I love classic Disney cartoons, so I was happy to find the Walt Disney’s Timeless Tales
series on Netflix recently. Volume Three includes two Disney shorts
I’ve long loved, along with four others that I think I may have seen
once, or at least heard of, but that might just be because three of the
stories were familiar and the other was similar to one of my favorite
Mickey, Donald and Goofy shorts. That last one is the only one of the
six that, as far as I can tell, is a wholly original story; the rest are
based on established poems, folktales and American history (or, more to
the point, fictional adaptations thereof). It’s a nice collection of
cartoons from the mid-1930s to 1950; some of them do feel a bit dated,
but they are a lot of fun to watch.
Casey at the Bat
(1946) – Ernest Thayer’s tragi-comic ballad upon which this is based has
always been a favorite poem of mine. I’m not big into sports, and I’ve
never had any team loyalties beyond rooting for Penn State, but I do
like baseball. I enjoy getting out to the ballgame at some point during
the summer if I can, where I can watch the game proceed at its rather
leisurely pace and usually have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. I
love all the elements that come together to make this an edge-of-your
seat tale that’s at the same time pretty easy to memorize and bust out
around the campfire or other appropriate occasion.
The Disney
version features narration by Jerry Colonna and lots of visual humor
depicting Casey as an overgrown oaf and everyone else at the fateful
baseball game as pretty ridiculous in some way or another. An opening
song includes a line about the ladies at the ballpark not knowing a hit
from a strike, which I find a bit insulting; all the female fans are
gussied up and swooning over the ballplayers but don’t have a clue
what’s going on. Though I don’t know, in the thick of things, they seem
pretty into it to me. The ball players themselves are a bundle of
quirks, and all of them have a tendency to sweat profusely, a la Striker
attempting to fly the plane in the comedy Airplane!. The short
is just over eight minutes long and is a fun, pretty straightforward
take on the classic poem; I know it also spawned a sequel in the 1950s,
which I hope to see one of these days. I don’t know when I first saw
this one, but it’s probably what introduced me to the poem in the first
place and is a definite Disney classic.
Little Hiawatha
(1937) – This was another short I’d seen many times, as we’d taped it
once during a stint of taping old Disney cartoons during the Duck Presents
program on the Disney channel. It uses bits of the Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow poem about Hiawatha, but the majority of it is wordless and
has little to do with the poem. In this short, Hiawatha is just a
youngster who looks like he can’t be much more than five. He wants to
appear fierce with his bow and arrow, but that’s tough when his pants
keep falling down every time he turns around. There are some silly
pratfalls here, but ultimately it becomes a story of compassion and
cooperation as he manages to corner a young rabbit, then decides to let
him go free, thus earning the loyalty of the woodland creatures, who
come to his aid when a bear attacks him.
This is probably my
favorite cartoon of the six. The animation is beautiful, and the
interaction between Hiawatha and the animals is wonderful, both before
and after his encounter with the rabbit. The choreography of the bear
chase is especially well done and reminds me of playing the Jungle Book
Super Nintendo game, where everything in the jungle has to be lined up
just so in order for Mowgli to successfully continue on his journey.
Talk about a community effort! And in this short, which came out around
the same time as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it’s easy to see the similarities to Whistle While You Work. Three cheers for the woodland brigade!
The Wise Little Hen (1934) – I’ve always been a fan of the story The Little Red Hen,
with the conscientious hen who can’t get any of her fellow farm animals
to help her out with her planting project. This is a fun short as well,
and it’s notable because it marks the entrance of Donald Duck, played
by Clarence Nash. But it’s also just a bit grating. That’s because
everybody is borderline incomprehensible. Donald always is, of course,
and it’s part of what makes him endearing, but one of the reasons it
works is because he’s almost always complaining about something. Somehow
the quacking just fits really well. Pinto Colvig plays Peter Pig, whose
voice is a strange combination of guttural oinking noises and a German
accent. His voice annoys me more than Donald’s.
But the one that
really bugs me is Florence Gill’s Wise Little Hen. I suppose that this
is mostly because she does the vast majority of the talking – or,
rather, singing various annoying verses of Help Me Plant My Corn.
I’d be tempted to refuse her just so I wouldn’t have to listen to that
voice – and because if I didn’t know the story, I probably would have no
idea what she was asking. It’s a very cute cartoon. But boy, does a
little of that clucking go a long way.
The Golden Touch
(1935) – Another familiar story, though like the preceding cartoon, I
can’t say for sure if I’d ever seen it before. It recounts the story of a
greedy king (Billy Bletcher) whose only delight is in counting his gold
coins like a proto-Uncle Scrooge. When a mischievous sprite comes along
to tempt him with the Golden Touch, he succumbs immediately. In some
versions of the story, it’s obvious that the supernatural being’s main
aim is to teach Midas a lesson about what’s important in life. Here,
that’s not so clear, since he stands to gain from the king’s realization
that the Golden Touch isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The odd
thing is that we don’t see how any of this affects anyone except the
king’s poor cat, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What exactly is this man a king of? He seems to live in complete
isolation. And what happens to everyone in his kingdom after he trades
away everything he owns to his mysterious visitor? Or maybe he’s only a
king in his own mind… Still, it’s pretty entertaining to see him turning
things gold left and right, especially during the dramatic dinner scene
when he realizes what a problem this is going to be.
Morris the Midget Moose (1950) – An interesting story of the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
variety. Except in this case, there are two “defective” creatures, and
it’s their cooperation with each other that makes them able to thrive.
Morris is tiny but has regular-sized antlers. When he meets Balsam, a
regular moose with tiny antlers, they team up to defeat the ferocious
Thunderclap, who is the established dominant moose in the group.
This cartoon reminds me quite a bit of the 1937 Mickey / Donald / Goofy cartoon Moose Hunters,
mostly because in both shorts, we see two moose ferociously fighting
each other by locking antlers and tossing each other to the ground.
Things don’t end so well for our intrepid hunters on that occasion.
Thankfully, Morris and Balsam get a rather happier conclusion. This
short also marks the last appearance of the wise character Bootle
Beetle. A bit odd, perhaps, that a beetle is telling stories about a
moose… But I guess he’s been around enough to have experience with
plenty of species beyond his fellow insects. A cute cartoon.
Ben and Me
(1953) – Twice as long as the next-longest cartoon on the DVD, this one
is based on a book by Robert Lawson. The basic idea is that Ben
Franklin was not such a brilliant American after all. Rather, he just
happened to get together with an ingenious mouse. This humble fellow
named Amos is voiced by Sterling Holloway, best known as the voice of
Winnie the Pooh, and the lilting, relaxing quality of his voice is just
as present here. I just love listening to him speak. Charles Ruggles
provides the voice of Ben, who comes off as entirely addled. I also got a
kick out of hearing the voice of Hans Conried, who I know best as the
voice of Thorin Oakenshield in the Rankin and Bass version of The Hobbit, playing Thomas Jefferson.
While
it’s nearly 60 years old, this short is still the most recent thing on
the DVD, and both that and the fact that it is set in such a definite
time period make it feel like the least dated of the cartoons here. If
it were made today, I’m not sure that too many things would have
changed. There’s excellent attention to detail as we see Amos and Ben in
Revolutionary times and watch as history gets just a bit skewered.
Here, Amos has a humble hand (or paw) in the creation of the Franklin
stove, bifocals, The Pennsylvania Gazette and even the
Declaration of Independence. A very clever and comical little ode to an
important chapter in American history probably best appreciated by
slighter older kids, as 21 minutes is a bit on the long side and it’s
funnier if you know some of the background already.
You can
watch all six of these in one sitting as I did or dole them out one at a
time. Either way, while some of these shorts show their age just a bit,
Walt Disney’s Timeless Tales: Volume Three is a great collection for any fan of classic Disney cartoons.
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