Saturday marks the 45th birthday of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Come out to socialize with Tim and Anthony as they share a little Mansion history and talk about what makes the home of 999 happy haunts such an incredible attraction all these years later.
Also, in this episode:
CEO Bob Iger got the interwebs buzzing this week with his comment that Disney's plan to "grow Stars Wars' presence significantly" in the parks. We'll look at what it means and what it doesn't and why everyone just needs to settle down.
Tickets to the 2015 D23 Expo, Disney's ultimate fan event, go on sale on August 14th at 10 a.m. PT. We take a look back at past Expos and try to justify why spending $2,000 for a Sorcerer Package ticket might actually be a pretty good deal.
Disney is opening the video vault and releasing Tarzan, Hercules and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad on Blu-ray for the first time. A newer home video release is Disneynature's Bears and Tim offers his review of the Alaska nature doc. It's a beautiful film, but does is really benefit from being narrated by Wreck-It Ralph?
This week, we hit 1,500 likes on The Mouse Castle Facebook page. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm cleaning out the gift closet and giving away a bunch of Disney stuff. You could win one of these very cool prizes:
Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong by Michael Labrie, companion book to the current exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum plus two tickets to the museum.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney's Classic Animated Film by J. B. Kaufman, signed by Lella Smith, creative director with the Walt Disney Animation Research Library and curator of the former WDFM exhibit.
The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by J. B. Kaufman.
The Sword in the Stone 50th Anniversary Blu-ray Combo Pack.
Robin Hood 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Combo Pack.
Disneynature's Chimpanzee Blu-ray/DVD.
Oz the Great and Powerful DVD.
Disneynature's Crimson Wing DVD.
To be entered in the drawing, all you have to do is LIKE our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/themousecastle and JOIN our event at www.facebook.com/events/180775945440694/. You must be a U.S. resident to enter. Only one entry per person, please. Winners will be announced on our Facebook page after the entry deadline. Thanks for supporting The Mouse Castle and The Mouse Castle Lounge. Good luck!
Chimpanzee's principal photographer Martyn Colbeck
You can't watch the home video release of Disneynature's Chimpanzee without gaining an incredible respect for the talent and grit of its film makers. Take time to view On Location: The Making of 'Chimpanzee' on the Blu-ray disc and you'll witness firsthand the extreme conditions they had to endure just to capture a few seconds of usable footage each day. High humidity, torrential rain, relentless swarms of bees and all manner of poisonous snakes and insects were standard issue during the more than three years it took to film Chimpanzee in the remote rain forests of the République de Côte-d’Ivoire. Camera crews would often trudge for hours carrying heavy equipment through dense vegetation just to get to where the chimpanzees lived. Chimpanzee was a difficult, but rewarding, passion project for this committed group of professionals. As principal photographer Martyn Colbeck noted, "There must be easier ways to make a living, but they're not as much fun."
It was definitely not easy, but the results were exquisite. Chimpanzee is a stunningly beautiful film and the most emotionally compelling entry in the Disneynature series.
Oscar
The documentary focuses on young Oscar, a baby chimpanzee being raised by his mother, Isha, among a group of chimps led and protected by the strong and dominant Freddy. Oscar is every bit as playful and high-spirited as his mother is doting and responsible. And he's also pretty darn cute. With his mother's guidance, Oscar learns the ways of the rain forest--how to forage for food, how to crack open the nuts that are the staple of their diet, and how to remain safe from predators. It's a largely idyllic existence. They eat, they frolic and play, groom, repeat. That is, until a rival group of chimpanzees challenges Freddy's turf and brings tragedy upon poor Oscar.
In wildlife documentaries, it's never enough to just find a group of animals, set up your tripod and start shooting. There needs to be a story to tell, with a helpful twist of fate or two to bring the story to life. And then, the camera has to be there to record it. There are no second takes in nature. When Isha was killed, director Alastair Fothergill thought his film was through. Unprotected in the wild, Oscar wasn't expected to survive. And without him, there was no story. "We thought the film was over," said Fothergill. "We were about to ring up Disney and say, 'Guys, we haven't got a movie.'"
Then something remarkable happened. Freddy began looking after Oscar, an act rarely scene among chimpanzees and never before caught on film. Here was the alpha male of the group essentially adopting the young chimp and caring for him as his own. Freddy protected Oscar, groomed him and made sure he was fed. And the cameras caught every moment of it.
These are very sweet, very tender and very real moments that give Chimpanzee its life. Certainly, there are gorgeous wide shots of the lush green rain forest (the tracking shots of the forest canopy from specially-designed cable rigs are amazing), but it's when the cameras get down to ground level amid both the serenity and chaos of chimpanzee life that special things happen. It's proof that even with the determination of talented film makers in a harsh natural environment, sometimes it's still better to be lucky than good.
A clip from The Heart of Chimpanzee Blu-ray bonus feature:
Chimpanzee is available now on Blu-ray/DVD Combo Packs and digital download. Make your purchase by August 27 and Disney will donate a portion of the sale to the Jane Goodall Institute to help save chimpanzees in the wild.
Sometimes, if I close my eyes I can still hear those familiar mechanical sounds. The hums, whirs and clicks of celluloid driven by a motor through sprockets and spindles, the friction of film rubbing against metal reels. In a darkened classroom I sat, watching lighted images of nature projected on a white screen. Sometimes they were of industrious beavers building dams, other times of barking fur seals frolicking on rocks. The voice of the films' narrator--straightforward and slightly amused--is as indelible in my head now as the noise of the projector. Suddenly, I'm 11-years-old again.
This is my memory of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures.
In 1943, Walt said of his films, "It is not visionary or presumptuous for us to anticipate the use of our own medium in the curriculum of every schoolroom in the world." To say these words were prophetic, particularly in the U.S., is a gross understatement. If you were a kid in the 1960s or '70s, there's a pretty good chance more than one Disney picture in 16mm was shown in your classroom, either to educate or to entertain, usually both. It was in elementary school that I first saw the Disney chestnuts Johnny Tremain and So Dear to My Heart, not to mention countless installments of the I'm No Fool cartoon series starring Jiminy Cricket.
But, it was the True-Life Adventures that stuck with me the most over the years. Full of both grandeur and intimacy, fact and fun, they presented an accessible and palatable look at nature. For a child of the suburbs, they made the great outdoors kinda cool.
As early as 1944, Walt Disney had been approached by the likes of Encyclopedia Britannica and the New York Zoological Society to produce educational films of some sort. Walt was intrigued by the idea, but balked at taking an academic approach to the subject matter. "We can't be boring," he would often say. "We've got to be entertaining." Following World War II, Ben Sharpsteen, one of Disney's key directors and production supervisors, approached Walt about doing a film on veterans homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness. Sharpsteen got Walt's OK, and the studio contacted Alfred and Elma Milotte, husband-and-wife film makers in Alaska, to shoot raw footage of area industry, nature and culture. As thousands of feet of film came back to the studio, Walt realized that there wasn't much entertainment value in mining, logging and building railroads, so he urged the Milottes to continue filming more animals and native Eskimos. It was Alfred Milotte who eventually suggested to Walt that they go to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, the home of thousands of fur seals. There, the couple shot for a year, capturing the migrations, mating habits and savage power struggles within this community of sea mammals. The footage was compelling and Walt was hooked. He tossed out the notion of using the Eskimo footage and focused solely on the seals. By the end of 1948, Seal Island, the first of Disney's True-Life Adventures, was ready for theatrical release--but, not without resistance.
Disney's distributor at the time, RKO, wanted nothing to do with a 28-minute nature documentary. To them, the film had no commercial appeal--audiences would be bored. Undeterred, Walt trusted his instincts and circumvented his detractors, arranging for Seal Island to be shown at the Crown Theater in Pasadena during the last week of December. The response by audiences and critics was enthusiastic. Here was a nature film that was dramatic, informative and, most of all, entertaining. Less than three months later, it would win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film (Two-Reel). Disney had a hit.
Seal Island established a formula that Disney would utilize in 12 more films (six shorts and six features) over the next 12 years. Each True-Life Adventure would begin with a golden spinning globe shot against a multi-colored background. The title credits would run, followed by an animated opening sequence of a paintbrush painting the area of the world we were about to visit. It could be America's heartland for The Vanishing Prairie or the dark continent of Africa (literally painted black) for The African Lion. Splashes and dots of detail would be added by the brush, creating lakes, streams and mountains on the continental landscape before dissolving into the real-life nature footage. The whole proceeding would be narrated by the friendly voice of Winston Hibler, who along with director James Algar, would write most of the True-Life Adventure scripts.
As a whole, the True-Life Adventure series was well received by critics, although Disney did draw fire from nature purists for taking a cutesy approach to some material and for setting up scenes on soundstages for dramatic effect. This was most apparent in the cutaway view of prairie dog tunnels seen in The Vanishing Prairie...
...and in the brutally fascinating fight-to-the-death battle between a wasp and a tarantula in The Living Desert.
Disney didn't shy away from the seemingly random cruelty of nature. When it was captured in the wild, as in this scene from The African Lion, it was the True-Life Adventures at their most dramatic:
This merger of serious and whimsical, of sound stage and natural splendor, are what ultimately made the True-Life Adventures so watchable. They consistently met Walt's objective to be entertaining first. That they could also be educational and awe-inspiring was a bonus. Liberties were certainly taken in the editing room, but the end results were appreciated by audiences worldwide and definitely made a lasting impression on a certain kid as he sat transfixed in that darkened classroom.
Disney's True-Life Adventures won eight Academy Awards and set the standard for all future nature documentaries. Even today, with Disney resurrecting the genre in its Disneynature series of films, you can see the influence of its 1950s-era predecessors.
African Cats, a look at the private lives of lions and cheetahs in the Masai Mara region of Kenya, is Disneynature's fourth film and the third released in theaters. Like the previous Disneynature films, it emphasizes the epic grandeur of nature--maybe even more so than the True-Life Adventures--in widescreen, high-definition. There is a bigness that defines all the Disneynature films, which is both their blessing and their curse. The films are amazing to look at, make no mistake, but, for all the spectacle Earth, Oceans and African Cats bring to the screen, they lack the intimacy and accessibility that was the hallmark of the True-Life Adventures. Even their narrators shriek of aloof importance: James Earl Jones, Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson. Compare them to the amiable nerdiness of Winston Hibler. I think I prefer my nature docs with a bit more geekery.
Each Disneynature theatrical release has come out on Earth Day, which lends an automatic gravitas to each film. It's a sad reminder of our modern age of climate change and human sprawl. The True-Life Adventures didn't have those storm clouds hanging over them (The Vanishing Prairie being the rare example of a True-Life film that alluded to man's encroachment on the wild). They were documentaries from a more innocent time. Today, we can no longer just celebrate our natural world on film, we're tasked with saving it too...or losing it forever. In that respect, the Disneynature films may be filling a more important role than the True-Life Adventures. What's sad is they're not allowed to just be entertaining anymore.
So, see African Cats this week (Disney is donating a portion of the proceeds to the African Wildlife Foundation). I'll be revisiting my True-Life Adventures DVDs (released in 2006 and packaged appropriately in film cans) and enjoying nature for its own sake. I'll turn the lights down and relish the view on my big screen TV, trying to conjure up nostalgic memories of my youth. Beaver Valley and Nature's Half Acre should do the trick.
I sure will miss the clatter of that film projector, though.
As nature documentaries go, "Earth" has a lot to live up to. The first film released under the Disneynature label, it automatically conjures up comparisons to Disney's "True-Life Adventures" series that set the standard for nature films over 60 years ago. I'm pleased to say "Earth," in theaters nationwide today, carries the mantle of its predecessor quite proudly.
Traveling from Pole to Pole, "Earth" encapsulates a year in the life of our mother planet, showcasing the exquisite beauty of Arctic ice flows, tropical rain forests and vast oceans without shying away from the harsh realities of nature. Thus we see a family of polar bears frolicking in fresh snow even as they are struggling to find food at the edge of an ever-receding ice shelf. We watch in bemusement as young mandarin ducklings "fall with style" in their first flights from their elevated nest. We also witness the steely determination of a cheetah hunting its prey on the African plains.
Last year, when Disney introduced Disneynature for the first time, it smacked of a brand about to caught up in its own self-importance. In the wake of growing public fears about climate change, Disney announced "Earth" would be released on Earth Day 2009 and, oh look, we've got Mr. Circle of Life himself, James Earl Jones, to narrate. "Earth" was already screaming "I'm an important film. You better pay attention." Marketing rhetoric aside, it's a relief to see jaded suspicions melt away as "Earth" draws you into its lyrical beauty. Jones's narration is grandfatherly and understated, not stentorian, with plenty of touches of humor and whimsy. While it makes plenty of references to global warming and the encroachment of man on the animal kingdom, it never belabors the point, allowing you to celebrate the grandeur of earth without fearing for its existence.
"Earth" is a film that avoids nattering on about theories of apocalyptic futures, and instead shows you, in grandiose splendor, what's worth preserving right now.
and 
, not to mention countless installments of the I'm No Fool cartoon series starring Jiminy Cricket.
