POSTERAMA 7
Today's poster selection is a rare one! It's for the "Mickey Mouse Club 3-D Jamboree", which capitalized on the popularity of the Mouseketeers and the 3-D craze. The film debuted in the Mickey Mouse Club Theater (naturally) in the summer of 1956. According to imdb, it continued to run until 1964, which seems hard to believe, but then again, the MMC Theater was renamed the Fantasyland Theater in '64, so it might be true.
It sounds like it would be an amazing blast to the past to see Jimmy Dodd, Roy Williams, and the Mouseketeers in color AND 3-D! I wish this was included on one of the "Treasures" DVDs. Apparently part of the program included the 3-D animated shorts "Working for Peanuts" and "Melody" ("Oh the bird and the cricket and the willow tree....")...
As for the poster itself, the design attempts to simulate the 3-D experience with those mouse-eared kids and the lettering popping out beyond the proscenium and theater curtains. Notice the union "bug" in the lower right corner, you only see these on some of the early posters.
On an additional note, I did a test on my 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea poster, and am happy to report that the pink lettering glows brilliantly under a black light. Cool! When I have more spare time, I might try to take a photo of it under UV light (better get my tripod!) and see what kind of results I get.
10 comments:
And a quotation from Walt Disney from a June 18, 1956 Los Angeles Times article: "The 3D vogue went by so quickly that there are probably many people who were hardly aware of it. Therefore I thought a revival might be a good thing, just for curiosity seekers if nought else."
Did Walt actually say things like "nought"?? Seems hard to believe; I think a lot of his stuff was ghost written by Marty Sklar and others, wonder if that was the case here!
Yeah, I kinda questioned his use of "nought" myself. Or maybe the author just made it up! (The made-up quote attribution vogue went by so quickly that you probably were hardly aware of it.)
This poster is staring down on me as I write this comment. One of the best ever.
I don't think it is too great a stretch to accept that Walt may have said "nought." He was, by most accounts, somewhat self-conscious about his lack of formal education and may, as a result, have overcompensated with unusual word choices. It has been known to happen. But, there is a more likely explanation. It's important to remember that language that may sound antiquated to us in 2009 may not have seemed the same to a man speaking in the 1950s, especially a man who always had one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth century. When all is said and done, Walt was essentially a Victorian. Even his love of futuristic technology was really more a function of the nineteenth-century faith in progress and improvement, a world view largely free of the cynicism that would set in during the twentieth century. "Nought" is a good old Main Street, U.S.A. kind of a word. I bet he said it. I hope he said it!
There's no way to tell for certain, of course, short of interviewing the author of the L.A. Times piece. But compared to the live interviews and spontaneous recordings of Walt that I've heard and collected over the years, neither sentence sounds like his speaking style.
Any chance of seeing the rest of the article?
Walt may not have said it, but the comment that he was essentially a Victorian with nineteenth-century values is spot on.
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day (or nought!)
Walt may not have said it, but the comment that he was essentially a Victorian with nineteenth-century values is spot on.
Not to be picky but in point of historical accuracy, Walt was culturally post-Victorian. He grew up in, and as a young adult was part of (if unconsciously), the pre-modern critique that developed in reaction to the Victorian -- the expressions of which included photography, new pop music forms and the early cinema, and which led to the rapid transformation of American cultural values post-WWI.
In his late 20's and early 30's Walt would briefly become the darling of the modernists -- a label that would hang on him long after he had stepped back from it.
Thanks for this poster. It reminded me of where I used to go when I was hot and tired. I think I fell asleep in this theater. If I remember correctly, it was located where the present Snow White and Pinocchio rides are now.
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