I'm sorry I started this. Mike Tiefenbacher writes to tell me that the first time Alan Young provided the voice of Uncle Scrooge was on the 1963 Disneyland record album, Donald Duck and Friends. In fact, Mr. McDuck is there on the cover. Mike also believes that this was the first appearance of the World's Richest Duck on a licensed Disney product not produced by Western Printing and Lithography, the company that produced the Dell Comics and Whitman coloring books and such. Scrooge, of course, debuted in a Dell Comic and later became part of the world-wide Walt empire.
So that would easily give Young the record as the longest-running Disney voice who's still alive…unless you count Kathryn Beaumont. Jeff Peterson informs she got the role of Alice in Alice in Wonderland in August of 1949 and then the movie was released in 1951.
In other dangling news, several folks have written me with examples of other movies that were shot on tape prior to Norman, Is That You? so I withdraw whatever I said in that area. I do recall though that there was some innovative, never-used-before technique involved in the transfer to film.
My pal Sergio and I watched a little of it (his scenes, mostly) the other day. He says that all or most of the interiors were shot not in a movie studio but at NBC in Burbank. A couple of the exteriors look to me like parts of that building, too. And I was struck by how bad the print was that Turner Classic Movies aired, full of dropouts and odd color tweaks. If this movie's ever coming out on DVD — and even Sergio isn't clamoring for that — it's going to need a major restoration. That is, assuming TCM didn't just get a bad print and there's a good one squirreled away somewhere.
Off to a meeting. More later.