Melody Time (thing)

Disney Animated Features
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Release Date: 27 May 1948

This film, coming after the pairing of two featurette-length segments in Fun and Fancy Free returns to the collection-of-shorts format used previously. It resembles Make Mine Music in many ways, as the shorts contained within are centered around the music.

The segments:

• "Once Upon a Wintertime" is a quiet, enchanting love story between two ice skaters.
• "Bumble Boogie" uses a boogie woogie-style arrangement (by Jack Fina) of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" to great effect, animating a poor bee caught in a surreal landscape of musical symbols.
• "Johnny Appleseed" is a ballad telling the tale of the famous orchard-planter. Features a song that many people have heard of (but didn't realize came from this movie), "The Lord is Good to Me."
• "Trees" is a simple mood piece based on a poem by Joyce Kilmer.
• "Little Toot" is about a small tugboat who manages to save an ocean liner; the song in this segment is performed by the Andrews Sisters.
• "Blame it on the Samba" features our old pals Donald Duck and José Carioca (from Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros) and a live-action pianist.
• "Pecos Bill" is narrated (and its songs are sung by) Roy Rogers; it tells the tale of the famous western folk hero who could (it is said) lasso a tornado.

As was becoming a trend, this film was not nominated for any Academy Awards. Many of the segments are quite popular on their own, though, and the era of compilation-style Disney Animated Features (roughly the entire 1940s) was almost at an end.

Information for the Disney Animated Features series of nodes comes from the IMDb (www.imdb.com), Frank's Disney Page (http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/Disney/), and the dark recesses of my own memory.