In this episode we look at how AT&T dabbled in attractions at previous World’s Fairs before sponsoring an attraction at Disneyland. We then discuss the development of Spaceship Earth at EPCOT, from its origins as the “Future World Theme Show” to the attraction we know today. We’ll also speak with former Imagineer Peggie Fariss about the depth of research which went into ensuring Spaceship Earth’s amazing level of historical accuracy.
Listen below, and don’t forget you can always support our efforts and gain early access to episodes and monthly livestreams with a tax-deductible donation to our Patreon!
Fifty episodes! Can you believe it? It’s true though – The Progress City Radio Hour has hit its fiftieth episode mark. And to celebrate, we’re looking at some 50th anniversary celebrations from the past: 1973’s 50th anniversary of Walt Disney Productions, and 1978’s 50th birthday of Mickey Mouse. Thankfully each of these events were marked by multiple television programs, in only the way the 1970s could do. We look at several of these shows, and they’ve got everything – from a moody Dean Jones to a peppy Lawrence Welk.
But that’s not all! For members of our Patreon we have a special deluxe version of the episode that’s an hour longer, and features a look at a truly bizarre TV special celebrating the 50th anniversary of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1987. Sign up now!
As we look back on fifty episodes we’re so grateful for listeners who have stuck with us this whole time, and to those of you who might only have started listening recently. Thanks so much for your comments, ratings, and feedback – it really does make the whole process more fun!
Disney animators and staff play Caxanga in Brazil during the 1941 “El Grupo” goodwill trip. The four players are Norm Ferguson, Bill Cottrell, Mary Blair, and Jack Cutting.
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!
Keep your Eyes and Ears on Walt Disney World with the Progress City Public Library
Hello everyone! For many, many years now I’ve put in a lot of hours scanning in a range of old Disney documents and ephemera for use in my research. I’ve also spent way too much time scouring eBay for such things, and watching as they become more and more scarce and, frustratingly, more and more expensive. I would imagine that it’s harder now than ever for an aspiring researcher to get started, as such documents are hoarded by a select few, and public archives are – sadly – pilfered.
Hoping to not become part of the problem myself, I’ve long tried to figure out a way to best share my hoard of documentation with interested parties. Recently, Foxxy at Passport to Dreams began a project exactly along the lines of what I’d been thinking, and that’s finally spurred me to actually do something. And so I’m happy to announce the Progress City Public Library, featuring the Progress City Disneyana Collection. Thanks to the auspices of the Internet Archive, I’m going to be slowly uploading documents and ephemera that I’ve collected and digitized over the last 20 years or so. I hope some of you enjoy such things, and that some of you can even make use of them in your own research!
All documents in the Library came from public sources, but some were very hard to find!
Today we published our 250th document to the Library, a special item for those interested in the never-built Disney’s America project – it’s Design and Development Guidelines for the theme park which we obtained from a library in Virginia.
Of course this project has entailed a lot of effort and expense, so we’re very grateful to our Patreon supporters who help offset some of the cost of this documentation project. It’s very much appreciated! As a thank you to supporters, we’ve been making the scanned documents available to Patreon backers well in advance of their public posting as a bulk download, to save them the time of having to download things individually.
One thing that you can do to help out is to donate items to the collection! If you worked for Disney or know someone who did, and if you have access to old newsletters, documents, ephemera, magazines, and the like, we’d love to be able to scan them in and share them! Just drop us a line and we’d be happy to work something out to help preserve this knowledge for the future.
We hope you enjoy the collection and that you find something interesting in the stacks of the Progress City Public Library!
Walt and Kirk Douglas frolic on the set of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
We’re back with a new episode of the Progress City Radio Hour! This month we’re talking about voyages extraordinaires – Disney’s run-ins with Jules Verne and the scientific romances of old. Leading off, we talk about the making of the 1954 classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Disneyland exhibit it inspired. We also look at other Disney attractions featuring Verne, from Horizons to Tokyo DisneySea’s Mysterious Island to Disneyland Paris’s Discoveryland. And to top it off, there’s a story about the making of the Disney Verne-wannabe picture Island at the Top of the World, and the magnificent unbuilt Disneyland area which it inspired, Tony Baxter’s fabled Discovery Bay. Listen here or via all podcast outlets!
From the Progress City archives comes this collection of 33 tall tales and true from Disney history. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats.
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