The MousePod - MousePod #28 - Swing Street
 

At the end of the last show I said that I’d be combining Make Mine Music and Melody Time into a single podcast. How silly of me. Clocking in at just under two hours, this MousePod covers just the 1946 Disney Animated Classic Make Mine Music. I hit the high points, the low points, and everything in between in this almost universally ignored Disney flick.
It’s worth noting that while I hit the books for this one, I found a ton of useful information from a few brilliant bloggers: Michael Barrier, Jenny Lerew, and Mark Mayerson. I want to thank them for the excellent work they do, and I encourage you to check out their work.
This show also features a conversation with Gary from The Mouse Lounge, one of my favorite Disney podcasts.
Finally, there’s a great audio bit at the end of the show (no fair skipping ahead) that made me so happy when I discovered it - I know you’ll get a kick out of it, too.
See ya real soon,
Jesse

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Great episode. I really dug Peter and the Wolf, what a lucky find that was!

But who in their right mind let Nat King Cole sing in Spanish. Sorry Jesse, but I cringed and laughed through that whole song his accent was so terrible.

Absolutely LOVED the Peter & the Wolf that closed the podcast. :cool: :snap:

Also, Hans Conried performs in one of my favorite films, the Dr. Seuss story and Stanley Kramer produced, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T - Conried steals the picture

Is it....atomic?!

It should also be noted that Conried is the voice of Mr. Darling as well as Captain Hook in Peter Pan.

Years ago, back in the days before DVD, a company called Voyager announced that they were planning to release a special edition Criterion laserdisc of "The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T". Unfortunately, it never came to fruition.

I have a vinyl bootleg soundtrack of the movie, which contains all of the songs from the film on side one, while side two featured songs cut from the movie, all sung by the stars.

A year or so ago, Heather was working on a Seuss project and had the opportunity to visit the archives. She asked the archivist helping her if she could see the art from the Dr. T project, and was presented with a pile of neat stuff (none of which she could copy - bummer).

I'd be so happy if someone revived the special edition plan...

"Abraca-dibrica-dabrica-dilliker / T-E-R-W-I-L-L-illiker"...


...and isn't Mr. Darling / Captain Hook traditionally played by the same actor?

We own a VHS copy of Dr. T. As a side note, as I've mentioned in the past, it seems that Matt Groenig, of Simpsons fame, likely has seen Dr. T. The kid's name is Bart and his arch nemesis is Dr. Terwilliker (close enough to Sideshow Bob Terwilliger for my tastes).

And yes, that is indeed true about Mr. Darling/Captain Hook.

I think this is one of my favorite podcasts to date. I really enjoyed the history and the section on Fred Moore. Thanks for the links to the other animator's blogs. Have you heard of The Animation Podcast? I've been listening to that one, and it's been really interesting.

A few years back on ebay I was bidding on an original "Happy Fingers" beanie, but lost it. I don't feel bad, I was out long before the finish at 5k.
But, I'd still love to have one! Practice Makes Perfect!

I've always wondered if they were out there. *drool*

Check this out.

Let's not bid against each other.

oh crikey, I've got zero mousepod listening time. What if the next one's here before I've listened to this one???


Slow down, Jesse. Isn't it time for one of those long sabaticals?

Here's a YouTube link for "All The Cats Join In"

Great show. When you move down here I'm going to teach you how to pronounce "tres". :p Maybe I'll teach Nat King Cole too. I was transfixed throughout Peter and the Wolf. Conried rules.

I'm only part way through. Makes excellent treadmill listening.

I hate to tell ya, iSm, but I have interviews recorded for at least four shows... the slowest I can do it is every other week...

Beautiful! Youtube isn't the best way to see the short, but if you don't already have it... it's a great way to check it out.

I love Conried, too.

And I hate to get defensive, but I do know how to pronounce "tres". Five years of high school Spanish, plus I lived in, like, Nueva York for most of my adult life until I moved to San Francisco (home of the mission burrito) 11 years ago. I forgive Nat Cole his accent (there's really no such thing as a "Spanish" accent, it's spoken natively in so many different places) and his pronunciation (have you ever heard him sing in English?). I think what was made his version of the song so great is the fantastic arrangement - so f**ing lush... I had instant regret when I made poor Dinah Shore follow him.

Nothing relevant to add, but on the topic of famous people in the wrong language, I point you to Laurel & Hardy redoing one of their shorts in Spanish.

(This isn't dubbed, back in the early days of sound it was common to do a movie in several languages with the major cast doing their phonetic best, more details here).

Aha, I HAVE seen All the Cats. It sounded familiar from the description and seeing this it is indeed the one I was thinking of. What a fabulous cartoon. Bringing the Fantasia/MMM theme full circle, it definitely brings to mind the Rhapsody in Blue cut from Fantasia 2000.

There's certainly an argument to be made that the only truly "bad" accent is one that is unintelligible...but Cole was in need of an intervention as he was clearly huked en fonicos (but I think the library lost the tape on how to pronounce "r"s). Nowhere, but nowhere, in the native Spanish speaking world is "tres" a homophone for Ms. MacNeille's first name. And as long as we're talking credentials, both of my parents are fluent and have been mistaken for native speakers. I was on the verge of fluency myself by the end of high school (sadly, due to lack of/failure to seek out opportunities to speak it at UCI, I've regressed pitifully in the ensuing decade).

It was indeed a beautiful piece of music, but Cole's brute force Spanish-by-numbers vocals were way too distracting to me and Dinah Shore was a refreshing change.

Rather than argue an unwinnable point, I will instead thank you for enjoying the musical choices as they stood, teaching me that second-guessing is a silly and pointless thing.

Now, if you told me you liked the visuals that accompany the Dinah Shore short in MMM, then there would be a more "lively" discussion.

What if I won the point instead? :evil:

Check this out. One of many online. At one point they say "the Spanish R sounds nothing like the English R". If you find me a pronunciation site that says otherwise, I'll eat my hat.

Fine. You win. I said "unwinnable" when I should have said "retarded".

Since you don't want to drop the subject, I will reveal that I purposely pronounced the title of the song to match Nat 'King' Cole's pronunciation (how's that for a peek behind the curtain?).

I'm certainly not fluent, but I do know enough Spanish to know what an r sounds like.

Did you like the song? I did.

Jeez, since when is it retarded to want to pronounce things correctly? How could I have known you did it on purpose? (If that's even true. :p) I didn't mean to out you or "ruin the magic" or anything. I wouldn't be surprised if you got a ton of emails on the subject.

I love Nat King Cole's voice but, like GD, I just can't handle the way he sings that. That's all.

No harm meant, hopefully none done.

I didn't say that wanting to pronounce things correctly was retarded, I said that beating the dead horse of the argument as you guys seemed to want to do was retarded.

I get that you didn't like the way that Nat pronounces his Spanish words. I'll bet that others felt that way, too. I also bet that the hundreds of thousands of people that bought his three Spanish language albums (including many in Latin America) could see past his pronunciation.

From the Washington Post Online:
From Cubanow.net:
The horse is dead.

(and it's "Fawlty" Towers)

If it helps, I know precisely what a Spanish r sounds like but I seem to be physiologically incapable of producing that sound.

So team together and make fun of me!

Oh, and I thought the Nat King Cole song was too cool for school. I don't know that the controversy's all about ... that's a smooth song.


I'm not much past that point in the show yet ... but I wanted to thank Jesse for that tangent-tip about the Clair de Lune restoration on that weird Fantasia DVD. I had forgotten all about it ... and it was certainly worth seeing again. (Though I don't buy that it was excised from Fantasia due to time constraints. It's only 2 minutes long ... which is itself why it doesn't fit in with any of the other pieces there.)

I never want to see that footage as "Blue Bayou" again, blecch. Oh well, we got a good restaurant name out of it.

It's not "Farty Towers?" I distinctly recall an episode where the sign said 'Farty', but maybe that was the Spanish version. ;)

I thought it was Flowery Twats, but I'm pretty sure that's French.

Since there are about 40 different Spanish accents, I don't see what the problem is.

We're past that now. I think we were talking about Fatty Owls.

You know, despite having studied French for over five years, I still cannot say the French 'R'- you're supposed to sort of roll it over your tongue then end with a kind of retching sound, at least when combined with H's and such. Never could do it. Sober, anyways.

I could never get that whole back-of-the-throat thing in French class. But now that I'm trying to sing in Italian with a tongue-flippy "R" I'm all about the French "R".

Well, call me Kay Fwancis, I can't even do Amewican Awwwws, forget Spanish, French or Catalan.

It was Farty Towels.

It's too bad you couldn't get any swing dancers to comment on the All the Cats Join In segment. Guess they were all too busy dancing.

I finally found it myself on YouTube (this internet thingie is pretty cool) and I watched it and it's great but then all these other swing related videos pop up over on the right and I have to watch them and then I have to go to bed.

Mousepod,
thank you for humanizing Fred Moore. His long list of accomplishments should never go unnoticed nor tainted by life's troubles. I couldn't believe what I had read on IMDB.com.
The List of greatness.
He did more then I could have imagined.