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Melody Time is a 1948 American live-action and animated musical film anthology film produced by Walt Disney. It was released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on May 27, 1948. Made up of seven segments set to popular music and folk music, the film is, like Make Mine Music before it, the popular music version of Fantasia. Melody Time, while not meeting the artistic accomplishments of Fantasia, was mildly successful.
The seven "mini-musical" stories outlined:
Like other segments of these package films, Once Upon a Wintertime was later released theatrically as an individual short, in this case on September 17, 1954. (1999). 9780816038312, Checkmark Books. ISBN 9780816038312
The segment was released independently on December 25, 1955, as Johnny Appleseed. The piece has a running time of "17 minutes making the film's second-longest piece". Before being adapted for Melody Time, the story of Johnny Appleseed was "first immortalized around campfires", then later turned into "storybook form".
The Andrews Sisters provide vocals. A clip features briefly in the "Friendship" song on Disney Sing Along Songs volume Friend Like Me. It was also featured in Sing Me a Story with Belle.
To preserve the look of the original story sketches, layout artist Ken O'Connor came up with the idea of using frosted cels and rendering the pastel images right onto the cel. Before being photographed each cel was laminated in clear lacquer to protect the pastel. The result was a look that had never been seen in animation before. Disney Legend Ken O'Connor
The Dinning Sisters provide vocals while organist Ethel Smith appears in a live-action role.
This retelling features Roy Rogers, Bob Nolan, the former's horse Trigger, and the Sons of the Pioneers telling the story to Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, all in a live-acted introduction set against animated backdrops before segueing into the animated story. The segment was later edited on the film's NTSC video release (sans the PAL release) to remove all shots with Bill smoking a cigarette and almost the entire tornado scene with Bill rolling his cigarette and lighting it with a lightning bolt. Both the cigarette and tornado scenes were restored when the film was released on Disney+. With a total running time of "22 minutes, it is the lengthiest piece".
| +Cast !Once Upon a Wintertime !Bumble Boogie !Johnny Appleseed !Little Toot !Trees !Blame It On the Samba !Pecos Bill | ||||||
| Frances Langford (Singer) | Freddy Martin (Music composer) | Dennis Day | The Andrews Sisters (Singers) | Fred Waring (Singers) | Ethel Smith and the Dinning Sisters (Singers) | Roy Rogers (Singer), Sons of Pioneers (Singers), Bob Nolan (Singer) |
Melody Time is considered to be the last anthology film made by Walt Disney Productions (the next film to be released was The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which featured two stories). These package features were "little-known short-film compilations that Disney produced and released as feature films during and after World War II". They were "financially (and artistically) lightweight productions meant to bring in profits to return to fairy tale single-narrative feature form", an endeavour which they successfully completed two years later with Cinderella. While the shorts "contrast in length, form, and style", a common thread throughout is that each "is accompanied by songs from musicians and vocalists of the '40s" – both popular and folk music. This sets it apart from the similarly structured Fantasia, whose segments were set to classical music instead. As opposed to Fun and Fancy Free, whose story was bound to the tales of Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk, in this film "Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein".
Melody Time was the last film The Andrews Sisters took part in. They sang throughout the 10-minute segment known as Little Toot. Andrews Sisters member Maxine said: "It was quite an experience. On the wall at the studio they had the whole story in picture form. Two songwriters played the score and Walt Disney explained it to us. It was a new thing for Disney. We sang the narrative. It was very exciting to work with Disney—he was such a gentleman".
Favorite Disney juvenile actors Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, who also starred in Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart, appear in the last sequence as the two children who hear the story of Pecos Bill.
Melody Time was the last feature film to include Donald Duck and José Carioca until the 1988 Touchstone Pictures film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Disney later released a package film entitled Music Land, a nine-segment film which "recycled sequences from both Make Mine Music and Melody Time". Five selections were from Melody Time while another was the short Two For the Record, which consisted of two segments produced under Benny Goodman's direction.
Melody Time was unusual in that, until 1998 (50 years after its initial release), it remained "one of the handful of Disney's animated features yet to be released on videocassette". Some of the segments "have been re-released as featurettes", and Once Upon a Wintertime has "been included on other Disney video cartoon compilations".
Prior to its 1998 home video debut in the US, in part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection, Once Upon A Wintertime was featured on the VHS, A Walt Disney Christmas, Little Toot on Storybook Classics, Blame It On The Samba on The Wonderful World of Disney: Music for Everybody and Pecos Bill on the American Heroes VHS paired with Paul Bunyan.
On June 6, 2000, Melody Time was released on VHS and DVD as part of the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection. However, in the Region 1 DVD release all scenes of smoking were digitally removed in the Pecos Bill segment while the Region 2 release in Europe leaves those scenes unaltered. The movie was left uncut, with smoking scenes intact, when it was included on the Disney+ streaming service. It was released on Blu-Ray, exclusive to the Disney Movie Club, on November 2, 2021, also uncut and unaltered.
Collectible items for the film include books, figures, and posters.
A 1948 review by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said the film was a "visual and auditory delight" and added that if Disney were able to reach his audience's other senses, "there's no doubt he'd be able to please them too". It says a "tuneful and functional soundtrack rounds out the Disney art". It said that Bumble Boogie "reverted back to fantasia-like interpretive technique". It also notes that the abstraction ends after Trees, and the final three shorts are "story-sequences". It says the simple story of Johnny Appleseed is done with "touching perception". It said Little Toot "is destined to become a fable of our time" and adds "the Andrews Sisters tell the story in lilting song". The review ended with the author saying "deserving accolades will go to Walt and his whole production staff, as well as to the staff whose voices he has used as well".
A 1948 review of the film for The News-Sentinel described Pecos Bill as the best segment, and said it "caused a stir among the small fry in the audience".
DVDizzy notes that in regard to the mix of shorts and 1940s music, "the marriage often does not work, and the melodies are not particularly the film's forte"; however, it adds that this is a modern-day opinion, and that paying audiences at the time the film was released probably "felt better about the music". The site then reviewed each segment in turn, saying: Once Upon a Wintertime is "physical slapstick" that doesn't match the "dramatic singing by Frances Langford", Bumble Boogie is "fun but forgettable", The Legend of Johnny Appleseed is the "most enjoyable" of the segments, Little Toot is "rather generic", Trees features "some nice imagery", Blame it on the Samba "involves Latin dancing and nothing more", and Pecos Bill has "Disney...going back and using today's technology to alter Bill's what admittedly is a minor point in one short of a film that's predominantly going to be watched and purchased by animation enthusiasts/historians". It explains the "video quality is consistently satisfying" and that the "audio has the dated feel of other '40s Disney films".
The film received a score of 77.06 out of 100 based on 50 votes, on the site Disney Movies Guide.
In his book The Animated Movie Guide, Jerry Beck gave Melody Time a rating of 2/5 stars, and described the film as "odds and ends from a studio geared up towards revival". He said that by this time the post-war formula of releasing anthologies had become "tired", with only a few of the segments being interesting, and feeling as if the animators kept "pushing for something more creative to do". He commented that the film, a "vast underachievement" for Disney, felt dated like its predecessor Make Mine Music, and added that he found it hard to believe that the artists who made this film had also made Pinocchio eight years before. He praised the "exceptional designs and palettes" by stylist Mary Blair, including the "flat stylised backgrounds" of Wintertime, and the Impressionist painting/folk art look of The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. He highlighted the "slapstick...impressive montage of Bill's impressive feats" as a "true treat". He described the "manic interpretation" of Flight of the Bumblebee known as Bumble Boogie, in which a bee terrorized by musical instruments and notes "changes colors and outlines from one moment to the next as the backgrounds seamlessly dissolve, change or morph around him", as "Disney's best piece of surrealism since the 'Pink Elephant on Parade' sequence in Dumbo". He also spoke about the "stellar special effects" involved in the dynamite exploding Ethel Smith's organ instrument, in the segment Blame it on the Samba. However, he added that the rest of Melody Time was "sadly...forgettable".
In The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, Steven Watts explains that while Pecos Bill "recaptured some of the old magic", the film as a whole, along with the other "halfhearted...pastiches of short subjects", came across as "animated shorts surrounded with considerable filler and stuff into a concocted package". He adds that as a result they "never caught fire" due to their "varying wildly in quality", with moments of creativity being outweighed by the "insipid, mediocre, stale stretches of work".
The authors of The Cartoon Music Book said Melody Time was "much better" than the other post- Fantasia Disney package films of the era, adding that it was "beautifully designed and scored", paving the way for the "'populuxe' style" of Disney's first renaissance (starting with Cinderella in 1950). They stated that Trees and Blame it on the Samba (which they described as a "psychedelic Latin American sequence") are "charming, if still obscure, entries in the Disney pop song catalogue".
The Andrews Sisters: A Biography and Career Record author H. Arlo Nimmo said "in general, the Melody Time holds up well, and the story of 'Little Toot' is as appealing to today as when it originally appeared fifty-some years ago". He described the singing as "unremarkable but narrating the...story cleverly". He adds Variety quote: "'Little Toot,'...is colorful and engrossing. Andrews Sisters give it popular vocal interpretation", and said that although The New York Times preferred the film to Make Mine Music the newspaper added "The Andrews Sisters sing the story...not very excitingly". He also included Metronome indifferent comment: "The Andrews Sisters sing a silly song about a tugboat". The article The Walt Disney Classics Collection Gets "Twitterpatted" For Spring deemed Little Toot one of Melody Time highlights.
In a review of the 2004 Disney film Home on the Range, the article "Frisky 'Range' doesn't measure up: Disney delivers fun" said that the "sendup of the Wild West...has some fitful comic vitality and charm - but it can't hold a candle to the 'Pecos Bill' segment of the studio's late-'40s anthology, 'Melody Time'".
Rotten Tomatoes reported that of critics have given the film a positive review, with an average score of . The critical consensus reads, "Melody Time is a charming musical anthology film that's expertly crafted and filled with high-spirited numbers."
A 1998 Chicago Tribune review of the film, in honor of its VHS release, described the film as a "sweet, old-fashioned delight and one of the few Disney animated films that pre-schoolers can watch alone without danger of being traumatized", but also added that the younger generation might be bored by it, as they are "attuned to the faster, hipper rhythms of the post-'Mermaid' era".
Beck considers the segment "Blame It on the Samba" to be the best "Good Neighbor" Disney film there is, stating that "it blows my mind every time I watch it." Film historian J.B. Kaufman has noted that the segment is a cult favorite among Disney fans.
According to a source, upon reviewing the music that Ken Darby had composed for Johnny Appleseed, Walt Disney "scorned the music", describing it as "like New Deal music". Darby was "enraged", and said to Disney "THAT is just a cross-section of one man's opinion!". Darby was only employed at The Walt Disney Company for a short while after this supposed incident.
Jerry Beck, in his book The Animated Movie Guide, comments on a risqué joke in Pecos Bill that somehow made it past the censors, when Bill kisses Sue and his guns rise from their holsters and begin to fire by themselves, simulating ejaculation. He adds jokingly that "perhaps Roy Rogers was covering the eyes of Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten during this scene".
There are many references to the Pecos Bill segment in the Frontierland part of Magic Kingdom: there is a sign of Bill outside the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Cafe, as well as various images of him, the other characters, and their accessories around the cafe. A pair of gloves with the inscription "To Billy, All My Love, Slue Foot Sue" is located in a glass display case. In the World of Disney, Jose Carioca from Blame it on the Samba appears in a mural on the ceiling among many other characters. In a glass case, behind the windows of the All-Star Movies, there is a script for Melody Time.
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