Melody Time
Melody Time is a 1948 American live-action and animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney. It was released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on May 27, 1948. Made up of seven segments set to popular music and folk music, the film is, like Make Mine Music before it, the popular music version of Fantasia. Melody Time, while not meeting the artistic accomplishments of Fantasia, was mildly successful.
Melody Time
Winston Hibler
Erdman Penner
Harry Reeves
Homer Brightman
Ken Anderson
Ted Sears
Joe Rinaldi
Bill Cottrell
Art Scott
Jesse Marsh
Bob Moore
John Walbridge
Donald Halliday
Thomas Scott
May 27, 1948
75 minutes
United States
English
$1.5 million[1]
$2.56 million (worldwide rentals)[2]
The cast is listed below:[3]
Production[edit]
In late 1947, Disney announced he would be releasing a "regrouping of various cartoons at his studio under two titles, Melody Time and Two Fabulous Characters", to be released in August 1948 and 1949, respectively.[17] Melody Time ended up being released a few months earlier than planned, in May.
Melody Time is considered to be the last anthology feature made by Walt Disney Productions (the next film to be released was The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which featured two stories). These package features were "little-known short-film compilations that Disney produced and released as feature films during World War II". They were "financially (and artistically) lightweight productions meant to bring in profits [to allow the studio to] return to fairy tale single-narrative feature form", an endeavour which they successfully completed two years later with Cinderella. While the shorts "contrast in length, form, and style", a common thread throughout is that each "is accompanied by song[s] from musicians and vocalists of the '40s"[9] – both popular and folk music.[18] This sets it apart from the similarly structured Fantasia, whose segments were set to classical music instead.[19] As opposed to Fun and Fancy Free, whose story was bound to the tales of Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk, in this film "Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein".[20]
Melody Time was the last film The Andrews Sisters took part in. They sang throughout the 10-minute segment known as Little Toot. Andrews Sisters member Maxine said: "It was quite an experience. On the wall at the studio they had the whole story in picture form. Two songwriters played the score and Walt Disney explained it to us. It was a new thing for Disney. We sang the narrative. It was very exciting to work with Disney-he was such a gentleman".[14]
Favorite Disney juvenile actors Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, who also starred in Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart, appear in the last sequence as the two children who hear the story of Pecos Bill.[6]
Melody Time was the last feature film to include Donald Duck and José Carioca until the 1988 Touchstone Pictures film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.[6]
Controversy[edit]
Due to the controversy surrounding the smoking in Pecos Bill, the segment was "heavily edited" when the film was released onto VHS in 1998. While the character of Bill is shown "smoking a cigarette in several sequences", the edited version cuts these scenes, "resulting in the removal of almost the entire tornado sequence, and [creating] some odd hand and mouth movements for Bill throughout". In a review at DVDizzy, it is noted that if one has an interest in the shorts, one will "probably be upset to know that Disney has decided to digitally edit out contents of the 50-plus-year-old frames of animation".[9] In the Melody Time section of the Your Guide To Disney's 50 Animated Features feature at Empire Online, the review said of the editing: "at least, it was [done] for the US releases, but not for the rest of the world. Go figure."[15] The scenes are removed on the Gold Collection DVD release[12] although the Japanese laserdisc and the version of the DVD released in the United Kingdom are uncut. For the first time in 80 years, the uncut version with Pecos Bill's cigarette can now be seen on Disney+, alongside a Disney Movie Club exclusive Blu-ray, released on November 2, 2021.
According to a source, upon reviewing the music that Ken Darby had composed for Johnny Appleseed, Walt Disney "scorned the music", describing it as "like New Deal music". Darby was "enraged", and said to Disney "THAT is just a cross-section of one man's opinion!". Darby was only employed at The Walt Disney Company for a short while after this supposed incident.
Jerry Beck, in his book The Animated Movie Guide, comments on a risqué joke in Pecos Bill that somehow made it past the censors, when Bill kisses Sue and his guns rise from their holsters and begin to fire by themselves, simulating ejaculation. He adds jokingly that "perhaps Roy Rogers was covering the eyes of Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten during this scene".[12]
Legacy[edit]
Many of the seven segments were later released as shorts, and some of them became "more successful than the original film". Bumble Boogie was among the few segments to receive huge popularity upon individual release.[26] The article The Walt Disney Classics Collection Gets "Twitterpatted" For Spring notes that "the Little Toot segment of the film was so popular that it was re-released on its own as a short cartoon in 1954, and was subsequently featured on Walt Disney's popular weekly television series".[29]
There are many references to the Pecos Bill segment in the Frontierland part of Magic Kingdom: there is a sign of Bill outside the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Cafe, as well as various images of him, the other characters, and their accessories around the cafe. A pair of gloves with the inscription "To Billy, All My Love, Slue Foot Sue" is located in a glass display case. In the World of Disney, Jose Carioca from Blame it on the Samba appears in a mural on the ceiling among many other characters. In a glass case, behind the windows of the All-Star Movies, there is a script for Melody Time.[6]