Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Melody Time (1948) - 72 Minutes


Melody Time is our (hopefully) last installment of the musical-clip-by-clip Disney film. It involves several shorter songs/stories of various themes. We begin with "Once Upon a Wintertime", followed by "Bumble Boogies", "Johnny Appleseed", "Trees", "Little Toot", "Blame it on the Samba", and finally "Pecos Bill".


Eli

Rating: 5/10

Reaction: Well here we go again. Another Fantasia-esq Disney film. I'm glad we've had a bit of a break between our last post and now (wow, a whole month!) or I may have gouged my eyes out and stuffed cotton in my ears. Not that this was a terrible film - but seeing the same sort of genre over and over again can get tedious. (Wait...are we the ones watching all the Disney films? Ha.) Anyway - you know what I mean. There were some cute sketches in this Melody Time. My favorites were probably the Winter Wonderland one, and also Little Toot. (Haha...toot...) Winter Wonderland was about a couple who go ice skating - but they are apparently miles up on top of a river with a waterfall. Stupid skaters. The woman almost dies - but doesn't, thanks to the forest critters. Then they happily ride home in their sleigh. Little Toot was cute, and made a lot of mischeif. He even destroyed half of NYC by having a cruise ship crash into a ton of buildings. We're talking 1000s of casualties here, people!!! No wonder he got exiled to the middle of the ocean. But then he saves the day. Duh. It's Disney.

Other clips included a cute bumble bee one, one boring one about trees, and a Pecos Bill story. We skipped Johnny Appleseed as we had watched it. And the intro involved these scary lips and masks that had no eyes and reminded me of Sleep No More. Yikes! Oh yeah - and I forgot our return to The Three Caballeros. I must say that the 10 or so minute clip involved in this movie was much better than those other 2 combined. Yikes. Those were some boring movies. But oh well, this was cute. Probably not one I'd re-watch time and again - but it was cute. And who doesn't love the Andrews Sisters? Nobody, that's who.


Regan

Rating: 5/10

Reaction: Gotta admit, I felt like they really phoned this one in.  Most of the songs were fine, but the attached cartoons left something to be desired.  What was going on in the winter wonderland?  First they go ice skating on some raging, godforsaken river with a mile-long plunge at the end, then when the girls fall in they have to be rescued, not by the boys or themselves, but by random forest animals.  Not cool.  The one with the fly being chased by instrument-themed...plants?...was just weird.

We also saw the reappearance of two of the three caballeros, Donald and random Amazon parrot, plus an impressively talented organist-slash-samba-dancer.  The cutest was probably Little Toot, the tugboat who massacred half of New York by directing the Titanic into it.  Still, anything sung by the Andrews Sisters has a leg up.  I also enjoyed the Roy Rogers Wild West segment at the end, although those Indians' war paint flying off was pretty horrific(ly hilariously un-PC).  Overall, not a very good or coherent series of clips.

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