Scope Samples #3

 

Wide Worlds: Two for All the Family

SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) --- I am drawn to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty like moths to flame, having written of it, in two 2006 parts, reflecting also on other Buena Vista releases from 1959. Blu-Ray since permits viewing the show very much as roadshow patronage from early that year through latter months when laggers like the Liberty finally took delivery. Disney wanted in on roadshow money and that was understandable, trouble being this was not his audience, advanced admissions and reserved seating scarcely stuff of the family friendliest company. Disney attractions were more the sort you’d drop kids off for, not go in with them, let alone pay premium price for doing so. The short that came with Sleeping Beauty for most dates was Grand Canyon, which breath-takes still on a wide enough home screen with proper separation of its rich stereo sound (it's included on the Blu-Ray). I sat for and felt transported to time when $1.90 would buy my adult ticket, a bane to grown-ups likely dragged to 70mm shows for sake of small fries seduced by strongarm saturation on ABC’s Disneyland, this effective despite color not yet part of the broadcast mix. Noteworthy at the time was Disney road-showing a seventy-five minute feature cojoined with a thirty minute travelogue, these on reserved seat, hard ticket terms. Both were weightingly artistic whatever their length, a plate piled high with spinach, all which suggested we’d be more enriched than amused, prices pledging more than shaggy dogs or Mickey and pals up a beanstalk. Walt Disney who appealed best to basic appetites was serving filet to a hamburger audience, the more so considering simplistic stuff he tube-gave them weekly. Snow White had been art, but less self-consciously so. Sleeping Beauty for all of width and clarity was former plus Cinderella warmed over. What was a prick on the spinning wheel but reprise of the poison apple, similarly inclined witches arranging both?

One problem, an essential one, was artists and staff largely middle age, many more than that, having been with Walt since twenties beginning, their skill on the increase to support situations and humor tendered before, repeated times before. Such veterans were near receipt of their gold watch and retirement, fun-making on hep and now terms beyond most. Closest to forward thinking might have been Ward Kimball, him around forever too, but with a mindset still like kid-at-heart he’d been and would stay. Could that be why Walt chose this approximate time to let air out of Ward’s tire by publicly demoting him off Babes in Toyland, Kimball having overstepped procedural bounds by announcing himself director for benighted Babes? Warner cartooning had gotten staid too for simple reason those guys were no longer young like when starting out for the firm. If Kimball had a WB counterpart, it likely was Bob Clampett who had left the shield years before but kept his sharp edge for TV projects harking ahead rather than backwards. Who were young turks of fifties animation? I say Chuck Jones still at Warners, him hardly a kid but smarter, the most creative, and being Chuck, said so. Then there was talent at minimalist UPA, but were they less funny than innovative? Jay Ward and Bill Scott were cartooners that Mom and Dad could enjoy with their martinis, the little ones laughing with Bullwinkle even where they didn’t get all his acidic asides. Fifties animation was a lot of old guys hanging on, but who of beginners had their discipline, inventiveness, experience? Search suggests that Sleeping Beauty did not have a 70mm playdate in North Carolina during 1959. South Carolina either. My parents would have had to drive me to Atlanta to see it roadshown. Not that I cared one way or the other (“This is the Only Theatre in This Area …” was policy endlessly repeated on ads, note ones here). Sleeping Beauty knocks us out for craft, a show window for sleekest electric trains so far built. I can enjoy it still for expertise applied, allowance made for what’s not there by way of story breakthroughs. In short, comfort Disney, a last roar for big-spend feature animation before boxoffice disappointment told Walt finally to cut corners where necessary to keep his long-form cartoons in profit. He’d do that successfully with sixties ones to come.

DOCTOR DOLITTLE (1967) --- Hark back a year to Greenbriar coverage of Midnight Cowboy. One image shows signage for Doctor Dolittle wrapped round the block, a smash not just presumed, but guaranteed. Starkest truth here was Doctor Dolittle being backdrop for a past soon to be supplanted by Midnight Cowboy, the old kicked curbside by pitiless new. Fox as purveyor of Dolittle was drunk still on grosses from The Sound of Music, Dolittle a seeming cinch for even more. Hindsight suggests they should have been out looking for their own Midnight Cowboy. The sixties by this point amounted to stand-off between understood approaches and incoming, insistent change. Fox wasn’t doing anything specifically wrong so long as they let product be guided by what worked before. Trouble was this wouldn't go on working, winds of change more fierce by the day and no one knowing what direction a restless public would blow. Doctor Dolittle was sold on reserved seat basis. How else where such colossal sums had been spent? This they proposed was a blockbuster for all the family to enjoy together! Taking all of one's brood out, parking the car, that is paying for the car to sit and hopefully not be stolen or vandalized, especially if you’re going in Gotham, then the getting-in, which adds way up where you’ve got multiple moppets, along with Mom/Dad neither of whom care much about seeing Doctor Dolittle but are there for sake of tots to see what is insistently “Entertainment for Everyone.” Doctor Dolittle was sort of 67’s Sleeping Beauty, much that was good but more perceived bad, certainly so by reviewers and impatient youth. Disney had their own Sleeping Beauty for the same year, The Happiest Millionaire, which would not be happy for loss it took. Due to top-heavy show scheduling, Doctor Dolittle had but ten playoffs per week at NY’s Loew’s State, so how do you break even unless the show stays a year at least, which The Sound of Music had, but Doolittle distinctly would not. 70mm was the by-now familiar hook, Doctor Dolittle an only feature playing the enlarged format that year that had been filmed that way.

That Thing Behind Rex Was Not a Miniature, Nor Stop-Animated, But Was Expected to Supply a Sock Finish

Charlotte’s Park Terrace at the time had the largest, widest screen in North Carolina. I saw a combo of Thunderball with You Only Live Twice there in 1972 and near fainted from bliss. The Park Terrace ran Dolittle on 70mm for twenty weeks beginning in January 1968. Did it sell sufficient tickets for that long or were those twenty weeks contractual? No other theatre in North Carolina used Doctor Dolittle on roadshow terms, certainly not on 70mm. I don’t recall it at the Liberty, having smelled an elephantine rat. Outcome for Fox was ruinous, $16.6 million spent on the negative, $6.2 million coming back in domestic rentals, $4.8 foreign. Who took fault, or got blame, for such utter fail? But how “utter” really, because the soundtrack was liked, many wearing out grooves on their LP. Fox loss would not be historic, least ways not for latter half of sixties Fox where disaster was the rule rather than exception. Looking at ledgers, I’m almost surprised the joint didn’t shut down altogether. Reason to take up the topic today? TCM served Doctor Dolittle for Thanksgiving … presumed whole of it at 2:30 pm EST to wash down turkey and cranberries (“presumed” for uncertainty as to run time … was theirs an edited version?). I watched for never having seen Doctor Dolittle and doing penance for the oversight. How much do you suppose TCM paid for the license, presumably a once-only run, usual arrangement the network has with Twentieth (or nowadays, Disney). Figuring Doctor Dolittle for HD broadcast, I knew at least it would look and sound great. There was a Twilight Time Blu-Ray that went out of print years ago. You can have it for one hundred or so dollars at Ebay. I’ll not pile onto Doctor Dolittle and call it an overblown fiasco as did many then and more now. Of course it is dated. Isn’t that partly why we watch? Rex Harrison talk/sings his songs in more-less reprise of Henry Higgins, not unwelcome as he did it well before. Parents obviously saw Doctor Dolittle as a “treat” for their offspring, but how did offspring view it? Treats are seldom best defined by elders. The Simpsons did a brutal takedown of Doctor Dolittle to open a 2015 episode. The clip’s at You Tube. Director Richard Fleischer gave a long memoir account of hellish ordeal that was Doctor Dolittle, mostly his having to cope with Rex Harrison.