Quick Note RE: Old Items

As I tried to note before (including in blue type above the postings), the machine that the early postings linked to was called www.afilm.com, but now is called ftp.afilm.com. If you find that links to e.g. older Action Analysis Classes do not work, please change the "www" in the links to "ftp."
I simply have not had time to change all the postings yet!

I am currently a few days in Denmark... New stuff coming soon!

It's Whom You Know...

I had not seen these before. It makes me think how much went on behind the scenes. These images are from the 1933 Stanford Quad, the Stanford University yearbook. The first image depicts the staff of the humor magazine The Chaparral: editor James Algar and manager Robert deRoos. Wait a minute--Algar we know as animator in the thirties, then director of True-Life Adventures. But deRoos...
Oh, yeah! "The Magic Worlds of Walt Disney" by Robert De Roos in the August 1963 National Geographic! That great 50-page article with the photo of Walt in his Disneyland apartment above the firehouse!
Could this be the same person? I bet it is!
(On page 183 of the article, he even quotes Algar!)

On the second photo we see the members of the Hammer and Coffin Society. And there, in a row, we find... Ollie Johnston, James Algar, Robert deRoos and Gilman Gist, who is described in an interview with Algar that can be found in Didier Ghez' Walt's People Volume 3.
He was the one who got Algar to apply at Disney's but did not get in himself. Algar later convinced Frank and Ollie to apply. Elsewhere in this yearbook we find lots of references to and pictures of Donn B. Tatum, former president and chairman of Walt Disney Productions...[Addition: Hire dates!
09/24/34 Frank Thomas
01/25/35 Ollie Johnston
07/23/35 Jim Algar
This seems to be inconsistent with Algar's story...]

Walt's Palm Springs Retreat

As a little midnight snack, here is a postcard marked "Walt Disney's Palm Springs Home." In pencil on the back someone wrote 1965...
[Addition: I am thinking it may actually still be there, at the south-west corner of the San Gorgonio trail and Middle Road.
See "33.791354,-116.524242" on Google Maps.]

First Day of Issue 1968

Here is a fun item I found at the January NFFC show in Garden Grove. The Walt Disney: Showman of the World stamp issued 9/11/68 has Walt painted by Paul Wenzel and additional characters by Bob Moore. No Disney characters, for at the time the USPS did not allow the copyright symbol on the stamps, something since worked around by printing it on the back.

Here is the invitation for the ceremony with extras, and the back of the program features Walt's own article "The Marceline I Knew" from the 9/2/38 Golden Jubilee edition of the Marceline News...The last two images are of loose sheets that were inside the actual program.

[Added: Though I do not remember where I found it, here is a larger version of the Wenzel/Moore image used for the stamp.]

< Click on it!

Another script: The Fire Fighters

Burt Gillett directed The Fire Fighters, the 1930 Mickey Mouse short. His script for this film was written and drawn on five sides of three sheets of paper. Note for instance that he had already in this stage worked out how the ladder would climb down itself!

It was included in a stack of amazing material that Gillett gave to a young girl in 1934 when he and his wife moved back east to work for Van Beuren. Her heirs auctioned it at Christie's East in 1994 for many thousands of dollars. The images here presented are from the auction catalog...

Snow White in DCA

Finally I got to see the Snow White exhibit in Disneyland's "little sister" park, Disney's California Adventure. Until mid-March, there will be more to this park than only the Soarin' over California attraction and the Pixar zootrope!
A little sampling of drawings from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be precise. Story sketches (including ideas for the bed building sequence), animation drawings, layouts and backgrounds. The cel-setups are (very good) reproductions, but the drawings are the real deal, even accrediting some of the artists -
Art Babbitt, Maurice Noble, Joe Grant, Ferdinand Horvath! The exhibition was made for Snow White's 70th, so I know it is "old news." I found it to be interesting enough to mention it here, though.
Here are a few pictures I took in there today...I have been traveling and working - thus no updates, sorry! More to follow really soon!