice in Wonderland project after the war, Mary Blair provided some concept sketches that combined these bright colors with the oblique shapes and three-dimensional design found in the California School of Watercolor style that she knew. Walt Disney immediately saw that not only was this a new and dynamic look, but it suggested a narrative emphasis on the whimsically strange elements of Carroll’s book. He finally had a generative starting point. Mary Blair determined the color palette for the resulting animation.
Disney made a one hour show for the 1950 Christmas season, shortly before the release of his Alice in Wonderland. (He consistently related Alice to the English tradition of Christmas storytelling, and the Lewis Carroll story remains a Christmas holiday staple.)
Sponsored by Coca Cola, the premise is a holiday party whose
guest of honor is Kathyrn Beaumont, the voice and living image of Alice (she
also voiced Wendy in Peter Pan.)
Guests at the party include the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his two most famous dummies, the city swell Charlie McCarthy and the country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd (there’s a priceless moment when Mortimer is in conversation with a stuffed Goofy, his Disney counterpart as the tongue-tied country clown.)
Other guests included young Bobby Driscoll, winner of a special juvenile actor Oscar who would be the voice of Peter Pan, and Disney’s two teenage daughters. The entertainment centered on a Magic Mirror, in which a genie (played by Hans Conreid, the voice of Captain Hook) called up a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoon, and scenes from Disney’s Snow White, Song of the South and, of course, Alice in Wonderland.
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In the lean years during and just after World War II when the Disney studio couldn’t afford to make animated features, they released a series of compilations or “package films” of feature length, but comprised of several short animated films. One of these in 1949 combined two stories in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Both stories memorably showed up on Disneyland in its first two seasons, with different titles.
The well-known Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes film series) narrates the tale, and Mr. Toad was voiced by Eric Blore, who in the intervening decades I’ve come to admire as a comic genius in supporting film roles of the 30s and 40s, particularly the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Top Hat.
The Ichabod Crane story, again under its original title of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a short fiction by Washington Irving, appeared in a second season episode in October 1955. This is a more sinister, New England Puritan tale, that we knew by the name of the character that most attracted our attention, the Headless Horseman. Notably it doesn’t have a happy ending. The ghost story quality is balanced by a comic approach to Ichabod and a breezy narration by Bing Crosby.
Showing a more or less complete animated feature such as Alice in Wonderland would turn out to be a rare event on Disneyland. More frequent were the excerpts, along with background and behind the scenes stories, that whetted young appetites for the full meal.
This approach worked not only for new movies but for previously released films, especially those that were re-released to theatres in the 1950s. So we got programs that discussed and showed pieces of Snow White and Cinderella—big hits for the studio—but especially movies that didn’t do so well on their first run, like Fantasia and Pinocchio (both from 1940) as well as an originally lesser hit, like Bambi (1942.) These programs preceded their theatrical re-releases (Pinocchio in 1954, Fantasia in 1956 and Bambi in 1957.)
In its initial release in 1942 however, Bambi had indifferent box office, and did even worse in its first re-release in the late 40s. But after its exposure on Disneyland, it did very well in its 1957 return to theatres, doubling the box office of its previous revival.
Then there’s the case of the film-that-must-not-be-named. Song of the South (1946) added animation to a live action story about a boy visiting a Georgia plantation after the Civil War, where he meets a sharecropper, Uncle Remus, who tells him animal stories that apply to the problems he’s having on his visit.
Disneyland devoted an hour in its second season (January 1956) to the history of Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus tales. Excerpts were shown from the movie, particularly the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” song sequence. The song won the Academy Award, and James Baskett, who sang it and played Uncle Remus, won a special Oscar.
Disney knew it could be a sensitive subject when he made the movie, and tried to ensure it would not be racially offensive. However it later became politically unpalatable because of objections to its portrayal of black characters, particularly (I gather) the dialects employed. It’s difficult to describe this, since I don’t remember the film—except for the song that we loved and sang all the time. Whoopi Goldberg is among those suggesting it be shown again and discussed and evaluated now. But we’ll return to this in a later discussion of the whole topic of ethnic humor and 1950s TV.
But to kids in the 1950s all this populated a world of discovery, of play, and of stories--all new to us, even if a little familiar from fairy tales, Golden Books and My Book House. Fantasyland presented what Walt Disney had done from the beginning: animating tales and creating animated characters. But he’d since gotten involved in other areas of filmmaking and storytelling, which then became a major part of Disneyland television.
By the time the TV show came along, I was starting to age out of the prime animation audience, so these (mostly) live action shows were just as influential on my childhood—perhaps more so, and for longer… For there were three other lands. And one of them almost immediately produced an effect that shook Hollywood to its foundations.
---To Be Continued...
