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.That was what his coordination chieflyconsisted of.He was very involved, said James Bodrero, another model-department artist, in a critical sense. 84 However questionable the initial con-ception of a film might be, what wound up on the screen after Disney hadgone to work was usually more economical and eªective than the earlier ver-sions of any given story that can be reconstructed from meeting notes andother sources.In work on Pinocchio, for example, he pruned away tediousexposition, and for Bambi he eliminated superfluous dialogue. He was very helpful, Carl Barks said of Disney s role in story meetingson the Donald Duck cartoons. Very seldom did he ever say a real hurtfulthing to any of the story men, something that would cause.great dis-couragement.If he turned down a story completely, he would do it as gent-ly as he could.As he walked out the door he would say, Well, I think thebest thing to do with that is just to shelve it for a while. So you knew thatwas the end. 85Sometimes in notes from story meetings there is a particularly strong senseof Disney himself and how he worked.On August 8, 1939, he reviewed whathad been done on a cartoon then called Donald s Roadside Market (it was even-tually released as Old MacDonald Duck).This was one of his first meetingson a short cartoon after he had left the shorts in Dave Hand s care for morethan a year.In the meeting, Disney impatiently rejected what he called oldstuª, thought aloud and at length, warmed up to an idea (making a full-fledged musical out of the story), and then got really involved in the possi-bilities ( Gee, I d like to sit in with you and see what we could get on thestart of that music ). Musical things can t miss, he said (this was in the midst of work onFantasia). That is why you can sit and watch a tap dancer for ten minutesstraight.And then there is that old gag we used in a picture a long timeago and that is these hens laying eggs to music and it s funnier than hell. Heseized on music as a way to rescue the struggling shorts and steered discus-sion toward basing Roadside Market on either swing or opera. I think itwouldn t hurt for us to make some musical things, he said.(The finishedcartoon, Old MacDonald Duck, is not a musical.)86Those meeting notes also reflect Disney s abundant profanity, which every-one remembered, though the stenographers edited it out in many instances.The notes are sprinkled with hells and damns, and Disney sounds generallyimpatient and irascible Why do we have to have all these damn chases? Disney s most common expression Oh, shit survives in memoirs andambi ti on s pri ce, 1 93 8 1 941 1 55 interviews but apparently not in any meeting notes.That was probably be-cause Disney censored himself in the presence of female stenographerssometimes ostentatiously, as when he apologized so profusely to a stenogra-pher for using the word prat (for buttocks) that the gal started blushing, Gordon Legg said.To him, it appeared that Disney was doing it purposely,to make her feel uneasy. 87 Disney was, however, notoriously and incongru-ously prudish in some respects members of his staª learned quickly thathe disliked jokes about sex and it seems just as likely that he sincerely re-gretted what he regarded as a lapse in his deportment.Disney s comments in meetings could be almost self-parodying in his re-peated use of words like fanny and cute, as during a 1937 meeting on ThePractical Pig: We can get cute actions on the fanny.Arrange it so that thelittle guy gets in cute poses with that fanny.That is what will strengthen thispicture a lot cute actions of the little fellows.With cute actions it will makea very interesting picture. 88As if harking back to the late 1920s, he frequently came up with mild bath-room gags, as in the August 3, 1937, meeting on a Mickey Mouse cartoon calledThe Fox Hunt.He suggested that the foxhounds plunge into a body of water,with only the tips of their tails showing as they sniª along vigorously un-derwater. The funny part would be to have all the tails converging on onetree and then the duck comes up and yells at them to come on. 89 (That gagis in the finished film.) In the minds of those making our pictures, Disneywrote in 1937, there never have been any thoughts of vulgarity merely hu-morous situations from life exaggerated and, to me, dogs sniffing trees andfire plugs is very humorous. 90 He had a very earthy sense of humor, said Jack Cutting, who joined theDisney staª in 1929. His humor was what I would call rural, or rustic.It was an unsophisticated sense of humor, and because he had that, he in-stinctively sensed what might go over well with the average audience.DickHuemer s sense of humor was sophisticated, and there were others there thathad that sophisticated sense [of humor], but.Walt wouldn t try to stepinto the orbit of Dick s type of humor.Everything had to be basic, in Walt sway
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