The blog will be updated again on May 30.

This just in from Ken Kebow:

[I wanted to let you know that our award-winning short documentary about Rolly is now available for purchase!!! Interested parties can go to "www.rollycrump.com" to order their DVD copies.]

A new, expanded version of this seminal book (in Norwegian) has just been released.

I just received this book last week. To be totally candid, I have never been very interested in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies so the second part of this volume is one I skipped completely. The first part deals with all of the pirates-related projects that were developed under Walt as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean attractions.

It is a well-written book and quite thorough when it comes to giving an overview of everything Disney related to pirates.

What made the book worthwhile from my standpoint are the pages about the movie Treasure Island which include quite a bit of artwork that I had never seen before. The section about Pirates of the Caribbean is also quite good although I did not discover much in it. At the very beginning of the book is one story sketch from the abandoned Goofy short How to Be a Pirate. I wish there had been a lot more about that abandoned project, which really intrigues me.

Bottom-line: this is not a bad book. For historians and history enthusiasts, it's a nice-to-have (but not a "must have") that does contain a few cool surprises.

Do not miss today on CartoonBrew the preview of Mindy Johnson's long awaited book Ink & Paint - The Women of Walt Disney's Animation!

And here is another drawing by Ward Kimball, released in the magazine Script on May 25, 1940.

My good friend Paul Sorokowski spent some time last week researching old issues of the magazine Script. In a few of them he discovered some gag drawings created by Ward Kimball. This one was released in the January 27, 1940 issue of the magazine.

We have Norman Ferguson (Fergy) on the right, but who is his assistant "Mike"? I do not have the answer. Could anyone help?

This is another exhibition you really should not miss if you are in LA!

Among the papers of Disney Legend Ham Luske, his kids found this small Christmas book that Ham intended to release during his lifetime.

I knew that Theme Park Press and Luske's family were planning to finally make it available, but I totally missed its launch back in December. I will pick it up soon, of course!

I just stumbled upon this great special cover of the magazine International Cinematographer while researching something totally different last week and thought you would enjoy it.

Of course, if you want to know more about George McGinnis, who passed away last week, the book to read is From Horizon to Space Mountain.

Sadly: George McGinnis, last Imagineer hired by Walt Disney, dies.

I conducted an interview with George McGinnis back in 2009. It was released in Walt's People - Volume 16.

It took Amazon a really long time but the price of Jack of All Trades has finally been reduced (for a limited amount of time) to $9.99. If you plan to buy the book, the time is now!

One of the artists featured in the upcoming They Drew As They Pleased - The Hidden Art of Disney's Late Golden Age, is the Ecuadorian Eduardo Sola Franco, who worked at Disney for a few months in 1939 and created hundreds of concept drawings for the Don Quixote project.

For those of you who will be in Paris over the next few weeks, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France just opened an exhibition about Sola Franco's amazing illustrated diaries. I wish I could see this.

I really, really hope I will be able to attend this exhibition from my good friend, Imagineer Julie Svendsen (click on the image to enlarge).

I am glad to announce that  the book Snow White's People: An Oral History of the Disney Film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Volume 1) by David Johnson (which I spent the last few months editing) has been released this weekend. This is a two-part series and Theme Park Press should release the second volume towards the end of this year or early next year, when I finish editing the second half of the interviews.

This first volume contains interviews with the following people:

Wilfred Jackson, Bill Cottrell, Dick Lundy, Grim Natwick, Shamus Culhane, Ollie Johnston, Art Babbitt, George Rowley, Libbie Meador, Eustace Lycett, McLaren Stewart, Ken O'Connor, Claude Coats, Katherine Kerwin, Ink and Paint (Helen Nerbovig McIntosh, Grace Godino, Virginia Pearson), Erna Englander, Elly Horvath, Bob Cook, Eloise Tobelman, and Thor Putnam.