#2 Fun and Fancy Free

January 2, 2021
Fun and Fancy Free (1947) ***
Disney+
Free
Disney Other

Day two! I made it to Day 2! Where is my parade? Of course, I did end up watching this starting at midnight, so I really do need to get in the habit of watching these earlier in the day and not have it always be some kind of all-night marathon like I’m in my 20s.

I spun the wheel, and this time it came up Disney Other. I have two Disney categories that I’m watching in order of release, Disney Animated Features, and Disney Other. Films that are combination live action and animation go into the Other category, except for Fantasia, which is an honorary animation-only film.

At first, I thought I was going to watch Make Mine Music, which is weirdly not on Disney+, but has had the individual cartoons uploaded onto YouTube. But then I realized three things, 1. YouTube is missing one of the sections, Peter and the Wolf, 2. It’s available on DVD, so I bought it, and 3. It’s actually fully animated, so even though it’s not one single story, it counts as a feature.

Next on the Other list is Song of the South, famously not on Disney+, and even though it is extremely problematic, I don’t want to skip it. I watched it as a child, and of course I grew up on the stories of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, and I still say, “Don’t throw me into that briar patch!” reasonably often. It was released on DVD a while back, so I found it on eBay and will watch it. I am interested to see how it has changed since the world has changed.

Moving on to the next film on the list, that was Fun and Fancy Free, which is on Disney+, so all is well. It is a combination of two shorts that were planned on being features before the war, Bongo, and Mickey and the Beanstalk, with a linking element of Jiminy Cricket.

Bongo is about a circus bear who longs to be free and live in the wild. He escapes, falls in love, and learns how to be a real bear. I know for a fact I had never seen it before, but it looked so familiar, especially when Lula Belle, the girl bear, showed up. So I looked it up, and there was in fact a Little Golden Book of Bongo, that I’m sure I must’ve had.

The second half, Mickey and the Beanstalk, I definitely have seen before, multiple times, but never as it is is in this movie. This is the live action section, where Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd have a party for a little girl, Luana Patten (also in Song of the South). Putting aside the fact that a grown man who plays with puppets invites an eight-year-old girl over to a party where she is the only guest, Bergen tells the story while we watch the animation. It is terrifically entertaining, even if you are not an Edgar Bergen fan as such, but I love his old radio show, and really love the fact that what he was was a great voice artist, and a frankly terrible ventriloquist, but that was part of the charm.

All in all, I enjoyed the movie very much, and managed to only add ten minutes to the running time by pausing the film, which is much better than with Hedwig. Then I found a making of short on YouTube called The Story Behind Fun and Fancy Free from 1997, also not on Disney+! You are falling down on the job, Disney+! Very interesting, highly recommended, Leonard Maltin is super young.