Scale-Model Railroader

MAYBE you’ve never noticed it but somewhere in every full-length Walt Disney picture there’s a railroad. This busy producer of animated cartoons belongs to that fast-growing group of executives who have adopted model railroading as their hobby.

Thus he keeps one jump ahead of his fellow hobbyists—he not only designs and builds his trains but draws ‘em as well.

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Mickey Mouse Goes Classical

By ANDREW R. BOONE

MOVING sound has been added to moving pictures to bring greater realism to the screen. Accompanying Walt Disney’s newest Technicolor creation, “Fantasia,” in which Mickey Mouse and a host of new companions perform to the rhythms of classical music, this latest Hollywood invention made its first public appearance a few weeks ago at the Broadway Theater in New York.
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What Big Arms You Have . . . and So Many
It’s in Disneyland, of course. Being prepared for underwater duty is the giant squid that “terrorizes” passengers of the huge park’s submarine ride.

Composed of rubber, the lengthy tentacles are operated by a system of compressed air and interior wires. They reach out at the excited kiddies as they ride by.

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What Makes MICKEY MOUSE Move?

Illustrated by Walt Disney

Fifty highly trained artists and scores of sound engineers unite to bring fast-moving animated talking cartoons to screen. Here’s how amazing job is accomplished.

by EARL THEISEN – Honorary curator motion pictures, Los Angeles Museum

MAKING Mickey Mouse move is not a mysterious technical process that Walt Disney does behind studio walls. It is an interesting thing that everyone can understand. The methods of animating a cartoon are fascinating. The fact that a hand-drawn picture can show motion is little short of miraculous.

A cartoon studio, in many respects, may be compared with a real life studio. In both they have stars or characters, a story or scenario, a director, and sets. In the Disney studio, the stars are cartoon pictures painted on sheets of celluloid and the sets are not made of wood by a carpenter, but are water color paintings made by an artist. The cartoon director is known as the “layout” man. As the term implies, it is his duty to lay out the story. He does this in the form of rough pencil sketches which serve as a guide for the artists who draw the story action. These sketches illustrate the various things the cartoon character does in the story. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sound Tricks of Mickey Mouse

Squeaks, squawks, oinks and music—it’s another animated cartoon hit set to music in a brand new way. Read how the hay baler joins a symphony.

by Earl Theisen
Illustrated by Walt Disney

MUSIC and noises in the animated cartoon interpret the action of the story. The narrative theme of the music and what is called the “sound effects” punctuates and emphasizes the story.

By playing on the aural nerves with symbolic sounds and noises the psychological reaction of the audience is controlled and varied according to the dramatic and emotional needs of the cartoon story.
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Not too shabby considering Disney’s Hall of Presidents didn’t come out until 1971.

PAST PRESIDENTS “TALK” IN EXHIBIT

Five of our most famous presidents come to life in a unique historical exhibit designed by a New York inventor for display in stores and schools. Under the control of an operator offstage, figures representing Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Grover Cleveland rise in turn and deliver excerpts from some of their most famous speeches. Levers like those in a signal tower raise and seat the figures, and the voices are supplied by sixteen-inch phonograph records and reproduced by loudspeakers hidden behind the stage. Dummy microphones give the exhibit a modern touch, suggesting that these former chief executives might have assembled to take part in a present-day meeting.

This would be even cooler if there was a string to make his nose grow.

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Pinocchio the Puppet

HOW TO DUPLICATE THE AMUSING LITTLE MODEL WALT DISNEY’S ANIMATORS USED

By HI SIBLEY

PINOCCHIO, the wistful puppet created by Geppetto, the wood carver, in Walt Disney’s second full-length production, is an inviting subject for either a homemade puppet or an amusing and companionable little doll. The accompanying illustrations show how to go about making one patterned after the original, which was created by the Disney model department as an inspiration to the animators drawing Pinocchio.

If you are an expert wood carver yourself, the head might be fashioned from a solid block of soft white pine and the nose inserted (Fig. 1), but a surer way to achieve a fair likeness is first to make a clay model. From this a plaster-of-Paris mold is taken, and the head is cast in plastic composition wood (Figs. 2, 3, and 4). The hat is made in the same way as the head and glued on.
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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color

By ANDREW R. BOONE

BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.

Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.
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This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part One
Part Two

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This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part One
Part Three

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This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part Two
Part Three

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The Magic Worlds of Walt Disney

By ROBERT DE ROOS

Illustrations by National Geographic photographer THOMAS NEBBIA

ONE AUTUMN EVENING in 1928, a new actor appeared at the Colony Theatre in New York in a movie called Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon ever produced with sound. He had ears bigger than Clark Gable’s, legs like rubber hose, a grin wider than Joe E. Brown’s, and a heart of gold. His name was Mickey Mouse.

Beginning that night, Mickey and his creator, Walt Disney, grabbed the world’s funny bone and have never lost their grip.

The New York Times praised the new film as “ingenious.”

“A wow!” cried the Weekly Film Review.

Thus was born history’s most influential mouse. Mickey led the way in the development of anima-tion as a new art, to the exploration of the world of animals and faraway people and of their adventures and geography.
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Wow, Disney actually prepared the images for them? Nowadays if you made one of these and put it up in your lawn you’d probably have Mickey’s lawyers on your ass for misappropriating their copyrights.

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Build P.M.’s Revolving Christmas Card

Three Disney characters rotate ’round and ’round to take turns wishing all your friends and neighbors a very Merry Christmas

By HARRY WICKS Workshop Editor

Last spring the staff at PM decided that tot Christmas 1969 we wanted yet another unusual yuletide decoration that readers could build. All agreed that whatever the finished product, it had to reflect the good cheer of the season. So we commissioned designer Gary Gerber to come up with something new. He did. Then ace workshopper John Capotosto went to work and put the project into the realm of a do-it-yourselfer: He figured out how to build it. finally, to give the display the happy mood of the season, the Walt Disney Studio created three of their characters especially for PM. The handsome result of all this effort is our way of saying Merry Christmas to our readers. —The Editors

CREATING on outdoor Christmas display that is unlike any that has been done before is a tall order. But the top-talent team that accepted this challenge from PM’s editors delivered. The result is a finished product that’s sure to draw raves from all who see it, and one that just might knock off first prize for best outdoor decoration in your neighborhood.

Standing about 4 ft. high, the display is motorized and features Mickey Mouse and two “stars” in a recently released Disney movie.
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