Melody Time

It's a cartoon.

It's called Melody Time.

It was made in the 1940s, but it was shown all the time in schools and after churches, after services.

It really is a way that this legend made it into the modern era.

What? I know.

You and I have sat through Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, whatever.

When You Wish Upon a Star, 90% of it.

is in the opening credits.

on the trail

That was Dennis Day singing Blue Shadows on the Trail from Walt Disney's Picture Melody Time featuring Dennis Day.

And very good, Dennis.

Dennis who? Dennis Sweatband.

Yeah.

Yeah, but the era also includes, like, Make My Music and Melody Time are kind of like Fantasia-lite.

They do the same thing Fantasia does, but with popular music, at least 40s-era popular music.

And then the last two, Fun and Fancy Free and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad are just bifurcated.

Just snowballs.

and snowballs into children's literature into school books and sentimental poetry and frontier folklore and then in 1948 into walt disney's melody time which gives us the version that's basically calcified in american popular memory ever since right that barefoot saintly singing and yes wearing that pot on his head

and somewhere in that whole process Well, somewhere in that process, the cider quietly disappears.

The business empire disappears.

We've got Saludos Amigos, we've got The Three Caballeros, and there's a heavy, intense focus on music as well.

We've got Make My Music, we've got Melody Time.

which are you know effectively a continuation of the the walt disney fascination with combining music and animation like we see in fantasia so there's another film from around this time that's not really included in the disney lore as such but it's something that for people like myself who bit of a completionist like to see the different things that have gone on there is a film that disney made in 1943 as well so only six years before this uh called victory through air power So to see where we're at in terms of the Disney films and where the studio is at, they produced a film called Victory Through Airpower, like I said, that was basically a promotional video for the use of investing in the Air Force for America.

So reading on IMDB, Wikipedia, all of the usual scholarly places, according to people who will be a lot smarter on the subject than me, apparently Franklin D. Roosevelt was shown this film and it basically gave him the ammunition.