If you are over 50, you remember watching The World of Disney, Sunday evenings, and if you are over 60 you remember those TV series Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. If you are over 70, you remember The Mouseketeers, and some of us were quite fond of Annette Funicello. Walt Disney must be considered as one of the greatest influencers of the Twentieth Century. The movie catalogue is tremendous – Bambi, a 101 Dalmatians, Snow White,…I could fill a page with the listing of Disney’s series and movies. There are more books written about Disney and Disneyana then you can shake a stick at! I will shake a stick at five such books in this musing.
From the blurb of that book - Probably no man during the twentieth century has made greater contributions to the worlds of film, art, music, and sound than Walt Disney. Perhaps the greatest impact was felt during the mid-1920s to the early 1940s when Disney helped to revolutionize the animated film. Walt went on to create one of the most appealing characters of all time, Mickey Mouse. During the thirties, Walt Disney Productions continued to make new innovations with color, cameras, designs, sounds, and music, eventually creating feature-length productions, such as Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi. His tour de force Fantasia, was the culmination of what is now known as the Disney style – imaginative visual effects and enchanting stories put to music on film. In the world of comic strip and comic book art, the achievements of Walt Disney and his staff have been no less significant. Today, old Walt Disney art and memorabilia – known to collectors as Disneyana are skyrocketing in price faster than most other collectibles. In this lavishly illustrated book, Cecil Munsey has provided an extensive coverage of both the merchandising history and the collectibles of Walt Disney Productions. There are over 530 black and white photographs, 16 pages of color plates, an annotated table of contents, and appendixes providing complete lists of books, comic books, comic strips, and sheet music produced, and Disney characters introduced during the years 1926-1950.
From the blurb of that book - Welcome to the magical world of Disney music and song. It’s a delightful world of wishes and dreams, a childlike world we all remember. Within these pages, you will find more than eighty songs that are guaranteed to evoke fond memories. Who can forget the joyful seven dwarfs and their “Heigh-Ho Heigh-Ho”, or Jiminy Cricket singing “When You Wish Upon a Star’, or Uncle Remus and the bouncy “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”, or the Spine-tingling excitement of the “Mickey Mouse March”. The Illustrated Disney Song Book is a lavish collection of these songs and much more. It’s a volume of music and memories that can be shared by the entire family. Each of the more than eighty songs has been specially arranged with music and lyrics so that they can be enjoyed by everyone in the family. Walt Disney believed in music. From the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, songs and music were a vital part of Disney films. As the great American composer Jerome Kern noted, “Walt Disney has made the twentieth century’s only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language”.
I had this book at the last antique fair we were at, and I would have to say this was the most fondled book we had, even more than the Maud Lewis, but no one actually bought it – damn.
I think this is the most beautiful and impactful of the Disney books in our inventory. It is truly spectacular.
From the blurb - “The most complete book on the subject ever written, this is the fascinating inside story by two long-term Disney animators of the gradual perfecting of a relatively young and particularly American art form – which no other studio has ever been able to equal. With the full cooperation of Walt Disney Productions and free access to the studio’s priceless archives, the authors took unparalleled advantage of their intimate long-term experience with animated films to choose the precise drawings to illustrate their points from among hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork carefully stored away. This is the definitive volume on the work and achievement of one of America’s best known and widely loved cultural institutions. Two of Disney’s famous Nine Old will require additional postage. Disney Studio within a year of each other in the mid-1930s. In 1978 they retired from Walt Disney Productions and began work on this book. This volume has 489 plates in full color and thousands of back and white illustrations.” The book has an endearing personal presentation “To Justin – use this book to make your dream come true – working for Disney! All my love Mom XO” X-mas 2003.”
The Art of The Lion King; by Christopher Finch; Hyperion, New York, 1994.
From the blurb – A lavish celebration of The Lion King, the magnificent Disney animated all feature film, The Art of The Lion King showcases the rarely seen spectrum of art created in the making of an animated film. Inspired by the panoramic majesty of the fiery sunrises, vast mountain ranges, savannahs, and velvet black nights of Africa, The Lion King was imagined and reimagined in a variety of media – from early conceptual material, beginning sketches of live animal models (at one-point lions were brought into the studio), to background paintings, layout drawings, and storyboards, to final art. A tribute to the significant talent and imagination of the collaborative adventure of making an animated film, The Art of The Lion King is a beautiful keepsake of an unforgettable film experience.
Walt Disney Donald Duck; Abbeville Press, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1978.
This is the latest Disney book that we acquired – 4 days ago. And I confess, Donald Duck and his extended family, even that old Scrooge McDuck, were my favourites, and when Donald appeared on Sunday evening, I was overjoyed!
From the blurb – One of Walt Disney’s most popular and enduring characters, Donald Duck is seen here in all of his loveable irascibility in a wonderful collection of his ten greatest stories. Personally selected by duck master Carl Barks, who wrote and illustrated Donald Duck comics for more than twenty years, these “short novels” are sterling testament to a new art form that evolved in the 1930s and reached its golden age in the 1940s and ‘50s. Each of the ten stories in this volume gives Donald a stage on which to be a buffoon, a mountebank, a tragedian, or whatever the story calls for. Mr. Barks never wrote “down” for the kids, feeling that many readers of Donald’s adventures are adults.
Hey – I never mentioned Goofy!!