Do you think this was actually a licensed use of Mickey? Also, what do we think they were selling?

10 First Prizes of $700 Each!

CAN YOU FIND THE TWINS?

Of course, you’ve watched the funny screen capers of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse who has climbed the steps to “movie” fame in Columbia Pictures. Recently, Mickey Mouse was acclaimed one of the world’s most popular movie features. His name and fame are spreading everywhere as more and more movie fans get to know him. Read the rest of this entry »

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Making Mickey Mouse Act for the Talkies

How do they make those animated movie cartoons of Mickey Mouse and his animal relatives which have proved so popular? In this article the author explains the tedious process by which cartoons are brought to life.

by Gordon S. Mitchell
Mr. Mitchell is a member of the Sound Department of Universal Pictures Corporation, and is well qualified to write on technical phases of movie production.

THE next time you drop into your favorite theater and watch Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Rabbit, Krazy Kat, or any of their familiar cartooned brethren scamper across the screen in a series of animated musical episodes, stop and ponder for a moment on these weighty facts: Read the rest of this entry »

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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