A weekly
dose of editorial comments from the pages of Hogan's Alley.
Did Alex Raymond,
the creator of Flash Gordon, commit suicide?
Take a look
back as top comic book professionals discuss their favorite Jack "King"
Kirby work.
Lynn Johnston
discusses her life and For Better or For Worse, and how the two affect
each other.
Bill Peet, the
outspoken Disney veteran, discusses the industry he helped influence.
Jerry
Ordway shows readers the making of his Captain Marvel graphic novel, Shazam!
Frank Miller
takes readers behind the scenes of his gritty work, Sin City.
Revisit
yesteryear as Barney and Snuffy Smith share a rollicking adventure in
Barney Google.
Herriman's Other
Masterpiece. Krazy Kat wasn't George Herriman's only brilliant work. There
was also Stumble Inn.
Visit
the friends of Hogan's Alley.
Bill Peet interview
- continued
Province:
The popular version is that Roy Disney was often concerned with Walt's
financial extravagances.
Peet: He was wrong most of the time. The only time he might have been right was with Fantasia. It was a gamble. They were all gambles. Anybody who tries to do anything great is gambling.
Look at Flowers and Trees. It was finished, and Walt went all the way back to the beginning and redid it in color. Roy had a fit and said this was absolutely impossible. But Walt wanted to put out the first color cartoon. Roy was wrong there. It won an Academy Award.
Province: Right after the war you worked on the film you're most identified with, Song of the South.
Peet: I did story-sketch on the sequences with B'rer Rabbit based on the Uncle Remus fables. The personalities were so rich and well-defined in the original stories. To me they were funnier than hell! I thought they were going to re-release it but the studio backed off because of the racial things. When it [originally] came out, the NAACP had strong objections to it. They felt Uncle Remus was treated as a slave even though it's post-Civil War, around 1910 or so.
Province: One of my personal favorites that came out some time later but was not one of the most popular was Alice In Wonderland.
Peet: I worked on just about every part of that. The strange thing is that the person who worked on it last received credit for a lot of my things. I developed the Caterpillar stuff, the Mad Tea Party, the "half a cup" gags and things like that. We wondered if it could have been a little better in many little ways.
We all disagreed with the way it ended; with a montage. I didn't like it. I had developed a labyrinth, and I was fascinated with the idea of the guards chasing Alice through this thing. It could have been a hell of a thing with the music, like trying to escape from a bad dream. but they decided to have everyone jump into the tea pot in a montage. Montages don't do anything, and you don't want to end with a conglomeration. You want suspense, where she's beating on the door with just a minute left and just barely gets out of there.
Province: Your ideas about story structure caused a major confrontation with Walt over while making Sleeping Beauty.
Peet: Some people would agree with Walt no matter what. When I was working on a story, I wouldn't agree with him no matter what, because I knew the difference. I wasn't trying to compete with him. I would disagree with him honestly, not just to fight with him. This was a case where Walt had no ideas. He was preoccupied with Disneyland and excited about that and irritated with us. He said, "Change this!" and I said, "Why make an arbitrary change? Why not try to do something better?" That was a weakness in the studio. If it stayed on the boards too long, Walt would see it over and over and get bored with it. It's not fair because after seeing it time after time it's no longer fresh, it can't be. Something very good could be ruined because Walt had seen it too many times.
Walt's judgment was tainted because he was spoiled by seeing a lot of stuff. His judgment was no longer worth a damn. He was always hiring these big-time screenwriters and playwrights. These people had no conceptions in visual terms at all, all dialogue. So they really couldn't handle the stuff. He paid them a hell of a lot of money to fail. When it came down to it, we had to do it.
He was very excited about Disneyland and working on that. Then to have to come back to the studio and work on the same old stuff he had been doing for years. A lot of product went out the door that he never saw because he was involved with Disneyland and the TV show. Once in a while he would come by to see what you were working on, but it wasn't like the old days when he would sit in and watch every move. It became more of his delegating jobs to those who were able to do it. His attitude was that we cost too much.
Province: You feel his interest in animation waned after Disneyland opened?
Peet: He always held up Disneyland and, later, Mary Poppins as being great. It was something tangible that he could see; the cameras filming, the sets being built and the special effects. Everything happening right then and there. Animation took too long. Walt would have to wait forever to see the results, and then you don't dare watch it because if there's a mistake there's nothing you can do about it because you've spent the money. You can't just cut out pieces because it costs so much. Live action, you just shoot again tomorrow and you can tell the actors what to do. Walt could control live action, too. He always wanted to compete with the big shots and make a Gone With the Wind or something.
Province: Mary Poppins was definitely Disneyfied because she certainly isn't a warm character in the original book.
Peet: It's about a wealthy British family that no one can identify with, let alone a nanny. I thought Mary Poppins was an icky, sweet nothing.
Province: I understand that Mrs. Travers, the author, did not part with the rights easily.
Peet: She came to the studio and was tougher than hell. She tried to oversee it and insisted that she be involved in some advisory role. They wouldn't let her do it because she would have raised hell every day. She was a witch of a woman and a real pain in the ass.
Province: What kind of relationship did you have with the "Nine Old Men"?
Peet: That name has always bugged me because it gives people the idea that there were only nine animators and that they did everything. There sure weren't nine old storymen because it's the most precarious job in the business. When I left the studio, I was the only one left from the story department from Pinocchio.
Yet the Nine Old Men were there the entire time and they could do no wrong. They knew Walt wasn't going to fire them because of some piece of animation that didn't work. But a storyman was only as good as his last story. Walt always figured he could get a storyman, but he respected the animators and didn't want to mess with them. He figured they were the special talents. They had been there the longest, but that didn't mean they were great. There were two or three that were pretty mediocre, but they carried the load on the features. The storymen aren't given any credit or seen as being important in any of the Disney books. They never gave me any credit for any of my work on The Jungle Book.
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