D52 Week 10: Melody Time!

Imagine you're some sort of child in the late 90s. Your mother would like to do something nice for you, and so she decides to buy you a Disney movie, in the popular Video Home System media format of the day. So many wonderful choices, both classic and recent! Now imagine that your mom's really weird and has ended up giving you Melody Time instead. You've just been imagining something not-as-bleak-as-usual from my childhood! And I imagine you'd be just as disappointed as I was. This just really is not a movie for young children anytime in the last couple decades. The Andrews Sisters! The Sons of the Pioneers! Horticulture! This did not interest me! I haven't dragged out that old VHS tape in over a decade because, um, it just didn't sound like fun. But was there any chance that I might enjoy it more now, ostensibly being an adult and with a bit more of a historical perspective of the 1940s in Disney history?

Well, no. Not at all, obviously. But perhaps it could at least follow through with one of the concepts laid out during its titular song?

Mel-oh-dee Tiiiiime! It's time for sweet romance...

I'm going to hold you to that. I'd better be up to my ears in sweet romance with every single short or you're gonna get a knuckle sandwich, everyone involved with this film.

Once Upon a Wintertime

Oh jeez. Perhaps it's just me, but this felt just a little too uncomfortable, what with the clueless sexism and all. "Women are simple-minded and fickle and they faint at the mere whiff of danger so they should never leave our sight ever, am I right, guys?" And if the last-minute-waterfall-rescue-as-a-big-action-climax isn't a tired cliché by this point, then I don't know what is! It wasn't even fresh in 1948! Perhaps upping the cute-bunny-to-boring-people ratio would've made the bitter uninterestingness go down better? As is, it's a really weak start to the collection, unless of course you actually like old-timey upskirt shorts or something. Is ice-skating on frozen rivers really something that people do? Because that's obviously a stupid thing to do. Am I right, guys?

And the sweet romance? Human Lady is willing to love Human Fellow despite his ridiculous clown nose, and Human Fellow is willing to love her back despite the flat, featureless patch of skin where here nose should be. It's touching.

Bumble Boogie

So, apparently, "Flight of the Bumblebee" is among the many pieces they'd considered for Flight of the Bumblebee. They probably didn't even enter the planning phases for that, I presume, but it still would've been interesting to see how that would've turned out, relative to this. It's a shame I didn't like this more, because I like some of the ideas and it's not badly done or anything and I genuinely regard it quite positively. However, it's full of stuff that's just a little disturbing - like the horns blowing out of their big horn eyes! - without having any real sense of purpose or imagination to justify it. Weirdness for the sake of being weird. Plus, seriously, it's a jazzy rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee", which is already a bouncy and fast-paced song, so why so many awkward stillish shots? This needed a lot more energy to be what it wanted to be. At least Make Mine Music understood that much. But this is still perfectly respectable!

And the sweet romance? One of the primary reasons bees even exist in the first place is as the noble middleman that flowers use to bump uglies. 'Nuff said.

The Legend of Johnny Appleseed

If you ever encounter a skunk, it won't spray you if you bend down and try to pet it! Trust ol' Johnny Appleseed on that! You know you can trust him, because he's relentlessly perfect, you see. Here's one of those times where I have to be a major contrarian, I guess, because it seems like most people regard this as one of the highlights of this package. But it's totally not! Johnny Appleseed just isn't an interesting character, at least not until he's a crotchety old dead guy. His only good scenes are the ones where he plays straight man to his crotchety old guardian angel. The rest of the time, he's as entertaining as, well, any other bland guy planting trees while carrying around a Bible really can be. I suppose I can see why people praise it: by the standard of these package films, the animation's pretty great, including a good old-fashioned Disney forest-full-of-adorable-critters, and there are some decent songs to back it up, too. This is clearly a quality piece of work, and it really is too bad that it still couldn't make up for the fact that Johnny Appleseed, in any form, is just too much of a goody-goody to be comically or dramatically interesting. But, please, tell me why I'm wrong.

And the sweet romance? Mr. Guy and Little Miss Lady both try to bite into the dangling apple at the same time, but some mischievous scamp yanks it up at the last second, and they end up accidentally kissing instead. Awwwwwww. Sweet romance. Even though this sweet romance is just as much her fault as it is his, Little Miss Lady slaps Mr. Guy in the face, and that's totally okay, because, pfft, women, am I right, guys?

Little Toot

I have a question for you. If, through some sort of bizarre time shift, Melody Time were released last decade, within several years after 9/11, would people have been okay with the concept of a ship slamming into a bunch of buildings like that? It's a bizarrely realistic-looking accident as depicted, after all. When I was a kid, though, I was more terrified of the creepy terror buoys, as voiced by the Andrews Sisters, whose singing I found deeply unsettling at that age in the first place. As an adult of sorts, their singing in this segment still grates on my nerves, but I'm more able to appreciate the animation, which is really quite nice here! The subtle personality details on the different boats were a nice touch, and the stormy battering Little Toot around is animated entirely too effectively to be in an ostensibly low-budget package film. Like Johnny Appleseed, it's good animation wasted on an empty shell of a story, but still. Good animation. "Yes, you're now a great big toot, Little Toot!"

And the sweet romance? It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean! ;)

Trees

Make Mine Music's "Casey at the Bat" maybe have been uninteresting, but now it's officially not the most boring "Musical Recitation" from the 1940s package films! This suffers from a pretty nasty case of Blue Bayou Syndrome, looking really quite beautiful, yet also being soooo slow-moving that boredom seriously muffles its artistic achievement. Also, Joyce Kilmer is a fucking hack.

And the sweet romance? Um. Well, this short contains a spider. What about him? I bet he's eaten a few sweet roaming ants before.

Blame It on the Samba

World War: The Sequel has come and gone, but that's still no reason to forget that Brazil totally exists, sez José Carioca! I promise, I'll never forget again! I actually enjoyed this more than the José-and-Donald-dance-to-a-popular-Latin-song-with-a-live-action-person bits from Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Admittedly that's not saying a whole lot, but the animation is noticeably better here, with a pleasant sense of energy that fits like a glove. A correctly sized glove. Plus, I kind of have a thing for jazzy organ use. So, this was mostly fine by me. It's a little concerting that the Aracuan Bird attempts to blow up Ethel Smith, though. Live-action people are very susceptible to dynamite, you know! Who knows what would've happened to her if she wasn't protected by her magical half-live-action organ???

And the sweet romance? Though Donald Duck appears to have mostly overcome the outward expressions of his sexual frustration that plagued The Three Caballeros, you know he's still feeling it on the inside. There's no doubt in my mind that Donald still would still very much want to bust his big red dynamite stick inside Ethel Smith's magical organ too oh god please kill me for just having typed that

Pecos Bill

I, uh....I kinda really hate country-western music, so I'm automatically predisposed to be irked by this - and yet, somehow I actually sort of wasn't. At the very least, it's better than "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed", because it at recognizes the most essential thing about telling a story about larger-than-life folk heroes: making them, um, larger than life. It's fun to laugh at ridiculously outrageous claims about legendary figures! I suppose it's hard to do much more with a man who spend his entire life gardening, but still, this is how you tell a story, folks! It's not my kind of thing, but it's a story well-told. As an added bonus, Luana Patten pops up in the live-action scenes, reassuring us that Edgar Bergen's famous sexy parties hadn't resulted in her demise. YET.

Of course, if you're watching this on DVD and you're an American, this sequence is edited so we don't ever have to see Pecos Bill interacting with cigarettes. Yes, this was an era where even feral children smoked! It's weird, of course - José puffing away on his bird cigar is perfectly fine for Those Kids Today, whereas cigarettes aren't. Just like Goofy's cigarette in Saludos Amigos. But, of course, Live-Action Walt Disney was allowed to smoke there. Do you suppose it has anything to do, specifically, with the fact that Bill and Goofy's cigarettes were hand-rolled? Hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes aren't exactly common in this day and age, are they? I honestly don't know. Anyway, apparently that's unacceptable, but the Painted Indians and the term "redskins" aren't offensive in the least, according to Disney. And our nation's capital's NFL franchise.

And the sweet romance? Well, that's obvious. Pecos Bill fell madly in love with the "powerful stimulatin'" Slue-Foot Sue! "Aw, shucks, a woman in the story!" Am I right, guys??? Pecos Bill's demonic murderhorse knows what I mean, at least.

Overall

As it turns out, Melody Time actually isn't all bad! It occupies a strange space, though; compared to the shorts seen in Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, and Make Mine Music, the production values seem significantly better, and yet, the actual ideas in most of these shorts seem almost threadbare by comparison. It has the most in common with Make Mine Music, of course - they're both ostensibly "classy" productions whose most satisfying segments are, contradictorily, the ones where the film gets to let loose a little bit. Again, I wouldn't really recommend the film so much as I'd recommend tracking down the couple decent segments elsewhere. You can probably live without Pecos Bill and his Painted Indian Stereotypes, for instance.

Only one package film left to go! You can get though this, Jesse, don't give up....

TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND EVIL DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: Melo-Deux Time is basically just a compilation of those Re-Micks segments they show on the Disney channel. Once you see classic Mickey Mouse footage careening illogically towards the collected musical works of such artists as Far East Movement and The Black Eyed Peas and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, you shall become heartwarmingly aware that this truly is the ultimate culmination of decades of Disney history. As a DVD featurette somehow involving Leonard Maltin will inform us, this is the way Walt always envisioned these shorts; he always lamented the fact that hip-hop had not yet been invented. It made him frown. :( But now, we were able to fulfill his dream, and it makes his frozen body smile. :)