Topic: Joe Besser as "The Green Man?"

[Pilsner Panther]

I just saw this, checking today's Episode Pick. I don't know who submitted this bit of obscure film history (BeAStooge or garystooge, maybe?) but it's a fascinating piece of Stooges and Disney trivia.

The Green Man is a very old figure in northern European mythology:

http://www.mikeharding.co.uk/greenman/green1.html

Also, in making a film with a live actor surrounded by animated characters, Walt Disney was returning to his first idea for an animated cartoon. In his early 1920's "Alice In Wonderland" series, Alice was a real little girl whose on-screen companions were animated figures from the Lewis Carroll stories. I've seen a few of these, and the animation technique is crude, but they do have a certain charm.

Mr. Disney must have kept this idea in mind for most of his career, as he made several films in the 1940's using the live-animated concept ("Song of the South," "Saludos Amigos" and others), and he revived it again in "Mary Poppins," where Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews interact with animated penguins.

It was extremely difficult to pull this effect off in the days before computer animation, when everything had to be timed frame-by-frame and drawn by hand. I'm not a huge fan of Uncle Walt, but he certainly knew how to make an audience's jaws drop when he had a mind to.

[BeAStooge]

making a film with a live actor surrounded by animated characters, Walt Disney was returning to his first idea for an animated cartoon. In his early 1920's "Alice In Wonderland" series, Alice was a real little girl whose on-screen companions were animated figures from the Lewis Carroll stories. I've seen a few of these, and the animation technique is crude, but they do have a certain charm.

Seven restored ALICE cartoons (1923 - 1927) were released this month on Disney's "Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities" DVD collection.  It includes a Leonard Maltin interview with the series original star (1923 - 1924), Virginia Davis.

[Pilsner Panther]

There goes some more of my money on DVD's! The "Alice" films would be well worth seeing again, as with other early animation like Windsor McCay's "Gertie The Dinosaur" and Max Fleischer's "Out Of The Inkwell."

What these films lack in modern-day technique, they make up for in sheer imagination, innovation, and an awful lot of very hard work.

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration."

—Thomas Edison (no mean filmmaker, himself).