For decades now, Disney has been releasing its archival titles to home media, and as the years have passed we’ve seen a number of formats come and go. Many of these formats are now obsolete, and as supplemental material is very rarely ported over from one generation of media to the next, a lot of fascinating “extras” are currently unavailable to most fans and interested parties.
And what a trove of material exists! Disney is soon to pass its 100th anniversary, and that leaves a lot of behind-the-scenes material, making-of sagas, and abandoned and unfinished projects in the vaults for people to discover. Sadly, none of this has made it to Disney+ as of yet, and with physical media on the wane for most it’s getting harder and harder to find quality releases that really plumb the depths of what is available.
Always of interest to the history-minded are unfinished productions – the type of abandoned animated projects which only survive in the form of unfinished pencil tests or concept sketches. One of these, dating back to 1942, is A Brazilian Symphony: Caxanga. This was a product of the famed “El Grupo” goodwill trip in 1941, when Walt Disney and a slew of his artists and studio staff made a tour of South American nations at the behest of the United States State Department. The crew soaked up the culture of Latin America with an eye towards making shorts and feature films with local themes. This eventually resulted in several shorts and two films, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
But several projects never made it off the drawing table, and one of these was Caxanga. The impetus for this project was a game that the Disney staff learned in Brazil, which involved four players rhythmically passing matchboxes back and forth in time with a catchy song.
Disney staff, including artist Mary Blair, can be seen playing the game in the 1942 short film South of the Border With Disney, which was released by Disney in association with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Created from 16mm film shot by Walt and a few of his group on location in South America, South of the Border With Disney is a little-known but fascinating short that often can be found on DVD releases of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
The Disney group was quite smitten with the game of Caxanga, and tried to fit it in to a number of projects they considered after the trip. It was included in early proposals for the Aquarela Do Brasil segment of Saludos Amigos, the Blame it on the Samba portion of Melody Time, and the unrealized sequence Carnival Carioca. Later, Caxanga was considered for a couple of shorts of its own. The first to be developed was similar to proposals for Carnival Carioca, and followed Donald Duck and Jose Carioca on a night on the town in Rio. In the course of the short, Donald was to visit a nightclub where he would fall for an alluring female bird based on Aurora Miranda. They would then play a game of Caxanga, with the stakes being a date.
The second version of the Caxanga short begins in Rio, with Donald, Jose, and Goofy sitting around a table playing Caxanga. Donald is frustrated as always with the game, but finds himself unable to get it out of his head as he attempts to head to bed. Some of the gags which follow are reminiscent of the 1948 short Drip Drippy Donald.
Sadly this short didn’t make it out of development either; it progressed to the pencil animation phase before being shelved, and some dialogue, narration, and music were produced. In 1995, the extant elements of the short were pieced together, along with some new audio elements, to reconstruct the short for the Exclusive Archive Collection laserdisc of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
Which brings us full circle to the topic of obsolete media and “lost” special features. For decades Caxanga has been available only to those who owned the 1995 laserdisc, but no more! Thanks to the efforts of the Progress City Historical Foundation, I’m happy to now make this short available once more. It’s really charming, and I think it could have been a very special one once fully animated. It certainly has the trippy vibe which makes The Three Caballeros so much fun – one can only imagine how visually impactful this would have been once animated and colored. So bust out your matchboxes and enjoy a game of Caxanga!
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