On February 25, 1939, at the old Hyperion studio, in the morning, a very special guest addressed Disney artists. This session with Frank Lloyd Wright is famous and I had wanted to share its transcript with you all for a long time.

Richard Huemer, the son of Dick Huemer, was kind enough to send it to me a few months ago. Here are the first 5 pages. The rest will follow tomorrow and on monday. Enjoy!

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles for the magazine Tomart's Disneyana Update about a very obscure aspect of Disney history: vintage Disney items from before the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Ever since I have tried to add to my collection and knowledge of such items from Eastern Europe.

While I was in Paris, unfortunately, I missed on ebay this great Snow White booklet from Bulgaria. Regardless, I thought I would share it with you today. The description mentioned:

"The brochure gives a short description of the story of Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.
Every sentence is accompanied by a photo of a child in different emotional states according to the action of the story – the child is happy, sad, scared, puzzled, happy."

Amid Amidi sent me yesterday this photo of Mary Flanigan that appears in the book The Merchant of Dennis the Menace: The Autobiography of Hank Ketcham. Like Amid, I can't decide if this is the same Mary that appeared in the photo with Walt in Kansas city posted a few days ago. This photo also appeared in Frank and Ollie's "animation bible" The Illusion of Life.

From the collection of David Lesjak: "Dennison Mickey Mouse gummed Christmas seals circa 1932."

This just in from Jim Korkis:

[Subject: Walt Decorating!

Disney is a world of illusions where the camera can indeed lie since it can even bring a three foot mouse to life. In this case, all the images in this photograph are real. That is the actual Partners statue of Walt Disney and in the background is an actual Disney Christmas tree at the Magic Kingdom in Florida. However, the angle of the photograph gives the illusion that Walt himself is putting the star on top of the tree. I guess this is an example of the difference between facts and the truth. The fact is that this supposed action is not actually happening but the truth of the matter is that in spirit Walt is indeed putting the final touches to Christmas decorations at Disney.]

David Lesjak just sent me a series of great Xmas related items to put us in the Holiday spirit. I will be posting those one by one until December 24th.

We start here with a Hallmark card from 1935 featuting the Night Before Christmas story told by the King Featues Syndicate characters.

This morning, do not miss the huge update to ToonsAtWar by David Lesjak, as well as Mark Mayerson's post titled Walt Disney's Birthplace For Sale on Ebay.

Speaking of Walt's father, Elias, I got this email from James D. Marks a few weeks ago:

[I just finished reading the following book: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition held in Chicago, Illinois. In it I discovered an interesting fact about Elias and Roy O.

Page 373: Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City: Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias, in gratitude, wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy.

Disney’s World by Leonard Mosley (source mentioned by Erik Larson).

Page 25-26"There was a brief family struggle over the third son’s name. He was born in the year of the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Elias had received serveral commissions to make furniture and provide designs for fair, and he made so much money from the exhibition that when his third son was born, he considered naming him Columbus, as a gesture of gratitude. But Flora would not hear of saddling her son with such an outlandish name, and finally they christened the new arrival Roy Oliver Disney.]

David Gerstein in the email he sent me this morning is right, of course. The storyboard drawings from the Sotheby's auction that I posted last week are from the short The Fox Hunt (1938) and not from an abandoned project.

"Hot Chocolate Soldiers" sequence from Hollywood Party

I had the marvelous surprise to receive today an email from Ettore, one of the readers of the blog, sending me a link to the sequence from the movie Hollywood Party that I mentioned in a post yesterday. I would like to thank him tremendously for sharing with us such a jewel.

I would also like to thank Mark, Bill and Jim Hill who all sent me information about Hollywood Party, including the fact that it can be found on Amazon, secondhand (VHS version).

According to JB Kaufman's seminal article on the subject, the animation of the Hot Chocolate Soldiers sequence was "done by a group of artists under the supervision of Ben Sharpsteen. Sharpsteen's group of animators on the sequence included both Cy Young and Ugo D'Orsi, who would go on shortly to form the nucleus of Disney's effects animation department.

Hot Chocolate Soldiers moved through production during the summer and fall of 1933. Both of Disney's background painters, Emil Flohri and Carlos Manriquez contributed paintings to it. The sequence was completed and delivered to MGM on or about 1 November [...] while retakes on the closing scenes were delivered to MGM on 22 January 1934.

The date of the final script [for the Mickey Mouse scene] (late September 1933) and the date of delivery of the finished scene to MGM (early November) indicates that most of the production work was done in October. The Disney exposure sheets suggest that the Mouse animation was largely in the hands of Fred Moore."

Now if I could only get access to that animated dream sequence from the movie Servants' Entrance...

Jeff Kurtti was kind enough to forward the following email from cinema historian Russell Merritt about this week's post about Walt and Eisenstein.

[I know of no surviving correspondence between SME and Disney. But for the link between Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and Disney, you might find my illustrated article Recharging Nevsky: Tracking the Eisenstein-Prokofiev War Horse, Film Quarterly 48 (Winter 1994-5), 34-45 of interest. It is a study of how Eisenstein and Prokofiev studied Snow White and the recording techniques for Fantasia when creating Alexander Nevsky.

I provide a commentary for the Criterion DVD of Nevsky/ Ivan the Terrible based on that article. Eisenstein writes up his experience at Hyperion in essays collected in Eisenstein on Disney. This also includes two photos of Eisenstein with Disney, the one with the two men arm in arm looking at a lawn image of Mickey Mouse; the other of Disney, SME, and Eisenstein's collaborators Alexandrov and Tisse with Mickey.

Eisenstein-Prokofiev correspondence survives at the Eisenstein Archive in Moscow in which they discuss Disney. I don't know whether Prokofiev saw any production work from the "Ride of the Valkyries" sequence. But he was at the studio when parts of Fantasia were being recorded and mixed. One word of caution: the similarities Nancy finds between Nevsky and "The Ride..." are more likely based on a common source in the Wagner music drama, which Eisenstein directed.

Hope this helps.

Russell Merritt]

Thanks to Jim Korkis I got access this week to a copy of JB Kaufman's outstanding article Before Snow White released in the magazine Film History (Vol. 5, no.2 - June 1993).

This article is by far the best piece of Disney research I have been reading in years (I am not kidding!) Through it, I realized that two non-Disney movies from 1934 contain sequences animated by the Disney Studio: Hollywood Party and Servants' Entrance.

I was wondering if any of the readers of this blog would have access to those two movies, as I would like to see those two sequences and share them with all of you (for historical interest only).

Those two photos come from the collection of Mark Sonntag. I asked Disney historian JB Kaufman if he could give us any information about them as both were taken on Walt's trip to South America in 1941 (JB has recently completed a seminal book on Walt's trip to Latin America that should be released within the next few years). Here is his answer:

"I'm guessing these photos were taken on September 30, 1941. On that day Walt, as part of his Santiago visit, was interviewed on the "New World" (Nuevo Mundo) radio program. This was sponsored by the Chilean-American Institute of Culture and broadcast by a special hookup throughout Chile. The man at the left of both photos, with the glasses, is Charles Wolcott, the musical director on the trip, who was also on the program that day and played Disney music on the piano."

Unfortunately we could not identify the other two persons that appear on those photos. Any ideas?

Another storyboard drawing that went on sale on Sotheby's this week, from an unproduced Goofy and Donald short where both characters seem to be fox-hunting.

Yesterday was a holiday in Spain, hence my silence. Tomorrow will be too and I will be in France until Thursday next week for work. The blog will therefore be silent again for a few days. The good news is that I have a few good visual posts for you today.


Disney has just released all the True-Life Adventures series on DVDs this holiday season and Wade Sampson wrote an excellent article on the making of this classic series for MousePlanet.

Another piece I would recomend this morning is the article by Jim Hill about the creation of Mickey's Xmas Carol.

This just in from Jim Korkis:

[Nowadays it is hard to find a celebrity who doesn't have some Disney connection. One of the most popular television series in the United States right now is "Heroes" and the theme for the last several episodes was "Save the cheerleader... Save the world." But how many Disney fans know the cheerleader's connection to Disney?

Hayden Panettiere who plays the cheerleader character Claire in the series has a lengthy list of Disney credits. She was Dot in A Bug's Life (1998) and later the character Suri in Dinosaur (2000) and also voiced the videogame Kingdom Hearts (2002). She has recorded several singles for various films such as Disney's Ice Princess movie and the Disney Channel original movie Tiger Cruise. Hayden was nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children after recording the read-along version of A Bug's Life. Not bad for a seventeen year old.]

One book that I defintely plan to have on my shopping list next year...

(In case you wonder: its cover has just been released, hence this post).

I received this photo of Sergei Eisenstein's 1930 visit to the Walt Disney Studios from Alexei Kobelev, through Nancy Beiman. (This photo also appears in the article titled Eisenstein and Walt in the book Hollywood Flatlands by Esther Leslie).

Nancy was wondering if anyone on this blog knew of any correspondance between Walt and Eisenstein after this visit, as she sees clear similarities between the Ride of the Valkyries unfinished Fantasia sequence and Eisenstein's movie Alexander Nevsky (1938).

And to conclude this very visual morning, here is one more photo from Mark Sonntag's collection. The caption reads:

[Walt Disney looks on, fascinated, while the motion picture camera is set-up for an exterior shot on Disney's full-length production, The Reluctant Dragon. A new departure for the animation cazr, this picture is a combination of "live action" and animation. A gay comedy of the Disney studio itself, it was made through popular demand of fans who were curious to know more about the Disney plants and their methods of working.]

To put us in the holiday mood, here is one more vintage Xmas item sent to us by Jim Korkis.

Great auction at Sotheby's today, which features among other things some artwork from an unproduced short featuring Goofy and Donald.