Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Practically Perfect

Floyd Norman, who was working at Disney's when the film was made, comes through with a nice little article about Mary Poppins.

Have I mentioned that the new DVD is quite wonderful, with all sorts of extras and behind-the-scenes footage? In fact, they could have omitted the movie and this new disc would be worth buying, just for the bonus features.

(Yeah, I did mention it, a week or two ago. But it's worth mentioning again.)

One bit of Mary Poppins trivia that is not included: As we animation buffs all know, Pinocchio was the only Disney movie for which Mel Blanc recorded a voice. (The story is that he did a whole voice track for Gideon before the decision was made to make the character mute, so all that remains of Mel's performance are a couple of hiccups. There are historians who think Mel can also be heard in a couple of miscellaneous lines from other characters.)

Well, Mary Poppins, in case anyone ever asks you, is the only Disney feature for which the great Daws Butler recorded voices. He's only recognizable briefly as one of the penguins and as one of the turtles, though Richard Sherman — co-composer of all those great songs — is pretty sure Daws was also one of the buskers in the "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius" number. (Also heard among the voices of animated characters are J. Pat O'Malley, Dallas McKennon, Thurl Ravenscroft and Jimmy MacDonald.)

• Posted at 7:16 PM · LINK

Oliver Twisted

I really like the 1968 movie, Oliver, but I always thought there was something a little creepy about the singing voice of Mark Lester in the title role. Some time ago in an interview, Mr. Lester admitted that he'd been dubbed, though he didn't say by whom. And maybe now we know why he didn't say: It was a girl.

By the way, the current DVD release of Oliver is a good transfer. For years, we had Beta and VHS versions that were made off a poor quality negative that was poorly color-corrected, awkwardly cropped in places...and which actually had one reel of the film (about ten minutes) printed mirror-image, reversing left and right. The Laserdisc release finally got it right and the DVD continues that tradition.

• Posted at 9:41 AM · LINK