On June 9, 1934, the Walt Disney animation studios released The Wise Little Hen, a Silly Symphony adapted from a classic fairy tale. As with most of the Silly Symphonies, the cartoon did not feature any of Disney’s stock recurring characters, such as the already-legendary Mickey Mouse. But one member of Hen’s supporting cast–a petulant, musical, sailor suit-clad duck–would…
1929 was a good year for Walt Disney: his seminal creation, Mickey Mouse, had just broken out as a huge star in the wake of the immensely popular short Steamboat Willie (1928). That cartoon’s success led to a series of sound-synchronized Mickey cartoons being released to theaters, two of which (Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho) had been…
Lord knows, I love me some Disney. I feel the need to state this upfront just to underscore how much I enjoy the Disney animated canon. I grew up with those films, watching them over and over again, singing the songs, pretending to be a princess (or one of the dancing ostriches from 1940’s Fantasia–I loved…
by Dorian Tenore-Bartilucci My very first moviegoing experience turned out to be simply a warm-up, a dry run: I was about five years old, and I went to the Interboro Theater in the Bronx, where our family lived at the time, to see The Sound of Music (1965). It would have been great, except that…
I was very saddened a few weeks ago to hear that Robert Sherman, one half of one of the greatest movie music-writing teams, was gone. The Sherman Brothers are responsible for giving the world the music of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), The Aristocats (1970), Charlotte’s Web (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), and probably their…
It’s become a somewhat tragic cliché in the past few decades–the young, hopeful Hollywood star, making a big splash on screens big and small before the pains of growing up on camera manifest themselves in drug addiction and wasted talent. The list seems endless, from Danny Bonaduce to the Coreys (both Feldman and Haim) to…
By 1930, Mickey Mouse had become a bona fide animated star. Since his creation two years earlier at the hands of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, he had starred in almost two dozen black-and-white shorts, ranging from his ever-popular debut in Steamboat Willie to Mickey’s Follies (1929), which introduced “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo,” the song that would remain Mickey’s theme for…
It’s Valentine’s Day! Yay for corporately-created holidays designed to entice people into spending copious amounts of money on flowers, candy, and various stuffed creatures of all types! I mean … yay for love! In honor of the day, I’m posting five of my favorite classic movie kisses, from the utterly romantic to the sentimental to…
True Classics 