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Well, here you go: Pigs with pigs. Related Posts...As promised, D23 has debuted their new online video feature “Armchair Archivists.” This new series will give us a regular look at the rarely-seen treasures of the Disney Archives, and hopefully some audio and video goodies as well. Judging from this premiere episode, the new series will be of far greater value than the current D23 “Disney Geek” segments. Hosts Josh Turchetta and Steve Czarnecki manage to be appropriately geeky but also suitably restrained, and do a good job without veering into fanboy caricature. Most importantly, the content is worthwhile. This big draw for this first episode is recently-found footage of Walt Disney that premiered at the recent Destination D event in California. Discovered by Ed Hobelman, archivist at the Walt Disney Studios, the footage shows one of Walt’s last filmed appearances. In the film, Walt promotes the upcoming The Happiest Millionaire while welcoming viewers to an early screening of Follow Me, Boys! The story of the footage’s discovery is interesting, and the film itself tugs at the clocksprings for Walt fans like myself. There’s also a visit with Becky Cline, the new director of the Archives, and a look at some of Walt’s personal effects taken from his office. Check it out: How cool is that Laugh-O-Gram megaphone? Related Posts...If, like me, you’re a capital-D Disney fan, you’ve long bemoaned the dearth of classic Disney films on the company’s many cable outlets. Thankfully, other channels like TCM have come to the rescue and give us an occasional taste of Walt’s films. This week, the Hallmark Movie Channel is stepping up with a crackerjack lineup of goodies: Wednesday, November 10th8am – The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1967) Thursday, November 11th8am – Big Red (1962) Friday, November 12th8am – The Three Lives of Thomasina (1964) Be there, aloha! Related Posts...There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle on the message boards lately about a brochure that someone found on the website of architecture firm George Coon, Inc. The brochure, now removed, described Coon’s work at other firms for a variety of clients. Working with Glover Smith Bode, Coon helped design a new Disney Vacation Club property for Walt Disney World called the California Coast Resort. From the brochure’s description:
Naturally, lots of fans are taking this as concrete evidence that this DVC resort is on the way. Someone even found another mention of the project in a brochure for Square Peg Design. There are just a few problems. First, Wing Chao retired from WDI in 2009. Then there’s the fact that unless they’ve been hiding construction for some time, there’s no way that a new resort could be constructed by 2012. At 1,208 units, this would be by far the largest of the DVC properties – much, much larger than even Saratoga Springs. There’s no hiding a project of that magnitude. It’s also interesting to note that Coon’s brochure includes the never-built Disney’s Vacation Club and Resort at Eagle Pines, and lists it with a completion date of 2008. You might remember that project was announced in 2001, only to disappear almost immediately following the terrorist attacks of that September. The land intended for that resort, adjacent to the Eagle Pines golf course, is currently the site of the millionaires-only Golden Oaks development and Four Seasons project. All the rumors and permits that have been percolating lately indicate that the next resort project at Walt Disney World will be a new DVC facility between Wilderness Lodge and Fort Wilderness. This, of course, approximates the location of the once-planned Wilderness Junction/Buffalo Junction resort from the Disney Decade of the 1990s. Unfortunately, this is going to be the way of things for the foreseeable future – a focus on building DVC units at the expense of everything else, especially all that untouched wilderness that Walt wanted to shield his resort from the outside world. DVC is like running a money-printing machine for Disney, so unless corporate leadership has a sudden attack of conscience regarding sustainable development and good taste, look for all that remaining empty land to slowly fill up with timeshares. I just don’t think that, for the time being, a California adventure will be in the cards. Related Posts...For your weekend viewing pleasure, courtesy of Progress City Public Access TV… This classy little documentary was made for the Disney Channel in 1989. It tells the story of Walt’s life, and continues from there through the events of 1984 and beyond. There’s a great deal about Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was in production at the time, and which seemed to be a return to the innovation of Walt’s era (never mind that the Roger Rabbit project was originally championed by Ron Miller in the pre-Eisner days). Anyway, it’s a pretty good bit of television, unusually even-handed in its biography of Walt, and features “talking head” interviews with a number of great Disney artists who are sadly no longer with us. They actually take some time to talk about the process behind the creation of their famous films, and there are a few stories that haven’t been told to death and are worth hearing. The interviews with Eisner and Katzenberg are interesting as well, as they’re in the earlier, humble days and their apparent candor provides an insight that seems so removed from later years when everything went so wrong. Here’s the special, in six parts. Continue reading Your Friday Viewing: It All Started With A Mouse – The Disney Story Related Posts... |
 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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