Friday, June 25, 2010

Thoughts on Melody Time

TootStoryb1TootStoryb2TootStoryb3
These Little Toot storyboard drawings were sold last year through Heritage Auctions...

Having gone through the entire draft of this film in a week, and eagerly awaiting comments, I do have a final thought regarding the order by which the film was put together. let's have a look at the dates of these final drafts:

2052 2/20/47 Little Toot Geronimi
2059 11/5/47 Bumble Boogie Kinney
2056 12/12/47 Pecos Bill Geronimi
2058 2/9/48 Johnny Appleseed Jaxon
2055 2/24/48 Once Upon a Wintertime Luske
2060 4/8/48 Blame it on the Samba Geronimi
2054 5/5/48 Trees Luske
2061 5/6/48 Titles&Inserts Jaxon

Interestingly enough, the draft for Little Toot predates all but Bumble Boogie and Pecos Bill by a year or more. No wonder that its intro sequence in the first part of the draft is scene 1 - and its production number is the lowest. I would think that Johnny Appleseed and Bumble Boogie were next in the pipeline, and they became scenes 2 & 3, and so on and so forth. Why the intro for the relatively short sequence Trees - with the one-before-lowest low production number - is numbered before Pecos Bill while the final draft is dated five months later is curious to me. Maybe I do attach too much value to these dates - who knows! Here are the sequences again as listed in the first pages.

Page 1, scene 1 & 1.1 - Little Toot intro (2052)
Page 1, scene 2 & 2.2 - Johnny Appleseed intro (2058)
Page 2, scene 3 & 3.1 - Bumble Boogie intro (2059)
Page 2, scene 4 - Once upon a Wintertime intro (2055)
Page 2, scene 5 - Trees intro (2054)
Page 3, scene 6 - Blame it on the Samba intro (2060)
Page 3, scene 7 & 7.1 - Pecos Bill intro (2056)
Page 3, scene 10 & the entire page 4 - Opening credits & intro
Page 5, scene 40 - End title

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1 Comments:

Anonymous PaulBunyan says...

It is interesting to note that some of these draft dates are just a few weeks before Melody Time’s US release date of 5/27/48. These must reflect some last minute changes. It is also interesting to note that Disney had Lance Nolley in Texas doing sketches for Pecos Bill two years before the release. (Boxoffice Magazine 6/1/46).

Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:57:00 PM PDT  

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