PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Song of the South

 
For some reason Disney hasn't had a nice dvd release of Song Of The South yet so the bootleggers will have to do if you want to see this 1946 film. You can find copies all over the place. Most seem to be from the Japanese Laserdisc or the British DVD. Someone gave me a copy of what I think is the British DVD. You can find a copy here, here's a place that has it for $7.99. Perhaps someday Disney will do up a nice disc and we can buy that too. It's a tough one, people are unhappy no matter what you do. I'm prefectly happy to watch the one I have right now, but I'd sure like a nice Platinium Edition 2 - dvd set that had lots of production art and the like on it. It could happen. I know it's a hot potato, but once you explain how to handle them, they aren't so dangerous.

It's post Civil War and Johnny and his Mom go to live with his Grandmother who lives on a nice plantation in the south. Lots of black people live on the plantation, working as share croppers. Johnny takes a likin' to Uncle Remus and his stories but mom thinks the elderly man is a bad influence on her son. It gets worse and worse and Johnny is knocked down by a bull. It's sad but he'll be ok. Uncle Remus can fix it with a dose of Brer Rabbit. Johnny makes friends with two local children, both of them poor, one black and one white. You can read a more detailed synopsis of the movie at Christian Willis's site. There's a puppy in there too. It's sentimental melodrama, and I got a tear at the end. It's pretty to look at and the animation is some of the companies best. I even like the songs by Johnny Mercer.

    
That's Uncle Remus in his cabin with the three kids, then it's Johnny, Toby and Ginny. They're all pretty cute. Uncle Remus tells the Brer Rabbit stories to illustrate a moral lesson. The kids learn. There's some conflict with Johnny's mom and just about everyone else. She'll get over that eventually, fixed by singin' and story tellin'. I like stories.

    
 
I really developed an affection for the Brer Rabbit that Paul Murry drew in Walt Disney Comics and Stories. Murry drew a ton of art for Western, all kinds of characters and stories. Western Publishing was the company that made Disney Comics from the 1930's to the 1970's. Disney tried doing comics back in the 1990's but it was a failure. I'm mostly interested in the old books. That's Dell Four Color 129 from December 1946. That's pretty old. It adapts some of the animated parts of the Song of the South. You can read the rest of the tar baby story plus another whole story here. The inking is by Carl Buettner. I really have a great respect for both Murry and Buettner. They created some very entertaining stories and some really nice artwork in their comic stories. For me Paul Murry is right up there with Carl Barks as a comic creator.

Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

Because I was careless I missed picking up the dvd of Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh last year when it came out. It sold out in a month. There were only 39,500 made and I guess people really snapped them up. Many of them for resale. A month after it came out there were resellers asking $80 for them on Amazon. Now the lowest starts at 100 US Samolians. You can buy a bootleg from places for less than 15 bucks. That's the main thing that I dislike about the Disney Treasures series, the limited nature of them, and they keep reducing the quantities of the sets. They are gone quickly and Dr. Syn's dvd disappeared faster than the character disappears into the night. Someone was nice enough to slip me disc one. I watched the 3 part series that ran on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color in 1964. I had a vague memory of not caring for the series when I saw it as a kid. No idea why, it's been too long. I enjoyed them this time. Patrick McGoohan is Dr. Syn, a mild mannered Vicar by day and The Scarecrow, the Devilish leader of a gang of smugglers, in the dark black night. It's Britian in the 1770's and they had some suckin' sort of life going on there. The locals in the area smuggle so they don't have to pay the heavy import tax. Saves some money. Dr. Syn takes on the identity of The Scarecrow and organizes the smugglers. They use the profits to help people pay the heavy taxes levied by the King, who seems a right dick. In the first story Dr. Syn helps a young American prisoner. Each of the hour parts has a different story. The US, and I am betting Canada, saw the series on TV Feb of 1964. Britian and the rest of the world got a 98 minute movie a few months earlier than the TV release. The nicest thing about this presentation is the actual episodes are widescreen, just like the movie. There's some sword fighting, musket shooting, cannon blastin', horse riding and  fisticuffs. Very entertaining. A shame you can't go down to the store and pick one up.

LEGO Toy Story

I picked this picture off of the Eurobricks site. It's the display at the D23 convention. I hadn't seen the larger brick versions of Buzz or Zurg. They look pretty fun, though Zurg seems a bit slim in the torso. D23 is an official Disney convention. They have a D23 site that has lots of activities but the only reason I go there is they have some comic strips running. There's a Mickey Mouse strip, a Donald Duck strip and a Scamp strip. They are all daily newspaper strips, they started at the beginning of their runs, and they have been at it for 6 months. I've saved them all so far. But this isn't about Mickey and the gang, it's about Woody and the gang. I saw some pics of the minifigs on The Brothers Brick a bit ago.

They have some neat new parts and colors. People are already excited over the army uniforms. I like the minifigs, especially Zurg, and the donkey. The martian looks great too. There are also the Prince of Persia and Car tie-ins coming. The first sounds interesting, there's an ostrich and a camel, and some nice new costumes.

Science Fiction Funday 42

Poor Fred McMurray is a dog hating mailman with two teenage boys in Disney's 1959 movie The Shaggy Dog. Tommy Kirk plays the older son, a rocket enthusiast, and Kevin Corcoran plays the younger son, a kid. Annette Funicello plays the cute girl. Tim Considine is Tommy's rival for Annette's affection, at least until the even more interesting and foreign Roberta Shore arrives in town with a large shaggy dog in tow. Tommy, while hanging out at the museum run by Cecil Kellaway, tries on a ring that curses him. His curse? Turning into that same shaggy dog. Yeow! It's the movie that jump started Fred McMurray's flagging career and launched a long line of live action comedies for Disney. They would follow TSD with the two Fred McMurray comedies involving Flubber. Maybe you heard of them. While Tommy tries to deal with turning into a dog he discovers that Roberta's uncle is really a spy. Soon Fred gets into the antics. That leads him to the police and getting analyzed by vetran voice actor Paul Frees. I've always been a fan of the man. More running about and the movie is over. The director is Charles Barton who worked with many of the young actors in the movie on the Disney series Spin and Marty. That was a pretty entertaining series that ran in little short episodes on the Mickey Mouse Club Show. There was a dvd out a few years ago but it's probably out of print. The Shaggy Dog was based on story The Hound Of Florence by Felix Slaten, who wrote the novel Bambi.

The 1976 sequel The Shaggy DA has Tommy Kirk all grown up. He's played by Dean Jones now. Dean's married to Suzanne Pleshette and they have a little boy. Keenan Wynne is the town's District Attorney and the bad guy. He played that role in several previous Disney movies. Tim Conway is the comic relief machine, no Othello for that guy, still a meaty part. Tim has the dog that Dean turns into, an ice cream truck with more than 39 flavors, and Jo Anne Worley as his girlfriend. She's in the roller derby. That's a whole movie's worth of running gags right there. Some criminals are working the city pretty hard. The current DA is doing little. After his house is cleaned out Dean decides to run for DA and clean up the town. The crooks steal the ring and it starts working it's mojo while Dean is trying to get his campaign on. Hi-jinks insue. The sequel isn't as charming as the first movie, but it's still ok. Not great but entertaining enough.

Dona Rosa at FALLCON Oct 4 & 5, 2008

   

   

I decided to add the other photos that I took at Don Rosa's table at FALLCON. He had a lot of 11 by 17 inch prints for sale. I bought a copy of the one that has the whole Duck clan. It's in the left picture in the row above. Right next to the excited Donald. There are all sorts of comic cover parodies on the back wall. I really liked the large poster that sat across from Rosa's table. Scrooge and Goldie. I wouldn't mind getting one of those signed.  It's looks like it's advertising one of his collections. That's one of the things that Don talked about in his talk. Donald and Scrooge are so very popular in Europe. Not so much so here, where people just don't read the Disney comics. Sad, really.