Walt Disney Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Music Throwback Saturday: Smile, Darn Ya, Smile

The Smile, Darn You, Smile cartoon was redone, and colorized, in 1995.

For this one, blame fillyjonk. She had a post featuring, among other things, Billy Cotton singing Smile, Darn Ya, Smile from 1931, a song written by Charles O’Flynn, Jack Meskill, and Max Rich.

Also in that post, from that year, a character named Foxy – looking not dissimilar to Mickey Mouse – in an animated feature with the same name as the song. It was a Merrie Melodies cartoon, a producer I recognize as later featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and others.

From Toonzone: This cartoon is very similar to Walt Disney’s Oswald the Rabbit cartoon Trolley Troubles (1927) [where “Oswald is the conductor on a runaway trolley] which [supervising director Rudolf] Ising likely worked on. Disney Swipe: In both Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! and in Disney’s The Opry House (1929), a fat hippo is deflated with a pin.”

The Smile, Darn Ya, Smile cartoon was redone, and colorized, in 1995. “The re-drawn version is never animated at 24 fps (as many scenes in the original are), but only with 12 drawings/second.”

As fillyjonk noted, the song “was used (at least the chorus was) at the very end of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (when the Toons get their happy ending, after all).” It was also recorded by several others.

LINKS

Read the fillyjonk post

Read IMBD of the 1931 cartoon

Watch the side-by-side comparison of the 1931 and 1995 cartoons

Listen to Smile, Darn Ya, Smile by Ben Selvin, which hit #14 on the Billboard charts in 1931 HERE or HERE or HERE

Listen to Smile, Darn Ya, Smile – Percival Mackay & His Kit-Kat Band (1931)

Listen to Smile, Darn Ya, Smile – Joe Morgan and his Palais D’or Orchestra (1931)

Listen to Smile, Darn Ya, Smile – Sammy Davis, Jr., featuring tap dancing

Watch the end of the Roger Rabbit movie

Listen to soundtrack recording of Smile, Darn Ya, Smile from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The lyrics

Smile, darn ya, smile
You know this great world is a good world after all
Smile, darn ya, smile
And right away watch lady luck pay you a call
Things are never black as they are painted
Time for you and joy to get acquainted
So make life worthwhile
Come on and smile, darn ya, smile

November rambling #1: Rebecca Jade’s new video, and Confessions Of An Idiom

What happens if the Elephant in the Room decides to make the Skeleton in the Closet bring the truth to light?

What Evanier said about Paris. Ditto. This is the second time this year my cousin Anne, currently working there, has had to report that she is safe.

Samaritan Lives Matter.

Fall of the House of Bush.

Marilynne Robinson warns against utilitarian trends in higher education.

Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Prisoner Re-entry.

The First County Clerk in the US to Approve a Same-Sex Marriage License. In 1975.

Egypt’s women-only taxi service promises protection from male drivers.

A New Alcott Emerges From The ‘Annotated Little Women’.

Now I Know: How Matthew Broderick Helped Shape American Computer Law and The World’s Most Prolific Author.

Berowne’s participation in the French Revolution. No, not that one.

A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.

Renaissance Geek: Eddie is 51, which is divisible by three.

Simply Red: The Con-Man Behind the Rightwing’s Starbucks Cup Freak-Out.

Wondermark: Throw Back the Dead Man’s Coin.

Binghamton, Now & Then.

Stop expecting artists to work for free — or worse, for “exposure”.

God, on Lawns.

Tosy has 10 opening sentences to short stories that do not exist, yet. But one of them could.

David Kalish: My imagined contract with cockroaches.

The new music video Weather the Storm by Rebecca Jade, the eldest niece.

Allen Toussaint – seven of his greatest songs. Plus Top 10 Allen Toussaint Classic Rock Covers, and finding a big hit in Toussaint’s trash can.

K-Chuck Radio: The WABC Sonic Experience!

Dustbury’s Feel Bad songs. Plus Connie Stevens (!) sang the original of a soul classic.

The Beatles: A 5 Minute Drum Chronology – Kye Smith.

“Love and Theft” – The Veiled but Tangled Roots of Jimmie Rodgers and Tommy Johnson.

Confessions Of An Idiom. What happens if the Elephant in the Room decides to make the Skeleton in the Closet bring the truth to light?

Mad magazine: Overheard at the New Amazon Bookstore.

The Absolute Best Way to Reheat Pizza.

Mark Evanier continues to list the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968, including Jackson Beck (Bluto, King Leonardo) and Dick Beals (Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Davey of Davey and Goliath) and Clarence Nash (Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) and Bill Scott (Bullwinkle J. Moose, Mr. Peabody).

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the first-ever Disney character and a long-eared precursor to Mickey Mouse, features in this long-lost animated film. Another, obscure, Disney film, John Henry.

The finale of a recent episode of Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, a program I forget was even on the air.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

What comics creator has most changed the way people think about comics?

MOVIE REVIEW: Saving Mr. Banks

It was Julie Andrew and her husband Tony Dalton Disney personally toured Disneyland with, not Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers.

The Wife and I saw Saving Mr. Banks a few weeks ago at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, and it was well-crafted, with Emma Thompson quite good as P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins. Even more impressive was Annie Rose Buckley, in her first film, as the writer as a child. I immediately “recognized” the composing Sherman brothers (played by Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak), and other performers, including Bradley Whitford as a Disney creator and Collin Farrell in the flashbacks as the future writer’s father.

So why has it taken me so long to write about this film? Was it about Meryl Streep lashing out at the memory of the real Walt Disney over his purported sexism, at an event honoring Thompson? Nah, that’s not it.

Was it that Tom Hanks was snubbed for an Oscar? Did not see Saving Captain Phillips (yet), but there were stronger folks in the supporting actor category, where his portrayal of Walt Disney would have been placed.

It’s that, from everything I’ve read, the movie is just too far from the truth for my taste. I expect biopics to combine characters, mess with timelines, and the like. This, though, is what my friend Steve Bissette called “the usual corporate product revamps of reality”, though “far less terrible than projected by many.” Bissette, citing the 1999 book MARY POPPINS, SHE WROTE: THE LIFE OF P.L. TRAVERS by Valerie Lawson:

It was Julie Andrew and her husband Tony Dalton Disney personally toured Disneyland with [not Travers], Disney made no trip to London to seal the deal (contracts were signed before Travers went to L.A. to work with the team, and were revised/renegotiated on fine points afterwards), Julie Andrews kept Travers personally up-to-date on the changes being made and fidelity to her character/books, there were no words between Disney and Travers at the L.A. premiere, the whole relationship with the limo driver is pure confection—and as a Gurdjieff devotee, Travers would have reviled the Freudian conceit of the movie.

Although, he adds:

Much of the film IS reflective of what went down, with far more attention to the actual history than most Hollywood films ever, ever give to their own… It’s clear from Lawson’s bio that Travers profited mightily and knew going in and through the process what was going to be done and was done, and did her utmost to ensure some control. The contract Disney extended and honored was extraordinary in its day and today is even moreso.

But knowing SO much is made up – the driver is the one character who humanized her – made it more disappointing, in retrospect.

Still, it LOOKED right. I bought that this was Disneyland, that these were Walt’s employees who he insisted call him by his first name.

Bottom line: you may very well enjoy Saving Mr. Banks. Indeed, I rather did, in spite of my reservations, though the aforementioned Freudian stuff was a little weird. Just don’t believe everything you see.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Norman Rockwell Museum

“It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Walt Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke.”

The day after our trip to Tanglewood, we decided to go to the Norman Rockwell Museum. It was showing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic,” which had opened on June 8 and would be available through October 27, 2013.

The exhibition “features more than 200 works of art including conceptual drawings, early character studies, detailed story sketches, and animation drawings. Also featured are delicate thumbnail layout watercolors, meticulously rendered pencil layouts, rare watercolor backgrounds, colorful cels, and vintage posters all illustrating how Walt Disney advanced the creation of an entirely new art form.

“The exhibition is organized by sequence through the progression of the movie, featuring some never-before-seen works of art.” Among the most interesting were the deleted scenes such as the soup-eating segment, which had a song attached to it, the bed building scene, and a fantasy sequence of Snow White dancing in the stars. These were fine scenes but detracted from the narrative. Dopey had a long piece when Snow “died” which also was scrapped.

It was fun looking at Marge Champion modeling for the dancing scene with Dopey and Sneezy and drawing water from a well. The exhibit, which can usually only be seen at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco came to Massachusetts because of the historic friendship and respect between Rockwell and Disney.

One cannot overstate the importance of Snow White. “It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke—shoot the works. There could be no compromise on money, talent, or time.” He also suggested that it was not aimed at children, and that, indeed, children under the age of seven or eight ought NOT see it; instead, it was targeted at the childlike part of the adult heart.

Did I mention that when we went, it was FREE? It was part of Free Fun Fridays of cultural venues. “Highland Street is giving out a total of $650,000 in grants to open up 60 venues across the state for one Friday,” 10 in the Boston area, but the rest across the state of Massachusetts.