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Elf from 2003 starring Will Ferrell is 20 years old today. In this video, I talk with Elf Special Effects Coordinator Tony Lazarowich about how some of the unique props and illusions were brought to life in this treasured holiday classic. He even shows us photos of the sea of swirly twirly gumdrops, something that was actually filmed but did not make the movie. A Jordan White Channel Exclusive!! May every day be like Christmas this season! Don't be a cotton headed ninny muggins!

Happy 30th Anniversary to cartoon characters who have made our world a zanier place since 1993. In this video, I am joined by my father, David White Sr., to talk with Animaniacs showrunner and co-creator Tom Ruegger about what Animaniacs is for those who are not familiar and some behind the scenes bits on how the show got made. Plus, I tell him what I do for a living, and learn that AI art, when creating completely new characters, is actually meant to be a good thing instead of scraping and stealing other art and other characters from other people like the Internet is accusing companies of right now. It's also my coming birthday, tomorrow! Happy Birthday to me!

Happy 30th Anniversary to cartoon characters who have made our world a zanier place since 1993. In this video, I am joined by my father, David White Sr., to talk with Animaniacs showrunner and co-creator Tom Ruegger about what Animaniacs is for those who are not familiar and some behind the scenes bits on how the show got made. Plus, I tell him what I do for a living, and learn that AI art, when creating completely new characters, is actually meant to be a good thing instead of scraping and stealing other art and other characters from other people like the Internet is accusing companies of right now. It's also my coming birthday, in 3 days. Happy Birthday to me!

Film: Toy Story 1995 Director(s): John Lasseter In this video, we get to hear from one of the co-founders of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith, and not only does he tell his side of the story about how the first all CG animated feature got made, but also his honest and knowledgeable views about AI, which is growing even more by the day, and the fears of AI are also growing more by the day as well. Next film after Toy Story: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Film: The Rescuers Down Under (1990) Directed by Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel Me, plus one of the film's story artists, Gary Trousdale, lay down the story of how Disney ended up making Hollywood's first ever all-digital movie. The Rescuers is an odd choice for a sequel, but Gary simply rolled with the punches. Meanwhile, Disney paid $10 million for a computer system from a company that would become important later on in our story: Pixar. Digital would aspire Disney to shoot for the stars, even shoot for the gold. Next week: Beauty and the Beast

Film: The Little Mermaid (1989) Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker The Disney Renaissance begins properly with this tale about a red haired sea creature who dreamt of life on the land. One of the film's animators, Nik Ranieri, relays his story of working on one of the film's characters, the lead villain Ursula. He also hands out his opinion of this year's Little Mermaid remake. Next week: The Rescuers Down Under

CHRISTMAS IN JULY SPECIAL!! Bing Crosby (an AI version) sings All I Want For Christmas Is You as made famous by Mariah Carey. Custom model trained by me with RVC WebUI

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. The Great Mouse Detective was the first animated feature made under the new leadership of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenburg at Disney. It was also the first notable Disney feature to have a whole sequence with CG graphics. I tell the story of how this feature came to be the best I can in this video. Gonna be uploading more of the other videos I have made, so bear with me. Next: The Little Mermaid

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Our guest star Ron Husband (veteran ex-Disney animator) lays down the his experiences of working on the troubled production of The Black Cauldron, and I lay down the story of the sudden new management change that came in during this time and the new culture that arrived because of it. Next week, the first movie made under Disney's new management.

Happy 35th Anniversary, Who Framed Roger Rabbit from 1988! Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Our guest star Gary K. Wolf (the author of Who Censored Roger Rabbit, the book on which Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on) lays down the story of how Who Framed Roger Rabbit came to be, starting with the book's publication. A significant moment in Disney history that would lead to the Disney Renaissance. Next week, the Disney Renaissance begins with an undersea adventure.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Jerry Rees (our guest star), gives us insights into the making of The Fox and the Hound and some of the transition that was going on at Disney once the Reagan years kicked into high gear. The Fox and the Hound from 1981 was the point where the Nine Old Men decided that they were finally gonna hang up their pencils and paintbrushes and pass the torch on to the young animators that they've trained to make animated features, so this was their last go round. It has probably the best character dynamic of any animated film to date, by the early 1980s. Here we have a fox and a hound dog who end up becoming friends not knowing that they're supposed to hate each other, then something happens between them that makes them hate each other, until one suddenly shows compassion for his former friend and then saves him, leading the other friend to stand up for his former friend even if they're supposed to hate each other. The closest kind of character dynamic I can think of in animated features that comes this close is between Moses and Ramses in The Prince of Egypt from 1998. Transition was going on at Disney during the beginning of the 80s. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would retire and have an office dedicated to writing a book dedicated to the craft of animation. Eric Larson would retire and instead be an animation consultant from this point. During production on The Fox and the Hound, Ron Miller, who was now the head of Disney, attempted to put Don Bluth in charge of the animation department, but even Don saw that the upper management was so risk adverse in making animated films, so on his birthday in 1979, he left the studio and took many of the animators, including John Pomeroy, with him so he can start his own studio. Their first production was Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and their second production was The Secret Of NIMH, the only animated feature I can think of where the lead character is a single mother. It pushed back the release of this film to 1981. Ironically, the studio that could not afford sweeping epic shots or creating drama in animated features by 1981, was on the same lot working on a live action film starring Jeff Bridges that would showcase a completely new kind of special effect: CGI. Our guest Jerry Rees worked on the CGI in Tron with Bill Kroyer, becoming one of the first features to ever use this cutting edge tool. Also, something would happen that would indirectly benefit animation as a whole, and it's spelled with 3 words. M-T-V. I want my MTV! Debuting the same year The Fox and the Hound was released, MTV, while it did not invent music videos, brought the medium to a mainstream not seen before, a kind of TV being craved by the youth known as Gen X, which spoke to them. As a result, animation artists now had a completely new medium to create animation with, beyond the constraints of family entertainment. This resulted in A-Ha's Take On Me video which used rotoscoped sketchy animation, and Dire Straits' Money For Nothing video, which also used early CGI. Yet even as Disney continued to drag on, the young animators, by now including Glen Keane who had progressed to being a supervisor, John Lasseter (who would later end up at a Northern California startup that would be important later in our story), and surprisingly, Tim Burton (yes, the same one who directs gothic style quirky films with Johnny Depp), were waiting for something, anything to happen because they were just as passionate about the art of animation as were the Nine Old Men that came before them. Tim Burton, noticing this lack of quality, stopped being an animator at Disney and progressed to directing live action films, starting with Pee Wee's Big Adventure in 1985. It would take a big failure from the studio to suddenly motivate the management to finally work on turning things around and make great animated films again. Next week, the film that almost killed Disney animation.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. By the time Disney's 23rd animated feature rolled around, The Rescuers, in 1977, the next generation of Disney animators have progressed from being mere trainees to actual character animators, and Don Bluth had progressed from character animator to full animation supervisor, alongside Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Milt Kahl. Glen Keane was given the ask of animating several shots of the character Bernard, voiced by Bob Newhart. The Rescuers was adapted from Margarey Sharp's books of the same name, and were optioned for film rights by Disney in 1959. The film would go through phases of development before finally getting around to production in 1975. Originally they were gonna have the story set in the Arctic, that was scrapped, then they tried to make a story with a lion, so that was also scrapped, then Wolfgang Reitherman, the director, suggested that the story should be simple. Little girl gets kidnapped, and the mice go out and rescue her. Also wild to know is that originally the villain was gonna be Cruella de Vil again, but the animators felt that Marc Davis' character wouldn't be justified for a sequel, so instead, they created a new villain based on The Diamond Duchess in one of the books, and called her Madame Medusa. The character of Snoops was heavily inspired by journalist John Culhane, who went around interviewing many of the Disney animators at the time, but never dreamed he would become a Disney character himself. Milt Kahl would retire from animation after this movie, and wanted to go out with a truly knockout performance for Madame Medusa, so much so that he did almost all of the animation on the character himself, pencil tests of which are still viewable today online for study. Originally Louis Prima and Phil Harris were gonna be in the movie, but both of their characters and parts were scrapped. This is Eva Gabor's second Disney animated feature, after playing Duchess in The Aristocats in 1970. The Rescuers premiered in theaters on June 13, 1977, and grossed $48 million worldwide. Surprisingly in France, it beat out what would become the highest grossing movie of the year and of all time at that point in history, Star Wars from 1977. By now, Ron Miller, Walt Disney's son-in-law, was the vice president of Disney and wanted a division for A movies and a division for B movies for the younger animators to work on. This was the first collaboration between the next generation of artists and the senior animators who already existed at Disney. Though by now, the senior animators knew they were really getting old, and they couldn't do feature films forever, so they had to pass the torch on to the next generation who would carry on this great craft of animation, yet by now, executives in Hollywood were weary of trying to do anything with animation at this point. Next week, the last animated feature that the Nine Old Men ever worked on at Disney.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Entering into the 50th year of the Disney company's history, and entering the 1970s after the Space Race had ended, Disney seemed to be on a good streak with the recent opening of Walt Disney World and a number of live action productions such as Bednobs and Broomsticks, but on the feature animation side, despite being only limited to one animated feature every 4 years, both The Aristocats and Robin Hood would come out three years apart from each other. The Nine Old Men animators were still animating on these features, but now these films were being produced by Wolfgang Reitherman, one of the Nine Old Men who was solely producing and directing on these films, and they were being executive produced by Walt Disney's son-in-law, Ron Miller, who was the head of the film division at Disney during this time. Robin Hood began initially as an adaptation of Reynard the Fox during the Walt Disney days, but constraints regarding real world events prevented Disney from moving forward with the adaptation. During production on Aristocats, Ken Anderson suggested the classic tale Robin Hood should be the studio's next animated feature, and he wanted to do it with an all-animal cast. Ken Anderson adapted the story, but he was more inspired by the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to make a buddy picture out of Robin Hood, meaning Little John was the only Merry Man kept on, Friar Tuck turned into a friend of Robin Hood's, and Allan A. Dale was turned into the narrator. Frank and Ollie wanted to make The Sheriff of Nottingham into a goat to seemingly subvert expectations (in a good way), but Wolfgang Reitherman insisted that the Sheriff of Nottingham be a wolf to fit the villain stereotype. Since the production was behind schedule because of the casting for the role of Robin Hood himself, the animators had nearly the whole Phony King of England song and dance sequence use recycled animation from Snow White, The Jungle Book, and the Aristocats, one of Disney's cheapest and shameless moments. Robin Hood premiered at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC in November 1973, and on a budget of $5 million, grossed $27.5 million worldwide in it's initial run, which was a Disney record at the time. It seemed rather strange that this was a success, considering Walt Disney's fingerprints were not on this production. The Nine Old Men that were with Walt Disney knew they were getting old, and couldn't work on animated films forever, so they set up a school at CalArts to teach and train a group of artists from several art colleges to become the next generation of Disney animators. In this group of trainees were Glen Keane, Ron Clements, and John Musker, who would become important later on in our story of Disney. Also notable about Robin Hood was that this was the first feature that a person who started as an inbetweener on Sleeping Beauty would be a character animator. His name was Don Bluth. Next week, the next generation of Disney animators would graduate to become official character animators on the next Disney feature. P.S. Pardon Julia's opinions about people in fursuits, as well as the picture of Loona Hellhound from Helluva Boss (an indie animated series meant for a more mature audience) but I wanted to get my point across as to how Robin Hood served as a forerunner for the furry fandom. Even Loona was called a furry once in one episode of Helluva Boss. Thanks, @SpindleHorse.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Walt Disney Animation was about to face quite a challenge ahead. The Jungle Book was put into production around 1965, with Ken Anderson's story treatment as the basis for the film. Based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, the film took a consistent narrative compared to episodic interstitials that made up the book. Most of the crew haven't even read the book, one time Walt Disney asked the story crew, "How many of you read The Jungle Book?" none of them raised their hands. As consistent with many Disney adaptations, Disney took a rather dark source material and turned it into something more lighthearted. Being on a schedule that now limited animated features to one every four years, Walt Disney focused much of his precious time on his big Florida project, which would become Disney World. Unfortunately, his health was deteriorating. During filming where he was explaining about Epcot, he had to have one of those health asthma things in between the takes. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston somehow managed to animate half the movie themselves. As for Richard and Robert Sherman, they wrote such classic songs for the movie that they ought to be commended for The Bare Necessities. With both of these groups of people, they visited Walt Disney to get some ideas for how they were going to take on The Jungle Book, but they noticed that Walt was not quite feeling himself. Would it have been too much to get as much additional input from such a great master as possible. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because on December 15, 1966, Walter Elias Disney, family entertainment icon and American folk hero, died at age 65 of lung cancer. The papers were full of it. Rumors floated around that Walt was cryogenically frozen and placed under the pirate ship at Disneyland so he can later be thawed out at a point in the future. I never believed that. When you die once, you're brown bread, you ain't coming back. Without Walt Disney, the production of The Jungle Book and the rest of Disney had such a huge hole in it. Walt believed in animation, but his brother Roy was still the business guy and thought Jungle Book wouldn't make it, so the animators really had their professions and craft on the line. 10 months after Walt Disney's death, The Jungle Book premiered in theaters, and on a $4 million budget, grossed $11.5 million in domestic and some more in other territories, making The Jungle Book a success. Disney as a company believed they could did carry on like normal, but going forward, nothing was gonna be "normal". This was the late 1960s. Hippies, the birth of metal, Woodstock, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, protests and riots regarding the Vietnam war, people all of a sudden now starting to care for planet Earth, as the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. A year or so after Walt Disney died, the Hays Code was abolished, and films that Walt Disney would have burnt every copy of had he had his way came into cinemas and became big successes. Films like The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary's Baby, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy showcased a new edginess and cynicism not seen in cinema before. It was known as New Hollywood. If anything, Dennis Hopper getting annoyed by other drivers in Easy Rider and then flipping them off, that's pretty much the ultimate gesture of how the young people in America that did get the press felt about the old guard and establishment that Walt Disney belonged to. From this point, Disney would enter a period known as the Dark Age of Animation, which would last until 1989. It was a period where the upper business management running the animation department did not want to take risks in cinematic animation. Even so, this period did produce some charming films, yet they didn't have the gravitas that they would have had Walt Disney been involved. Since this club I'm part of has already looked at Aristocats, next week, Disney enters the Dark Ages properly with an adaptation of a classic tale that would prove to be a forerunner for the furry fandom.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Walt Disney had always envisioned making Mary Poppins into a movie ever since the success of Snow White back in 1937-1938, ever since his two daughters suddenly got him interested in the idea when they were reading one of the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers. He loved the idea, and approached P.L. Travers, real name Helen Gogh, for the rights to make the movie, but P.L. Travers was dragged into this kicking and screaming. She did not think Walt Disney was capable of such a feat, that of a live action production, which Walt Disney wanted to make it as. I guess if you make cartoons in Hollywood for so long, people are gonna look at you as just the guy who makes cartoons. P.L. Travers didn't like what Walt Disney stood for, the chipperness, all-American innocence, cartoons, songs, she didn't want to be involved in this. It wasn't until Walt went to her apartment in London and told her his life's story in a way that would connect with her, matching his own childhood struggles with that of P.L. Travers, that she finally caved in and gave him the rights to make the movie. Inevitably, she hated the final product. She must have gone around in the press telling everyone how much she hated the film. Julie Andrews was approached by Walt Disney after a performance of the hit play Camelot to star in Mary Poppins in the lead role. Julie might have been skeptical, but not quite as snobbish or snooty as P.L. Travers was. She ended up coming on board because her husband at the time, Tony Walton, was hired to not only design the costumes, but also be the defacto production designer, and she couldn't bear separation. While other leading men in Hollywood were considered for the role of Bert, Dick Van Dyke was given the role because he was such a hilarious knock-out on his hit TV show The Dick Van Dyke Show. Instead of traditional script writers, Walt relied on Richard and Robert Sherman to come up with the big story through their songs, which won them an Oscar. Their song they composed for the motivational character arc of George Banks, Feed the Birds, ended up being Walt Disney's favorite song. Anytime Walt Disney ever met the Sherman Bros for the rest of his life, and they were near a piano, Walt would say, "Play it", and they would play Feed the Birds. This may be Walt Disney's most personal film because through the character of George Banks, he wanted to reflect not only how he felt about his own father, but also how his wife Lillian felt about him sometimes. Every special trick in the book Walt perfected during 4 decades of show business was rolled into one package. The movie was filmed entirely indoors. You've got a lot of wire work with the wires thickened with shoe polish to appear almost invisible to the camera. You've got beautiful matte paintings by Peter Ellenshaw, the studio's chief matte artist. You've got traveling mattes and split screen photography, an audio animatronic robin that sings to Mary during the "A Spoonful of Sugar" sequence, dry ice smoke, and finally the sodium vapor process, used extensively during the animated portions of the film with the live actors. There was only one such camera prism crystal made for this process, which rendered almost perfect seamless compositing, even through the straps on Mary's hat in the Jolly Holiday sequence. A rotating room was also used for the floating tea party sequence. Techniques such as these would serve as a reference and forerunner for the creation of today's CG effects, during a time when computers were only used for business, mathematics, and calculating trajectories to the moon. Mary Poppins opened at the Graumann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood on August 27, 1964, and on a $4 million budget, grossed nearly $32 million in its first domestic run. The movie would give Julie Andrews her first Best Actress Oscar, and would garner the most Oscar nominations for any feature Walt made in his entire life, including his only nomination for Best Picture, which went to My Fair Lady from Warner Bros. Mary Poppins' success happened in a much different world than Snow White. Young people were tuning in to the music of Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Beatles, they started to get into the activities synonymous with the hippie crowd, they began to grow worried about a war in a place called Vietnam, and the Civil Rights movement had reached its peak. Even Dick Van Dyke participated in the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech. With such radical change, some things had to go. Walt Disney would become one of them, because 4 decades of showbusiness and unhealthy habits were about to take its toll on him. To quote Bob Dylan and Guns N' Roses, he was knocking on heaven's door. Next week, the last animated feature Walt Disney was ever involved in during his entire life.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. By 1955, there would come not only a radically different Disney, but a radically different America. In the post war era, Americans had a bunch of disposable income that they could blow on a new thing from Disney, a monument to Disney, namely Disneyland. They could spend to see a new kind of Disney movie in theaters, namely one made in live action instead of animation. They now had television, which was taking the Western world by storm, so they could now watch Disney shows in their own living rooms, and with the post war optimism, Disney promised a bright future as seen from a mid-century perspective. Yet the animated films still remained, and to stand out from the competition, Disney animation would now have to provide an experience consumers could not get in their own homes. Lady and the Tramp would be the first animated feature in CinemaScope, or in layman's terms, WIDESCREEN! CinemaScope was a widescreen process invented by 20th Century Fox for a movie called The Robe, and it proved to be so successful that other movies and other studios wanted to shoot in CinemaScope as well, so Fox began licensing CinemaScope out to other studios, Disney included. As our special guest star Willie Ito recalls, the animation paper was rather large to accommodate the new widescreen format, 16 field paper to be precise. Both Lady and the Tramp and Disneyland Main Street U.S.A. have the same time and place setting, a turn of the century Midwest American town where the gas lamp is giving way to the electric lamp and the horse cart is giving way to the automobile. This was an era and place Walt Disney fondly remembered from when he was growing up in the small town of Marceline, MO. He wanted to provide that same experience for future Americans because going forward, America was only gonna expand and not be what it once was. Even the youth was starting to rise up. They were starting to own cars, to the dismay of their own parents, they were dancing to a new kind of music, rock and roll, and they were also beginning to feel disconnected from their own parents who fought the war for them to be free in a post war America, a reality that was captured well in the 1955 classic, Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean. By the time Disney started going onto television to talk about Disneyland and stuff, they pretty much stated in the first episode of the Disney show that Sleeping Beauty was going to be the next movie in production, and that the epicenter of Disneyland would be Sleeping Beauty's castle, which is an absolute monument to this very day. Though for Sleeping Beauty, CinemaScope wasn't enough, Walt Disney had to go bigger. Next week, Disney makes the first animated feature in Super Technirama 70 or, umm... let's just say he made the first animated feature in IMAX.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Entering into the 1950s, Cinderella made big bucks. The movie that was in production at the same time as Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, wasn't so lucky. This was too bad because Walt Disney wanted to make an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ever since he became fascinated with Lewis' Carroll's two books as a schoolboy, and ever since he made the first Alice's Wonderland shorts of the 1920s, and ever since he wanted to make an Alice live action animation combo feature with Mary Pickford, which he ditched to make Snow White, and ever since he wanted to make an Alice in Wonderland movie after the success of Snow White but World War II inevitably dashed his hopes of making such a film. Finally, he decided that to do these two books justice, he would make it into a full fledged animated feature. This would be, according to Walt Disney, his first proper post war feature. The usual suspects turn up once again. Visual design is once again provided by Mary Blair, an absolute master, Sterling Holloway voices yet another character in a Disney movie (that of the Cheshire Cat), Ed Wynn also makes one of his first collaborations with Disney during the early years of the studio, playing the Mad Hatter, and once again Walt's master animators, the Nine Old Men as they were now known among the studio, provided the A class animation under the budgetary constraints. The film was promoted through the new medium of television with "One Hour in Wonderland" starring Walt Disney himself, along with a 10 minute feature "Operation Wonderland" which talked about the making of the movie. The film premiered in July 26, 1951, and on a $3 million budget, took in only $2.4 million, lower than the box office receipts of Cinderella a year prior. This resulted in a million dollar write off, and rather negative reception from critics. However, it would regain popularity in rereleases and be viewed as a film in tune with the psychedelic early 1970s, being viewed on college campuses across the nation, and become another wonderful Disney classic. However, by this time Walt's attention was starting to turn elsewhere. He wanted to really recapture the innocence of some of his childhood, and began to become fascinated with trains, and television, and other stuff. RKO was now a burden he wanted to escape himself from, since he knew RKO was in dire financial straits under one Howard Hughes. Next week, Disney's last movie with RKO.

The previous episode, the one about Song of the South, is gonna get around to what needs to be kept in or taken out on Friday, so that episode will have to wait for next week. For now, let's do Cinderella. Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. By 1947, Walt Disney Productions was trying so hard to get by, being in the red and doing compilation films like Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free, Make Mine Music, and a combo between The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Walt didn't have room to expand his imagination, so he needed a Snow White sized hit. He went back to the fairy tale well, and found his favorite fairy tale, Cinderella, and chose it as the basis for his next animated feature, the first proper one in 8 years. Marking several firsts in Disney's history, this film marks the first time voice actors are credited for playing the characters in the opening, yet they don't specify which characters they play. For the visual design of this film, which is outstanding, by the way, Disney hired Mary Blair to conceptualize the production in a greeting card style. She may have been the first woman in Disney history to have a significant role in how an animated feature from Disney was going to tell its story or how it was gonna look. Happy International Women's Month! Mary Blair would go on to provide visual development for the next 2 Disney animated features. It also marks one of the earliest roles for legendary voice actress June Foray (best known for playing Rocky the Flying Squirrel), where she provided the noises for Lucifer the Cat. A minimalist style and simplistic character design was used to quicken the production, and the film was shot in live action first so the animators would have something to reference to for the sake of cutting down costs because they could not afford to experiment like the earlier features could. Cinderella cost $2.2 million to make, and premiered in February 1950, and made $7.9 million in its first run, also generating sales in merchandise and music. Since it cost so much, Walt Disney turned to producing live action features to keep his animation business afloat because animation at that time still cost more than live action. Walt Disney also began to gain interest in the emerging new medium known as television, which was taking the post-war first world by storm. He put out his first TV special on NBC, One Hour in Wonderland, which aired Christmas Day 1950. It was the first time Walt Disney would appear on television, debuting the mustachioed, business-suit wearing, larger than life persona that we see him as today. It would also be a vehicle to help promote his next movie. Next week, Alice in Wonderland.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. After the low box office returns of both Pinocchio and Fantasia, Walt Disney needed to put a new feature into production fast. What he found was a story in a slim children's book called Dumbo, and he loved how simple it was, so that would become the basis of his next film. This did not require expensive special effects or a lavish art style, and was bargain bin compared to the other features. This would mark the first Disney project for Sterling Holloway, who would provide the voices for tons of Disney characters over his long association with the studio, including the voice for Winnie the Pooh. Yet even as the film was in production, trouble was brewing. Employees were complaining about getting overworked and underpaid, and believed they should unionize, something Walt Disney was against. Despite this, Art Babbitt, one of Disney's top animators at the time, had the Screen Cartoonists' Guild vote to hold a strike, which occurred May 29, 1941. The strike was crazy, and at one point Walt potentially gang tackled Art Babbitt for throwing some insults at him. After the strike, the atmosphere at the studio seemed grim. Employees were now afraid of Walt, and the ones that turned against him during the strike, they were not only laid off, but also in Walt's words, he would call them Communists, which was a big insult to give to someone at that time. The Nine Old Men and the other animators still remained faithful to Disney, and despite these shortcomings, he still needed to complete both Dumbo and Bambi. Yet the economic constraints were coming against him, and the studio shelved films and departments to save money, and the hard reality of the real world would rupture his fantasy that Walt Disney was creating. Next week, the Golden Age ends, a World War begins, and a special guest will appear to tell us about Bambi. Who, you may ask? Stay tuned!

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. With Snow White on his resume, and Pinocchio in production, and Bambi in the planning stages, Walt Disney prepped for his most ambitious feature yet, with the working title The Concert Feature, which would be a collaboration between him and Leopold Stokowski to craft an animated feature of what it would be like if a concert had images that went so well and synced with the music. Almost like the birth of the modern music video. They were very selective in choosing which music would end up in the movie, music which is still played and spoofed and studied to this very day, much like artwork and frames of this film. The most notable accomplishment of Fantasia was Mickey Mouse's comeback. Fred Moore, one of the top animators of the studio, and the inspiration for what Lampwick would look like in Pinocchio, redesigned Mickey Mouse to be more childlike. He made Mickey Mouse the Mickey Mouse that we still see today. This film marks a series of firsts for Disney. It marks the first time true color live action was ever used in a Disney movie, and for a studio that acts as the ultimate family brand you see today, the first ever onscreen kill, when the T-Rex kills the stegosaurus during the Rite of Spring sequence. It would also be the first movie ever to have immersive stereo sound, most likely to conjure the feeling that you were in a concert hall. However, only one theater had the sound equipment necessary to play Walt's vision for the film, and it did not resonate well with audiences at first, because they were not used to a non-traditional structure in a major motion picture, and I believe some of them thought that Walt Disney brought back the silent film, since the animated scenes contain no talking or dialogue. Walt was ahead of his time, and the film, being so artsy, has gained newfound appreciation among critics and fans as being one of Walt Disney's great animated masterpieces. Continuing this weak performance of box office after Snow White, Walt still intended to make animated movies. Yet a day of reckoning was about to come to him in 1941. Next week, not only does the circus come to town, but a completely different kind of circus forms outside the Disney studio marking one of the darkest chapters in Disney history. Here's the book I was talking about in the video: https://archive.org/details/waltdisneytriump0000gabl

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. After the success of Snow White, Disney started production on a project called Bambi, but eventually put it on hold so he could work on Pinocchio, based on an Italian magazine serial by Carlo Collodi, about a wooden marionette puppet boy who strives to become a real boy. Eventually Walt Disney and his team would morph Pinocchio into a likeable character, and a brief moment in the serial where a cricket tells Pinocchio what's the right thing to do, before Pinocchio squishes the cricket, they took the cricket, and made him into Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio's conscience. Originally Pleasure Island was called Boobyland (???). Glad they changed the name. In house songwriters Leigh Harline and Ned Washington wrote When You Wish Upon a Star, then presented it to the story team, and they felt it should play a crucial role in the film's story, and Walt felt it would be good for music cues in the film. When You Wish Upon a Star has since become synonymous with not only Pinocchio, but also the Walt Disney Company in general. Pinocchio, originally scheduled for Christmas 1939, was eventually released in February 1940. Attendance was lower than that of Snow White, despite critical acclaim, mainly due to the horrific situation happening with a war in Europe at that time, which would eventually become unavoidable. Despite these losses, Walt was passionate about what he was creating. He is noted to have said once, "We're not making cartoons, we're making art." Art was something Walt was truly after and would definitely play a part in his passion project. Next week, Walt Disney crafts the first ever movie in immersive stereo sound.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Walt Disney now had a growing influence among Hollywood big guns, and by 1934, he had more characters to play with in his "cinematic universe", such as Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Clara Cluck, that one cow character, The Three Little Pigs, and Black Pete. However, he needed to diversify beyond shorts, and he was gonna use a centuries old story to achieve that. One night in 1934, Walt sent some of his employees to lunch, brought them back to the soundstage, and told them all the story of Snow White, acting out every part, every moment. What Walt Disney was proposing had never been done before. A full length feature animated film in true color, frame by frame, using all the techniques in animation they have perfected at that point, utilizing new ones as well, such as rotoscoping and the multiplane camera. Every short film they made has led up to this. Disney spent $1.5 million on the film, which was a lot of money for the small animation studio, but less than half of the budget of two 1930s classics, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind, both costing around $4 million or so. The film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre to the public on December 21, 1937, and on that first screening, at the end, dazzled the audience. Disney's Folly, as the press called it, triumphed. Cecil B. DeMille wired Walt saying, "I wish I could make pictures like Snow White." One review compared it on the level of The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith and the birth of Mickey Mouse, which Disney himself created. With the profits from Snow White, according to Walt's words, he was able to build an animation studio on 51 acres in Burbank, CA, the very studio I took an amazing tour of last year. Geopolitical turmoil, mostly, would make success on his next animated films unlikely, but that did not stop Walt Disney. Next week, Walt Disney enters the 1940s with his second animated feature and crafts the company's official theme song.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. Walt Disney now had a hit character with Mickey Mouse, and over the course of the next 4 years, leading into the Great Depression, Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies would set the industry standard for animation, and at the studio, the techniques that are still used in animation today would be invented. With the immense help of both his brother Roy Disney, his representatives, and Columbia Pictures, his distributor in the early days of Mickey Mouse, he was able to rid himself of Pat Powers, the notorious producer that wanted all the rights to Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney would get a distribution deal with United Artists, then in 1932, would find out about Technicolor's three strip color process, producing lifelike color for the first time in movies. Technicolor licensed the technology to the Disney studio, then put Flowers and Trees into production, and the result was success and Walt Disney's first Oscar. The studio thrived during the Great Depression, artists knew Disney was always hiring animators, and Walt was crafting out the basic likelike principles of the incredible medium that continues to entrance audiences to this day. Bank of America was able to help successfully finance the studio in the 1930s, though Walt, in his desire to be the best in animation, and diversify, he would soon undertake the studio's costliest venture in Disney's relatively young 11-year history in 1934. Next week, Walt Disney makes the first ever true color frame by frame lifelike animated feature in history.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. After losing Oswald, Walt needed to create a substitute character to replace Oswald. He devises a mouse, and gives him the name Mickey because his wife hated Mortimer for a mouse name. Work starts on the Mickey shorts, yet after screening a cartoon after The Jazz Singer, he decides he's gonna make 'em with sound. While the first 2 Mickey shorts were in production, the third, Steamboat Willie, would be the one with sound. Mickey would make his big public debut on November 18, 1928, in front of the feature Gang War. The audience loved the short. The success of Mickey led to Walt deciding that in order to stay afloat and not fall in the same situation he did with Oswald, he needed to diversify. The creation of the Silly Symphonies would lead to more experimentation to animation, with new techniques added to the medium and art form with each iteration. Next week, Walt Disney conceives the first cartoon in true life color.

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period. By 1927, the Alice shorts have run out of steam, so Walt Disney created his first cartoon character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and was commissioned to make 26 Oswald shorts for Universal. People were beginning to take notice because the Oswald shorts were a step up from the Alice shorts, and it became apparent to some critics at the time. Unfortunately, in a series of events, Walt eventually loses his first distributor and the rights to the rabbit that he created. On a long train ride from New York to Los Angeles, he would conceive plans for a substitute character to take Oswald's place. Next week, Walt, in his hour of desperation, conceives and draws one of most beloved and recognized characters in the world.