When Walt Took Us Way Back

So Dear To My Heart (1948) Celebrates Days Past



'64 Reissue Sweetened By a Disneyland Short

Middle-age (at least) men on line for Star Wars know from aching nostalgia. They'll freeze on sidewalks to reclaim 1977 just as So Dear To My Heart's narrator longs to be back in boyhood where "fishhooks, jackknives, and candy" were an only concern. Walt Disney grew up in this kind of world. He'd spend a lifetime trying to duplicate it. Many of Walt's generation grew up rural. For them, life's sole purity was had on a farm. Most would be yanked from bucolia to WWI trenches or Depression worry, then face another war in the 40's. Nothing for them could seem so gone as innocence that was dawn of a 20th century. So Dear To My Heart is as perfect a title as could applied to content like this. Maybe Disney should have used it again this month: Star Wars: So Dear To My Heart, instead of The Force Awakens.

Walt Conveys Personal Sentiment for SDTMH

Every generation's nostalgia is the next generation's quaint, or laughable. Old time collectors who'd first mentor me would talk longingly of Fred Thomson or Tom Mix and I'd think how much more sophisticated I was for growing up on James Bond and Hammer films. More-so objects of my condescension was a next group that sat at altars of Roy, Gene, or Lash. Movie memories I had gathered surely had more heft and lasting value than these. Immaturity can bring you to such wrong conclusion. Most of those raised in the real good old days would be gone before I'd wake up to how fortunate they'd been. So Dear To My Heart coming out in 1948-49 might have been too late for capturing its ideal audience (domestic rentals were $2.2 million as opposed to Song Of The South's $3.5 million of two years before). So Dear's story being set in 1903 placed it far back of most ticket-buyers in '49, fewer of whom had grown up on farms so as to know joy of cow-fresh milk or new-born livestock.

A Soundtrack Album To Hypo 1964 Dates

There'd be further remove by the time So Dear To My Heart had its first and only reissue in 1964. To by-then increased number of city-bred viewers, rural backdrop was more hardship and place to get away from than vanished utopia. These farm folk didn't even have television, after all. Not that Disney had ignored the theme since 1948. There had been Old Yeller and its more dramatic telling of a boy's attachment to his pet. So Dear's animal focus was a black sheep getting early start on household wreckage that would later occupy Great Danes, darn cats, and way-out seals of Disney 60's menagerie. You could, in fact, credit So Dear To My Heart with giving that formula birth. Slapstick in Disney live action saw first flowering here. Maurice Rapf, who co-wrote So Dear To My Heart, recalled in his 1999 memoir (Back Lot, from Scarecrow Press) that 20's comedies were often shown during lunch hour to animators and story men, there being "much to learn" from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Charley Chase.

Sight humor would temper So Dear's lament for a past beyond reach. There would also be life lessons spoon-fed by animated critters in short segments throughout, these a hook perhaps over-emphasized by Disney-RKO sales. Not a few ticket-buyers figured cartooning to be bulk of footage, where in fact opposite was true: this time live action would dominate. So Dear To My Heart first went before cameras in 1946, had scenes added through early 1947, Disney spending much of 1948 at further delay and tinkering. So Dear was a very personal project and a closest Walt came to faithful recreation of boyhood he'd known. For having made scant impression when new, the film saw next service on Disneyland, the ABC-TV series (in 1954). Considering WD's affection for So Dear To My Heart, it would be most interesting to see/hear his intro from that broadcast. There is currently an out-of-print and high-priced DVD, but So Dear To My Heart streams at Amazon and elsewhere in HD. Leonard Maltin also hosted it recently as part of his ongoing Disney series on TCM.