Plus Place - A Review Series

[That Duckfan]

Plus Place
a review series

Everybody has their own story of growing up with Disney. I suspect for many of us it was a combination of things: getting the weeklies from the girl next door who had a subscription, renting a DVD at the library, watching old cartoons on a CRT screen, going to the grocery store to check out the latest pocketbook in the stands. It's different for everybody, it depends on your age and country of birth, and on silly little things like the actual stock of your local home video rental place. I certainly believe that the story of what you missed out on as a child is just as interesting than the things you did get to see. They're two sides of the same coin, really. For instance, I've never seen The Little Mermaid. The library I went to as a child only ever had the direct-to-DVD sequel on the shelves, and I was smart enough to know that that wasn't the place to start. You can talk up the Disney Renaissance as much as you like, and it's certainly interesting from a creative point of view, but it's not a very good indication of what an individual child actually encounters. I fell in love with Disney cartoons that were made for my grandparents' generation. My first two Disney Classics, the ones that defined the animated feature for seven-year-old me, were The Three Caballeros and The Great Mouse Detective!

Everybody has their own story of growing up with Disney. But that may be about to change. For today is the 12th of September, 2019. Today, Disney's streaming service Disney+ launched in the Netherlands --- a trial run. It's free until its full release on the 12th of November. And I am intent on making the most out of those two months. But I'd also reflect on what this launch signifies. For decades, Disney's "Vault" program created an artificial scarcity around their animated features. And even then, with the retail prices of VHSes and DVDs, no kid could ever dream of having full access to the Disney catalogue. Even at the start of this decade, as the 50th Disney Classic was released and I entertained the possibility of watching one every week for the whole year, there was no realistic way of obtaining these. Out of all my interests and collections, my animated library is by far the most neglected. But starting today , a child has access to virtually any Disney movie they want (provided their parents buy Disney+). Today, the landscape changes. And it's likely never to be the same again.

Now, if I had any good sense, I would seize on this opportunity by creating a blog or a YouTube channel, raising awareness at Disney's that I'd love to be their hot new brand influencer or setting up a Patreon so that I'm not completely wasting my time as well as my money. Unfortunately I don't think that's how it works. The YouTube market is pretty saturated with people who are a much better soulless shill than I could ever be, and given the existence of D23 over in America I'm fairly sure Disney is already milking their fans for all their worth. I'm pretty sure they're not interested in the kind of creative discovery I strive for in my online reviews. And honestly, part of me wouldn't be comfortable writing, knowing that The Mouse is watching.

So I return to the fan forum. I know my way around the place. I'm assured of a small but steady readership, the best kind of readership. I'm on a platform that doesn't rely solely on my output, that goes on when I'm not there. Why not, eh? Let's dive into the worlds of Disney (and associated properties), and glide down the decades.
We'll finally figure out what makes it so compelling to watch.

[TheMidgetMoose]

Count me as part of the steady readership.

What exactly are you going to be reviewing? The Walt Disney animated films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Ralph Breaks the Internet? Are all of those available on Disney+? Will you just be reviewing animated movies or TV series and live-action films, too?

[That Duckfan]

Sept 12, 2019 23:07:14 GMT TheMidgetMoose said:

Count me as part of the steady readership.

What exactly are you going to be reviewing? The Walt Disney animated films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Ralph Breaks the Internet? Are all of those available on Disney+? Will you just be reviewing animated movies or TV series and live-action films, too?

Yeah, the animated canon is my main objective. Now that I have the means to tick off a few boxes in the Marvel Cinematic and Star Wars Universes I will most likely watch those as well soon, but I might not cover those... yet. I'm up to Spiderman: Homecoming in the MCU, watched them all in order, so obviously I'm first going to Infinity War before I ever want to review the series again. I found the original Star Wars trilogy to be crushingly dull (as someone watches classic Doctor Who, I was seriously unimpressed), I'd much rather check out some of Disney's live-action canon from the '50s and '60s. Or the True-Life Adventures, I'm really curious about those and there's not too many of them.

Right now I'm thinking of doing them chronologically by series. So first the classic shorts (which started in the 1920s), then the animated canon (started in 1937), then the live-action canon (I think the 1950 Treasure Island is the oldest one in stock) or the aforementioned True-Life Adventures. I know the sheer volume of guff increases with the decades, so the longer I can stay away from the present, the better. Look, I loved The Suite Life on Deck when it came out, but it's not exactly worth a rewatch at this time.
The only thing I'm not too sure about is the animated spin-off series. I'd like to tie in those half-baked sequels while I'm doing the originals, but animated series take much much longer to go through. Maybe a cursory selection is enough. Anyway, I don't think I should run into that problem until... Winnie the Pooh?

EDIT: I'm trying to find an eye-catching font size for the main writing, but the difference between 10pt and 12pt is pretty big. Is it still fine to read (looking at people with smaller screens)?

[TheMidgetMoose]

Essentially, you're going to try to do everything, or almost everything, correct? Quite a big task, especially if you plan to do it in two months, but I'll be excited to see it.

[drleevezan]

I look forward to reading your reviews!

[That Duckfan]

Series 0

Classic Shorts (1928-1952) 

To start off with, we have a selection of classic shorts. It’s fairly small, I got through these in the first day (but the write-up took a little longer). It makes sense that these are not Disney’s first priority, and it’s nice to see them at least pay lip service to the company’s origins. Then again, given some of the more obscure fare on display, the selection feels sorely lacking. Call me biased, but I’d argue Playful Pluto and The Old Mill are more significant than, say, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. The former have been released on Blu-Ray (alongside only a few dozen others), but the latter made its way onto Disney+. The list of HD classic shorts is short enough as it is, and what we have here is only a handful of what's available. Here’s to hoping that the other existing transfers will be added to the library in the future.

All shorts have been restored with their original titles, which is very nice to see. Steamboat Willie features the extra animal-torturing scenes that were found a few years back, which was a nice surprise. The Three Little Pigs, on the other hand, is here in the edited Fuller Brush Man version. This makes total sense.

---

Mickey Mouse: Steamboat Willie (1928)
Dir. Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Star. Walt Disney
Well, I spent about a week trying to contextualize Steamboat Willie, so we’re off to a great start. For many people, at least for me as a kid, this was as far back as cartoons could go. The plot is fairly bare-bones, but that’s to be expected from a 1920s short. But the technique pioneered in this short, of synchronizing sound with animation, is still one of the greatest ever delivered. I could watch this cartoon over and over again, and I’m sure I will.

Today, Mickey-Mousing is a famous no-no in the scoring of film music, making the action feel cheap and fake. But back in these early cartoons, it works like a charm. What gives? Well, I think the lack of voices makes a big differences. There’s hardly any voice acting in the best Mickey-Mousing shorts: The Three Little Pigs and The Wise Little Hen are both told in song and rhyme, the latter relying heavily on narration. The Band Concert is an odd duck, one played by Clarence Nash. In these cases, the music is the one taking story duties, something that is eventually brought to the next level in Fantasia. But soon enough, wisecracks and screwball comedies come to take over the screen, animation storytelling becomes more conventional, and Looney Tunes characters get the upper hand in the popular consciousness. (If you see me ripping on Looney Tunes to make a point about Disney animation, don’t be alarmed. It’s just a matter of taste. And of course I mean the Merrie Melodies as well, but one way or the other Warner Brothers animated shorts doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily.)

The HD restoration is excellently done, perhaps even too much so. Seeing Ub Iwerks characters move so crisply takes away from the rudimentary animation effects. Or maybe I’m more used to the more polished black-and-white Mickey of c. 1935, who knows.
Either way, all my love to Steamboat Willie. An evergreen of the animated medium.

Extra: Disney As Told By Emoji (Steamboat Willie)
A cute little modern-day extra. The story of Steamboat Willie as told by animated emoji in one minute. It’s a nice novelty, and considering the awful Get A Laugh! cut-downs they made a few years earlier, this type of reimagining is infinitely more faithful to the spirit of the original.

---

Silly Symphonies: Flowers and Trees (1932)
Dir. Burt Gillett
The introduction of Technicolor into animation was a little less auspicious. The quality of the animation was generally less integral to the appeal of Disney shorts, which was still getting out of the post-Iwerks slump. 1932 was an important year for the introduction of drawing classes within the studio, as well as the hiring of several animators that would come to play a key role in Disney’s future, but we’re not there yet.

Flowers and Trees is a very bread-and-butter Silly Symphony, story-wise. Colorful flowers and trees sing, an evil grey stump tries to steal a tree girl, fails, and tries to set the forest on fire. There are hardly any color gags (such as cold characters turning blue), it’s just a nice gimmick on an otherwise forgettable short.

---

Silly Symphonies: The Three Little Pigs (1933)
Dir. Burt Gillett
Star. Billy Bletcher, Pinto Colvig, Dorothy Compton, Mary Moder
Now this is more like it. The Three Little Pigs was one of the biggest hits of the early days, and it’s easy to see why. The song is catchy and drives the story action forward, and the Big Bad Wolf is a terrific pantomime villain. I love his winks to the audience. Sure, it’s a Disney staple, but I tend to associate it with Donald Duck rather. I didn’t realize it went this far back.

In fact, what makes The Three Little Pigs another step up from the previous two cartoons is that it has a story. It has a moral, and the whole story is set up to deliver that moral. This sets it apart from many contemporary shorts, especially those not made by Disney. In 1933, “cutesy animals playing music” was still pretty standard fare in cartoon shorts. Disney had previously overindulged in that with the Mickey Mouse cartoons of c. 1931, but by 1933 Mickey was going on adventures―even if that proved to be the end of the story-told-through-music. It was difficult to combine both the music and the story in the increasingly elaborate demands of the audiences of the early 1930s, but The Three Little Pigs managed it with flying colors.

---

Silly Symphonies: The Wise Little Hen (1934)
Dir. Wilfred Jackson
Star. Clarence Nash, Florence Gill
It was a close call, but The Wise Little Hen is my favorite of the bunch. Like The Three Little Pigs, it moralizes about hard work, but where it improves is in the characterization of the characters. Fiddler and Fifer only react to the action and a virtually identical, whereas Peter Pig and our new star Donald Duck are more involved. They make their bed and have to sleep in it all the same. I love how quickly they initiate kicking each other in the backsides, because it shows a kind of self-awareness that the pigs didn’t have, and in a way it prefigures all the future Donald Duck stories that end by showing the consequences he faces for his actions.

I always want to say a little something about the design of Donald here. It’s not just any Donald Duck we meet in The Wise Little Hen, but gangly, ungainly proto-Donald Duck. I love it. It’s a shame that they gave him proportions similar to Mickey Mouse, I think the weirdness of his early installments carries its own charm. Certainly Dippy Dawg/Goofy didn’t need to be shrunk to similar proportions, so why should Donald?

Too bad Peter never got his success. I guess there was no more room for cartoon pigs, whereas there is also room for more funny ducks.

---

Mickey Mouse: The Band Concert (1935)
Dir. Wilfred Jackson
Star. Clarence Nash
This short showcases what is probably my favorite genre of Mickey Mouse shorts, the Performance That Goes Wrong. Many early rip-offs of Mickey Mouse caught on to the funny animals making music genre pretty quickly, but music by itself isn’t inherently funny, so you need to come up with larger set-ups to keep things interesting. One way of doing that is by introducing Donald Duck as troublemaking factor, which is something he fulfills masterfully here. Another is by relying on some natural phenomenon―cue “The Storm”―which is great at building dramatic tension, but which tended to get a little overused in later years. (The amount of Donald-versus-nature shorts is a bit much, in my opinion.)

Is The Band Concert the very best of these? I'd argue no, but that may be down to a matter of taste. I certainly wouldn’t call its fame unwarranted, even if I secretly prefer Mickey’s Grand Opera, Mickey’s Amateurs, or Symphony Hour. It is the first Mickey Mouse short in color, though again that doesn’t really seem to aid the story more than it is just pleasing to look at. Late-black-and-white Mickey shorts really had their lighting palette down, and it’s something they don’t get nearly enough credit for. Look at Two-Gun Mickey, or Orphans’ Benefit, or Mickey’s Service Station―but I’m rambling about other shorts again. The Band Concert is great in its own right, and would be even greater with a proper restoration. As it is, though, you can’t go wrong.

---

Mickey Mouse: Lonesome Ghosts (1937)
Dir. Burt Gillett
Star. Walt Disney, Clarence Nash, Pinto Colvig, Billy Bletcher
I’ve never really seen the hype for this story. It’s the go-to short for a classic Mickey, Donald and Goofy adventure, along with Clock Cleaners. And while it’s nice to see the trio together, I’ve got to admit that I’ve always preferred their outings with other characters: Clara Cluck, Horace Horsecollar, Clarebelle Cow. Where the characters can work off one another, rather than by some outside nigh-untouchable trickster character(s). I guess it prefigures the Looney Tunes way of cartoon short storytelling, where the inventiveness lies in how the formula plays out, but I’ve always thought that was a bit of a lame excuse for a medium where you could be doing literally anything else. In the same year, Donald alone starred in Don Donald and Modern Inventions, two shorts I would rank as absolute classics, and he didn’t need two top-billing co-stars and a bunch of ghosts for that.

Don’t get me wrong, Lonesome Ghosts isn’t a bad short by a long shot. The gags all hit bullseye, the ending is satisfying, and it’s a great showcase vehicle for its stars. But at the same time, you’ve got to wonder what the point is of bringing them together if they spend the short mostly separate. Clock Cleaners pulls all the elements off just a little better. Or maybe I’m just too familiar with the Scooby Doo genre by now...

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Mickey Mouse: The Little Whirlwind (1941)
Dir. Riley Thomson
Star. Walt Disney, Thelma Boardman
One of these stories has to be at the bottom, and this one is it. Where to start... Mickey gets a new, floppy design, and a bit of a character change along with it. Maybe it’s the atmosphere at the Disney studios around this time (Mickey being a Walt symbol, and this being written shortly before the animators’ strike), but Mickey behaves like a real prick. He’s selfishly lusting after Minnie’s pie, and he’s so care-free you’re almost waiting for someone to take him down a peg. Instead, we’re treated to a domestic retread of The Band Concert, right down to the same music piece. But where we previously had to deal with a big tornado destroying everything in its wake, now nature seems to have decided to give Mickey Mouse in particular a bad day. I’ve never liked stories where the action is aimed directly at the main character, as opposed to the main character simply getting caught up in events as they happen. Maybe I’m too much of an atheist at heart for that sort of thing.

It’s also great to see Minnie take a page out of the Daisy Duck book of relationships. She’s angry with Mickey for no reason other than to spite him; she was somehow too aloof to notice the massive storm passing, and decides Mickey had a go at her garden despite this being totally out of character for him. Minnie ends up with less agency than she had 13 years earlier in Steamboat Willie, solely playing the role of testy girlfriend to complete the “joke”. Sad.

---

Mickey Mouse: Lend a Paw (1941)
Dir. Clyde Geronimi
Star. Pinto Colvig, Walt Disney
This short is one of the famous Pluto outings, and rightfully so in my opinion. I never had much patience for Pluto shorts, which tend to boil down to “aren’t animals cute?” a lot of the time. This one mixes things up at least by the use of Pluto’s good and bad angels. They’ve got a lot of character between them, between the slick bully and the embattled moralist, and that does a lot to liven up the story. Mickey’s role in the story is sadly that of the big bad misunderstanding, a story trope I hate with a great deal of passion when it’s done lazily. Here, it at least serves a place within the story rather than being the inciting incident. But it doesn’t do much to rehabilitate Mickey from his previous appearance. In the end, it all works out, and the status quo is restored fairly quickly ones Pluto listens to his good angel. Good triumphs evil and all that, even if we have to explain it by way of dog.

---

Donald Duck: Chef Donald (1941)
Dir. Jack King
Star. Clarence Nash, Sarah Selby
Structurally speaking, this short is probably the simplest of the ones reviewed here. Donald mixes his baking powder with rubber cement, and hilarity ensues. Simple, but effective. The thing with Donald cartoons is that he doesn’t need antagonists: he’s his own worst enemy. Shorts like this one prove that. The inciting incident may be a little contrived, but it provides a whole lot of mileage. Donald Duck, at heart, is one of the great foils of the modern age, forever fighting with household appliances and new inventions in ways that stretch, but never quite break the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Donald, like Goofy, managed to find ways to remain relevant into the pedestrian, suburban cartoons of the 1950s. Chef Donald is a more boisterous precursor of that. My only real niggle with the cartoon is that poor Mother Mallard ends up being the victim of Donald’s incompetence. Violence toward strangers may have been funny in 1941, but there are better ways of closing this short without devolving into Looney Tunes-esque violence.

---

Mickey Mouse: Pluto's Christmas Tree (1952)
Dir. Jack Hannah
Star. James MacDonald, Dessie Flynn, Pinto Colvig
We round off the series with a Christmas short, and it’s one of the cuddliest the Disney studios ever produced. What can I say, I’m a sucker for early-’50s harmonies and between this and The Simple Things, there’s quite a bit of it. That Pluto’s Christmas Tree is partly set inside a Christmas tree and ends with a bit of caroling, should be enough to warm the coldest of Christmas hearts. (And no, Mickey’s Christmas Carol is not yet on Disney+.) I’m not the biggest fan of Chip and Dale, or of Pluto attacking his owner’s belongings, but what the hey. It’s Christmas. Have a good one.

---

Top 5 

1. The Wise Little Hen 

2. The Band Concert 

3. The Three Little Pigs 

4. Steamboat Willie 

5. Lend a Paw 

Bottom 5 

5. Chef Donald 

4. Pluto's Christmas Tree 

3. Lonesome Ghosts 

2. Flowers and Trees 

1. The Little Whirlwind 

[TheMidgetMoose]

I'm not near as keen on Steamboat Willie as you, or most people for that matter, seem to be. It's not very appealing visually, has little to no story, and honestly just isn't funny. I completely understand that animation wasn't as advanced back then and that, for its time, this thing really did good. I'm sure if I was a moviegoer in 1928, I would've loved it for its inventiveness in sound effects and music. From a modern perspective, though, the gags just strike me as too violent and just unfunny. Steamboat Willie doesn't get a laugh, tear, or jump in fear out of me, so I'm not sure I find it really effective. Great for its time, but lackluster for today, at least in my opinion.

I agree with your thoughts on Lonesome Ghosts. It's a nice short with good animation and some good gags, but shorts like Clock Cleaners, Moose Hunters, Moving Day, and Tugboat Mickey are much better in my book. Of course, I think the trio would reach some of their greatest heights (as a trio) in longer features like the Mickey and the Beanstalk segment of Fun and Fancy Free and The Three Musketeers.

I also agree completely with your observations on Pluto's Christmas Tree. That truly is one of the cutest Disney shorts out there. It's the best advertisement for the concept of living inside a Christmas tree I've ever seen!

It's honestly a little to disappointing, as you mention, to see how small the library of shorts is. The best Disney shorts (well, the best in my opinion) are completely missing. I hope they expand.

[Mesterius]

So... these are ALL the classic shorts that are on there at the moment? Not that I expected everything, but ten shorts are not much.

By the way, it sounds really strange that The Band Concert (or, for that matter, Flowers and Trees) should be upscaled from DVD masters. I think there has been plenty of evidence during the past five years or so that Disney has restored all their classic shorts in HD. When it comes to The Band Concert in particular, it was even released on Blu-ray last year on the collection Celebrating Mickey. So I have to think the print on Disney+ is in HD. Here are some hi-def screenshots from the Blu-ray edition.

[That Duckfan]

Sept 25, 2019 1:19:28 GMT TheMidgetMoose said:

I'm not near as keen on Steamboat Willie as you, or most people for that matter, seem to be. It's not very appealing visually, has little to no story, and honestly just isn't funny. I completely understand that animation wasn't as advanced back then and that, for its time, this thing really did good. I'm sure if I was a moviegoer in 1928, I would've loved it for its inventiveness in sound effects and music. From a modern perspective, though, the gags just strike me as too violent and just unfunny. Steamboat Willie doesn't get a laugh, tear, or jump in fear out of me, so I'm not sure I find it really effective. Great for its time, but lackluster for today, at least in my opinion.

I agree with your thoughts on Lonesome Ghosts. It's a nice short with good animation and some good gags, but shorts like Clock Cleaners, Moose Hunters, Moving Day, and Tugboat Mickey are much better in my book. Of course, I think the trio would reach some of their greatest heights (as a trio) in longer features like the Mickey and the Beanstalk segment of Fun and Fancy Free and The Three Musketeers.

I also agree completely with your observations on Pluto's Christmas Tree. That truly is one of the cutest Disney shorts out there. It's the best advertisement for the concept of living inside a Christmas tree I've ever seen!

It's honestly a little to disappointing, as you mention, to see how small the library of shorts is. The best Disney shorts (well, the best in my opinion) are completely missing. I hope they expand.

I struggled to put Steamboat Willie in context. I've seen the Oswald shorts that preceded it and it's definitely a continuation of that in many ways, but the introduction of synchronized sound brings such a new language of rhythm with it that the only conclusion that I can reach is that it was groundbreaking. That said, I'll admit my bias: my experience of silent film soundtracks comes from the digital era, where crisp new sound recordings are placed over ancient footage. The music is often a little tacked-on, which is disorienting when you know what records of the time actually sounded like. By all accounts, silent film composers could deliver soundtracks that were the precursors of the Carl Stalling soundtracks we know and love (compare), but recreating that soundscape requires a lot of research and a lot of resources, which are not always available. That said, efforts are getting better and better, and efforts to recreate the moods captured on silent films have become very impressive, they're worth checking out.

I understand why someone wouldn't like Steamboat Willie as much, but I have a kind of reverence for it. It's the measure by which the Disney way of cartoon storytelling emerged, and even when I was a kid watching colorized Disney shorts, this was the only one left in black-and-white. (For the longest time, I thought they kept the shorts made before The Band Concert out of circulation, but that turned out to be wrong when I found many of the colorized shorts on YouTube, going all the way back to The Gallopin' Gaucho.)

I hadn't thought of Moving Day. That's another great choice for a cartoon that is structurally similar, but much more fun IMO.

[That Duckfan]

Sept 25, 2019 11:52:36 GMT Mesterius said:

So... these are ALL the classic shorts that are on there at the moment? Not that I expected everything, but ten shorts are not much.

By the way, it sounds really strange that The Band Concert (or, for that matter, Flowers and Trees) should be upscaled from DVD masters. I think there has been plenty of evidence during the past five years or so that Disney has restored all their classic shorts in HD. When it comes to The Band Concert in particular, it was even released on Blu-ray last year on the collection Celebrating Mickey. So I have to think the print on Disney+ is in HD. Here are some hi-def screenshots from the Blu-ray edition.

I've taken another look at the shorts, and I suspect you're right. I will amend the false info in my entry. I haven't really kept up with Disney home video releases of the past five years, partly because of a falling interest, and partly because all the stores that sold DVDs in my area have closed down. Finding info about recent releases on the internet is a bit of a nightmare. There's no Wiki or anything that I trust to be fully comprehensive -- guess I'll be investing in Dave Smith's Disney encyclopedia soon! This forum thread hasn't updated since 2013, but confirmed my thoughts on the lack of HD materials (properly remastered) out there. Searching for Blu-Ray releases of classic shorts never really yielded anything (RIP the Walt Disney Treasures line), so I genuinely thought Disney had dropped the ball of remasters and what we got was pretty much all they had. If you know of a more recent list of restored shorts, I'd love to see it.

I've looked at your screenshots, and they match the shorts on Disney+. Looking at the line art, it's clear that these are all fully HD. I'd been thrown off by the colors, which seem to dance around a little sometimes, and aren't as bright as I expected. Maybe that's the limits of 1930s photography, or a sign that I should wipe my screen more often.

[Mesterius]

Sept 25, 2019 20:28:01 GMT That Duckfan said:

Sept 25, 2019 11:52:36 GMT Mesterius said:

So... these are ALL the classic shorts that are on there at the moment? Not that I expected everything, but ten shorts are not much.

By the way, it sounds really strange that The Band Concert (or, for that matter, Flowers and Trees) should be upscaled from DVD masters. I think there has been plenty of evidence during the past five years or so that Disney has restored all their classic shorts in HD. When it comes to The Band Concert in particular, it was even released on Blu-ray last year on the collection Celebrating Mickey. So I have to think the print on Disney+ is in HD. Here are some hi-def screenshots from the Blu-ray edition.

I've taken another look at the shorts, and I suspect you're right. I will amend the false info in my entry. I haven't really kept up with Disney home video releases of the past five years, partly because of a falling interest, and partly because all the stores that sold DVDs in my area have closed down. Finding info about recent releases on the internet is a bit of a nightmare. There's no Wiki or anything that I trust to be fully comprehensive -- guess I'll be investing in Dave Smith's Disney encyclopedia soon! This forum thread hasn't updated since 2013, but confirmed my thoughts on the lack of HD materials (properly remastered) out there. Searching for Blu-Ray releases of classic shorts never really yielded anything (RIP the Walt Disney Treasures line), so I genuinely thought Disney had dropped the ball of remasters and what we got was pretty much all they had. If you know of a more recent list of restored shorts, I'd love to see it.

I've looked at your screenshots, and they match the shorts on Disney+. Looking at the line art, it's clear that these are all fully HD. I'd been thrown off by the colors, which seem to dance around a little sometimes, and aren't as bright as I expected. Maybe that's the limits of 1930s photography, or a sign that I should wipe my screen more often.

The thing is -- what's out on Blu-ray (very little) is not at all representative for what Disney has actually restored of the classic shorts. As Jerry Beck mentioned in a recent Stu's Show podcast, home video is not a priority for Disney these days. From what I understand, they have restored EVERYTHING of their classic theatrical output, but they have no interest in doing complete sets of the animated shorts on Blu-ray, the way they did on DVD years ago.

It's already 8 years since Disney had just about their entire library scanned and preserved in 4K, which you can read about here. Since then, some shorts have come out in HD on Blu-ray, some have popped up on streaming services like Netflix, some have turned up in abridged "Have-a-Laugh" versions on Youtube. And there are other examples: For the past several years, Sweden has aired the classic Christmas special From All of Us to All of You in a restored HD edition. All in all, there are clear signs that Disney has all the classic material restored. They just haven't done very much with the shorts yet.

[That Duckfan]

Sept 25, 2019 23:34:42 GMT Mesterius said:

Sept 25, 2019 20:28:01 GMT That Duckfan said:

I've taken another look at the shorts, and I suspect you're right. I will amend the false info in my entry. I haven't really kept up with Disney home video releases of the past five years, partly because of a falling interest, and partly because all the stores that sold DVDs in my area have closed down. Finding info about recent releases on the internet is a bit of a nightmare. There's no Wiki or anything that I trust to be fully comprehensive -- guess I'll be investing in Dave Smith's Disney encyclopedia soon! This forum thread hasn't updated since 2013, but confirmed my thoughts on the lack of HD materials (properly remastered) out there. Searching for Blu-Ray releases of classic shorts never really yielded anything (RIP the Walt Disney Treasures line), so I genuinely thought Disney had dropped the ball of remasters and what we got was pretty much all they had. If you know of a more recent list of restored shorts, I'd love to see it.

I've looked at your screenshots, and they match the shorts on Disney+. Looking at the line art, it's clear that these are all fully HD. I'd been thrown off by the colors, which seem to dance around a little sometimes, and aren't as bright as I expected. Maybe that's the limits of 1930s photography, or a sign that I should wipe my screen more often.

The thing is -- what's out on Blu-ray (very little) is not at all representative for what Disney has actually restored of the classic shorts. As Jerry Beck mentioned in a recent Stu's Show podcast, home video is not a priority for Disney these days. From what I understand, they have restored EVERYTHING of their classic theatrical output, but they have no interest in doing complete sets of the animated shorts on Blu-ray, the way they did on DVD years ago.

It's already 8 years since Disney had just about their entire library scanned and preserved in 4K, which you can read about here. Since then, some shorts have come out in HD on Blu-ray, some have popped up on streaming services like Netflix, some have turned up in abridged "Have-a-Laugh" versions on Youtube. And there are other examples: For the past several years, Sweden has aired the classic Christmas special From All of Us to All of You in a restored HD edition. All in all, there are clear signs that Disney has all the classic material restored. They just haven't done very much with the shorts yet.

Fascinating. I only have a few Blu-Rays in my collection, Alice in Wonderland and Lady and the Tramp among them, and those two have been beautifully restored. That's the kind of quality I was expecting to see in the Silly Symphonies I reviewed earlier, but of course technology is no match for 20 years of evolution in color animation. I used to think that the increased color depth compared to the DVDs was a result of the Blu-Ray format allowing for a wider range of colors, which now that I think about it, makes zero sense. They're still great discs, but I don't always have a Blu-Ray player lying around...

Here's to hoping we'll be seeing some more out of that vault soon. It's good to see people put some of that Disney money for good.

The From All of Us to All of You restoration reminds me of the great work they did on the Tomorrowland set of the Walt Disney Treasures (sadly, the only one of the 1950s TV sets that I own). Here's some more hoping that Disney+ can make room to house the Disneyland anthology series. Wouldn't that be great...

[TheMidgetMoose]

Sept 26, 2019 0:43:11 GMT That Duckfan said:

Sept 25, 2019 23:34:42 GMT Mesterius said:

The thing is -- what's out on Blu-ray (very little) is not at all representative for what Disney has actually restored of the classic shorts. As Jerry Beck mentioned in a recent Stu's Show podcast, home video is not a priority for Disney these days. From what I understand, they have restored EVERYTHING of their classic theatrical output, but they have no interest in doing complete sets of the animated shorts on Blu-ray, the way they did on DVD years ago.

It's already 8 years since Disney had just about their entire library scanned and preserved in 4K, which you can read about here. Since then, some shorts have come out in HD on Blu-ray, some have popped up on streaming services like Netflix, some have turned up in abridged "Have-a-Laugh" versions on Youtube. And there are other examples: For the past several years, Sweden has aired the classic Christmas special From All of Us to All of You in a restored HD edition. All in all, there are clear signs that Disney has all the classic material restored. They just haven't done very much with the shorts yet.

Fascinating. I only have a few Blu-Rays in my collection, Alice in Wonderland and Lady and the Tramp among them, and those two have been beautifully restored. That's the kind of quality I was expecting to see in the Silly Symphonies I reviewed earlier, but of course technology is no match for 20 years of evolution in color animation. I used to think that the increased color depth compared to the DVDs was a result of the Blu-Ray format allowing for a wider range of colors, which now that I think about it, makes zero sense. They're still great discs, but I don't always have a Blu-Ray player lying around...

Here's to hoping we'll be seeing some more out of that vault soon. It's good to see people put some of that Disney money for good.

The From All of Us to All of You restoration reminds me of the great work they did on the Tomorrowland set of the Walt Disney Treasures (sadly, the only one of the 1950s TV sets that I own). Here's some more hoping that Disney+ can make room to house the Disneyland anthology series. Wouldn't that be great...

Absolutely! Disney made some really entertaining stuff for their 1950's and 1960's series. It'd be great if was made more easily available!

[That Duckfan]

Prelude

Schneewittchen (Snow White)
Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore type 709
First compiled in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), no. 53.
First printed by Realschulbuchhandlung in Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, 1812.
Seventh printing by Dieterich in Göttingen, Kingdom of Hannover, 1857.
de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sneewittchen_(1857)

I always like taking a look at the bigger picture when I’m reviewing something. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or the space to go into all the different adaptations of a story, but I will take a look at the original whenever I can; when possible, in the original language.

Snow White remains one of the most recognizable fairy tales out there. The vivid colors (white, red, and black), the magic mirror, the huntsman, the seven dwarfs, the three attempts at murder the kiss of the prince (Königssohn), all these are fairy tale staples. I’ve long been a bit literal-minded, and you’ll be seeing me trying to pinpoint real dates and places on Disney’s imaginary dreamscapes, but thankfully that wasn’t yet the case when I was reading fairy tales. They can be fairly random and illogical at times, but having matured I now understand that it’s the feeling that counts.

There are some differences with the Disney version. Snow White is seven years old, and marries the prince. All the dwarfs speak, but are not named. The evil queen also tries to poison Snow White with a shoelace and with a comb, before trying the apple. She dies by dancing in red-hot metal shoes at Snow White’s wedding.
With that in mind, the Disney adaptation is fairly faithful, only changing the elements that feel out of place, and giving the dwarfs a little more character beyond the Goldilocks shtick when they find an intruder.

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Series 1 

Part 1 

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 

Sup. Dir. David Hand
Seq. Dir. Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen
Star. Adriana Caselotti, Lucille LaVerne, Harry Stockwell, Moroni Olsen, Pinto Colvig

How many children’s movies from the 1930s still attract audiences today? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of them; Americans would likely count The Wizard of Oz as another. I don’t know if that counts as great film-making or as great branding―probably a combination of both. For the record, Snow White was released in theatres in February 1938, more than 80 years ago now. My grandmother wasn’t even born when it came out, and here we are, still talking about it as an integral part of Disney branding.

Because it is, isn’t it? All the old tropes we associate with Disney pictures: princesses that aren’t quite emancipated, overly sincere musical numbers, animal sidekicks, capital-v Villains that fall to their doom, it’s all here. Even when Family Guy parodied Disney in “Road to the Multiverse” (2009), they were still drawing on Snow White. What we have here is an immensely, massively successful movie (it was the highest-grossing film of all time until Gone with the Wind, and is still the highest-grossing animated feature adjusted for inflation) that codified the public’s imagination of what a Disney movie is. That can be a blessing (people know what they can expect) as well as a curse (Disney princesses and villains have tried to be ‘different’ for decades, and we still don’t think of them as the norm). Yes, the successes of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty have done their bit to solidify that image further (never mind The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Tangled and Frozen), but this is where it all started.

Of course, it was never destined to go this way. Disney could have very easily gone another way, making a movie about modern inventions and city life at the eve of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was definitely within the company’s scope at the time, as were other things―the different lands in Disneyland are a living testament to that imagination. But a fairy tale it was, for better and for worse, and with a little history you can see its construction.

Snow White was essentially a culmination of a decade’s worth of progress in animation. And I’m not just talking visually, although the water effects still blew me away. It’s the reliance on music to tell the story, the use of silent forest animals to fill up the cast (years of Silly Symphonies finally paying off), it’s the careful application of giving each of the seven dwarfs a distinct character trait. And yes, it’s also the rotoscoping and the multiplane camera and the water effects, it’s definitely also a technical high point and well as a high point in storytelling.
The belief that people wouldn’t want to watch a cartoon for an hour and a half really shows: it tries to pack just as much stuff as you’d get in your usual 8-minute Disney short. Some of the pacing is on point―some of it isn’t, but that’s to be expected.

The biggest structural problem Snow White suffers from, in my opinion, is its overreliance on gags to fill runtime. The dwarfs, while they are in many ways the heart of the picture, do test my patience a little in the sequence when they notice an intruder in the house. (It’s Lonesome Ghosts all over again.) It doesn’t add much to the story other than to give us more time with the dwarfs, who for all their virtues aren’t Disney’s deepest characters.
Grumpy is the only one who really gets a character arc in his acceptance of Snow White, which livens things up a little and clears her from being a total Mary Sue. It also helps that he fits a pattern of aging men that I recognize in my environment sadly all too often. Walt describes him as “the woman-hater” in the theatrical trailer, which is definitely one of his more noticeable traits, but his tendency to put himself at odds with the group (perhaps, deep down, just for the sake of it) is something that appeals to me.
Outside of the film, I think it’s Dopey and Doc that draw the most attention. I can see why, but they just don’t go a similar kind of arc. For me, Grumpy represents all the critics and the nay-sayers, the people who said you can’t make an animated feature film. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is just so appealing, you’d have to have a heart of stone to reject it.

That said, the movie is not without its flaws. Snow White herself is, well, her main role is to be pure and innocent. She’s a lot more domesticated than the Grimm’s Snow White, who finds the dwarfs’ house completely clean. Disney’s Snow White is a little too eager to do housework for my 21st century tastes. I guess from a 1930s perspective, the woman’s place being in the kitchen is better than her not existing at all (as Grumpy would have it), but it’s going to be several decades before Disney heroines start to question their place in society.

In fact, there seems to be no such thing as society in Snow White. We’re told that Snow White is a princess, but in the first scene we meet her she’s cleaning in rags on behalf of her evil stepmother. There’s a castle but no king, no court, no servants, not a country to run. The princess can just disappear for months without anybody raising as much as a finger. There’s the Prince, but he doesn’t even have a name, and only show up to kiss Snow White’s cold, dead lips. Future princess movies will do their best to fill in some of the worldbuilding, including jolly rotund kings, but that’s all still in the future for now.

However, I would like to say something in Disney’s favor and that’s their decision to launch their animated features with a female lead. The Disney princesses brand shows a certain awareness of their relative contribution to female leads compared to a lot of other brands. I guess it was kind of inevitable, given how much they like to adapt children’s and fairy tales, but you don’t really see them pull a Batman or a Buck Rogers.
I think this is a result of the Disney ethos of making comedy and standing up for the little guy. Their most successful heroes are child-like, feminine (or have traits traditionally associated with), or social castaways. There are relatively few masculine heroes in the Disney canon, and when they do they tend to end up pulling the rug from under their feet. Sometimes that’s an effective part of the story (Aladdin), sometimes not (Hercules).
That said, it’s still very clear that this movie starring a female lead is written and staffed entirely by men. Nobody’s really sure what to do with her, other than reacting to things that happen to her and dreaming about the future. She barely does anything of her own accord. In the heyday of Hepburn and Garbo and Dietrich, of Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, and Mae West, that is something I consider a massive missed opportunity.

But then, the morality of the past is always hard to get a grip on. Perhaps Disney caught a lucky break with the tough regulations of the Hays Code and the Comics Code, temporarily taking the wind out of the sails of his competitors. Snow White might carry a G rating today, in 1938 some ratings boards advised parental guidance for the under-16s! How much our perception of movies have changed.
At least, I hope so. I’m not the first failed artist to hold up Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a cinematic masterpiece. Back in the day, the German chancellor Hitler was equally impressed by Disney’s work, especially Snow White, which was one of his favorite fairy tales. Because of course he did... We’re talking about a man who thought he could get into the Vienna School of Fine Arts with some bog standard landscapes and watercolors. He never stopped painting as a hobby though, so that we can now point to some watercolors he did of Doc, Bashful, and Pinocchio. Hmm... I’m not sure whether to conclude that art transcends boundaries (as that would imply that I agree with Hitler’s taste), or whether I should start wondering why so many of interesting things attract the wrong kind. No doubt we will return to the fascinating angle of real-world politics in upcoming features.

So, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s a massive achievement, it has great historical significance, and it holds up remarkably well. Perhaps something of an acquired taste eighty years down the road, but that’s only to be expected. I’d be more worried if it hadn’t aged in some form. I have as of yet nothing to compare it with, but I feel fairly safe in calling it the Citizen Kane of Disney classics.

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Extras 

Yes, Disney+ also ported over some extras! The list is not as extensive as it was on the home video releases, but considering they’d had to drop the mini-games as well as everything not made in high quality, it’s not altogether too bad. Together, the extras almost match the length of the film.

Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs Trailer
The trailer for the Signature Collection. The brush effect looks great and it doesn’t give away too much of the plot, which is always a plus. I went over to YouTube to watch the original theatrical trailer, which features a young Walt Disney in one of his earliest presentations, showing off figurines of all the dwarfs.

Alternate Sequence: The Prince Meets Snow White
A short sequence of three minutes. There are only a few minor changes from the final cut. The Prince kisses Snow White.

Deleted Scene – Bed Building Sequence
This sequence is a little longer, at six minutes. The dwarfs decide to make Snow White a bed. It got cut presumably because it diverted too much attention from the Queen’s plan. It was the right choice at the time, if it makes it seem a little like Snow White hardly had any time to herself. We had enough dwarf sequences.

Disney’s First Feature: The Making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
It’s always nice to see a making-of featurette. We all know the story, everyone was skeptical until they actually saw it, and of course Disney plays it up for dramatic effect. It’s slick flick, but it’s not too much in your face. I especially liked how it validated many of the points I made in my own review; the ways in which it was a technical achievement. Don’t come to Snow White if you’re looking for Disney’s best fairy tale (I keep humming bits of Sleeping Beauty to myself at the moment, which is something didn't work out), but it is very worthy indeed.

Hyperion Studios Tour
This “virtual tour” of the Hyperion studios shows some of main departments of the studios along with anecdotes from the people who worked there. Narration is provided by some of the usual faces (Eric Goldberg, Ron Clements, John Musker) photoshopped into 1930s photographs. It’s a little on the nose about how great working there was, the sort of thing I would have fallen for completely some ten years ago. Of course it’s the people with the longest and most successful careers in Disney whose stories we hear, from back when they were all young bucks playing pranks on each other. It still sounds like a pretty chill place to be honest, provided you had the talent and the drive to stay on top of the game. That bonus scheme for gags is a pretty nifty way to encourage creativity, I’ve got to admit.

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Pedant’s Corner

Welcome to Pedant’s Corner, where I try to match fairytale settings to real-world locations (and nitpick the historical inaccuracies), giving us a rough idea of the chronological order of all the Disney classics.

The action of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is set over three days and a montage. The first two days are set in the fall, and the final scene where Snow White wakes up is set in the spring. Geographic clues point to a location in Germany, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where.
The leading theory on Snow White’s setting seems to be the Netherlands somewhere in the 16th century. I’d like to argue against both counts. The Dutch location seems to come from the clogs Snow White is wearing in her first scene, which is fair. But the setting also including mountains and extensive mining operations, which is something the Netherlands categorically does not have. I’ve read somewhere that the association of dwarfs with mining comes from historical mining operations in the Erzgebirge in Saxony. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s definitely a better fit location-wise than the Low Countries.

One of the best ways to get a sense of the time period is by looking at the costumes. In our case, Snow White’s costume is probably our best shot. The Huntsman and the dwarfs wear fairly generic clothes you’d expect from their vocation, and even the Prince does little to stand out. As for the Evil Queen, well of course nobody ever dressed like that in real life! Snow White’s costume is a composite old-timey dress with a few 1930s touches here and there. People like to use her puffy sleeves as a way to tie her to a particular era when they were in fashion, especially the 1500s. 

The problem with this line of thinking is that that’s pretty much the only part of Snow White’s dress that conforms to 16th century fashion. Dresses of that era are split between black sobriety with pious white veils, and garish frilly Tudor poofiness. Snow White’s dress accentuates her shoulders, but that’s about it. And her not covering her head in any way pretty much rules out any kind of medieval setting.

There are other problems with such an early setting. Some of the technologies seen in the movie would be anachronistic. The dwarfs use iron tracks to work their mine, something that only began to be experimented with in the 16th century, but really only got going by the Industrial Revolution. Then there’s the Silly Song sequence, in which the dwarfs use several modern music instruments: the cymbal (introduced from the East in the 17th century) and the concertina (patented in Saxony in 1834). There's also the dwarfs’ pipe organ, with wooden pipes carved similarly to Native American totems. They also own a pretty elaborate beer stein, which didn’t become common until the late 19th century. 

There’s also the question of kingdoms. In fairy tales, kingdoms seem to spring out of the ground like weeds! Snow White herself is of royal blood, and the Prince passing by is likely from another royal house (although this is not made explicit in the film, meaning that he could just be the ruler of a Principality). There weren’t a lot of kingdoms around in early modern Germany. France, Denmark and Poland-Lithuania bordered Germany of course, but that’s not where we are. Within the Holy Roman Empire, we find the Kingdom of Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, but both titles are held by the Emperor in Vienna. And the Evil Queen is no Evil Empress. There’s also the Kingdom of Bohemia, but that ended in the Emperor’s hands by the mid-1400s. From 1701, we also have the King in Prussia, but again most of Prussia was pretty flat. The only mining operations were in the Lower Silesia.

Most of these problems can waved away by moving the date forward to the 1820s-30s. The level of technology seems to fit rural Germany of that time pretty well, and puffy sleeves are back in fashion, along with the colors Snow White is wearing. Her still wearing a bodice would be a little folksy for a princess, as higher waists and lower necklines were in vogue, but she’s still young and doesn’t seem to be interested in the height of fashion. And neither does the Prince, or maybe he just can’t grow sideburns.
There’s also more settings to choose from. The post-Napoleonic balance of power saw kingdoms created in Hannover, Württemberg, Saxony and Bavaria. The latter three are particularly hilly and full of forests, and Saxony in particular is famous for its mining (in the aforementioned Erzgebirge).

Of course, there never was a real-life Snow White or Prince Ferdinand or Queen Grimhilde (as I’m told their names are), but it was pretty common for kings at the time to re-marry. After the death of Queen Louise of Prussia in 1810, king Friedrich Wilhelm III married Augusta von Harrach. She did not become queen, possibly because of religious concerns or because the king couldn’t bear the idea of having a second queen. Maximillian of Bavaria married less than a year after the death of his wife in 1796, and they went on to have many more children with the woman who was to become his queen. William I of Württemberg even married three times.

But the story perhaps most resembles that of Snow White can be found in Saxony, where Amalie von Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, Queen of Saxony (1806-27), and her sister Maria Theresa von Habsburg-Lorraine, Queen of Saxony (1827), raised the children of their late sister-in-law in an unusually strict manner (and when I saw unusually, I mean that Wikipedia makes explicit mention of it). No mention of escapades or uncommon deaths.
The eldest of the daughters, Amalie, became a notable composer of music. The second, Maria Ferdinanda, was married off to Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. She was twenty-five, and he was twenty-seven... years older than her. The third, Maria Anna, was highly nervous and rarely left Dresden before marrying the future Duke of Tuscany. And finally, Maria Josepha Amalia, only sixteen when she married the nineteen-year-older King Ferdinand VII of Spain, where she died at twenty-five.

Yes, being a princess wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Better stick to fairy tales. I hope I’ve made a compelling case for setting Disney’s Snow White in the 19th century. I’ve certainly had a blast reading about historical people and reading fashion plates to try and match Snow White’s attire down to the year. You can always find my best guesstimate at the end of the bottom of these sections. 

Erzgebirge, Kingdom of Saxony, Fall 1824 to Spring 1825 

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Music Madness 

On the making-of feature, Michael Giacchino notes that Snow White anticipated the book musical, where the songs are integrated into the narrative (popularly ascribed to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 Oklahoma). Credit where credit is due. 

The music in Snow White is pretty different from most Disney fare, if only because it’s so old. Adriana Caselotti gets to show her soprano voice with a ballad or two, as an example of something you wouldn’t see today. It doesn’t bother me, I’m used to plenty older music, but other songs leave more of an effect. “Heigh-Ho” is a classic and it sets in at just the right time, but my favorite is probably “The Dwarfs’ Yodel Song (The Silly Song)”. It’s festive and faster than most, which helps a lot to keep the momentum going.

I also find a lot of enjoyment in the Prince’s “One Song” (I Have But One Song), because he really only does. Ah, the irony.

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★★★★★

[Scrooge MacDuck]

19th century for Snow White? Now that's unusual. I kinda like it, but it ignores all offscreen evidence — the comics depict Snow White's world as clearly medieval, soldiers and all. (Of course, much as it might be fun for historians like yourself to play that game, I think trying to match the Disney fantasy films to historical periods and countries is a fool's errand. They clearly take place in magical kingdoms that don't show up on maps, if not in a parallel world altogether; Maleficent had the right idea on this point if none else. Much sooner will I believe the elaborate fan theory that it takes place in Middle-Earth, if anything.)