Monthly Archives: January 2014

I've been plugging the new Criterion DVD/Blu-ray set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World here for a while, not because I had a very small hand in its making but because it's such a great presentation of what I suppose is my favorite movie. I don't claim it's The Greatest Movie Ever Made or even The Greatest Comedy but it's a film that always brings me joy, and I've been fascinated with its history since I first saw it in November of '63, between the time Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy and Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. That was a good time to escape into a funny film.

The 5-disc set, which offers all its content in both DVD and Blu-ray format, will be officially released January 21 but I received my copies yesterday. Boy, is this a terrific thing…and I say that as someone who will not make another nickel, no matter how it sells. (Well, actually, if you order a copy through this link, I'll get a tiny cut but I get a tiny cut of anything you buy from Amazon if you get there by clicking through a link on this site.)

If you like this film, you probably already own a copy on DVD, Blu-ray, Laserdisc or even VHS. I have at least one of each plus a copy in Beta. The Criterion set does not contain the documentary, "Something a Little Less Serious," which was seen on some of the past home video versions. It also does not have all the extra versions of scenes (alternate takes which the director Stanley Kramer chose not to use) which were on the Laserdisc. But apart from those, I can't imagine why anyone would ever need any of the other video versions.

This set has many special features, including an amazing documentary on the visual effects and many interviews. There are two versions of the movie on it. One is a very fine transfer of the general release version, which was cut down somewhat from the way the movie was seen at its premiere. Then there's a 197 minute "reconstruction" of that original version, restoring most but not all of the cut footage. A few scenes are picture-only or audio-only and a few have imperfect video…but this is as close to "complete" as you're likely to ever see.

You can watch the almost-completely-restored version with or without the Audio Commentary Track. Should you choose "with," you'll hear three Mad World experts — Mike Schlesinger, Paul Scrabo and me — telling you so much trivia about this movie, you'll wonder if we have actual lives. This coming Wednesday, Mike and I will be on Stu's Show, discussing It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and telling you all sorts of things that we didn't have time to get into our 3+ hour annotation.

If you've never seen this film — or haven't seen it in a long, long time — and you buy this set, I suggest you watch the General Release Version first. Then wait a while and watch the longer version with our Commentary Track. Do not watch it with the Commentary Track until you're ready to hear us give away a lot of plot points.

I don't want to oversell this movie. The worst thing you can do when you tell someone a joke is to say, "Boy, are you gonna laugh at this." I really like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and I won't be offended (or bother arguing) if you don't…but if you do like it, you're going to like what the Criterion folks have done to it.

My friend Misty Lee posted this on Facebook and I couldn't resist stealing it…

An anonymous (to you, not to me) reader wrote to ask…

You mentioned that when you were at Hanna-Barbera, the quality of animation on a show varied because Bill Hanna would send one episode of a show to a sub-contractor in Taiwan, another to Korea, another to the Philippines and so on. That must have meant that some shows came back better than others. I see errors in animation all the time on those shows and I wonder how you dealt with that. Could you correct things?

Well, I didn't have to deal with that much because I wasn't the line producer on any of the shows I did there. But on every show, there was a producer who had to look at the animation that came back from overseas and deal with all the errors and bad drawing in it. You could usually spot these people in the halls of H-B because every time you saw them, even if you saw them ten times a day, they had less hair.

The show comes back. Things are wrong. So what you do if you're one of those increasingly less-hairy people is to call retakes. You essentially make a list that goes something like this…

Scene 3: Scooby Doo's nose is missing
Scene 5: Fred is missing an arm
Scene 6: Shaggy drawn to look like Indira Gandhi
Scene 7: Velma walking in mid-air instead of on ground
Scene 9: Daphne's dress the wrong color
Scene 11: Daphne should not be fondling a horse

And so on. You would be amazed how many mistakes there would be in some shows when they came back from Korea or wherever…often obvious things that you'd think anyone over there should have caught. Watching this process prompted me to write this somewhat notorious Garfield cartoon. See how many mistakes you spot, above and beyond the fact that this should have been taken down from YouTube by now…

So the producer calls retakes…and it was not at all odd for the order to be for 40% retakes or 45% retakes, meaning that percentage of scenes required fixing. Then the way the process worked, the producer was supposed to receive the corrected scenes, screen them and then be able to call for secondary retakes, meaning retakes of the retakes. In practice though on a network series, it was not uncommon for there to be no time for secondary retakes.

Once in a while, there was no time for first retakes…or if there was, not enough. A producer might fax the overseas studio a list of 50 retakes needed on a cartoon and say they had to be in by a certain date. The overseas studio might fax back and say they could only get 25 retakes done by that date…so please pick which ones were the most important. A few times, I participated in discussions of what we'd like to have fixed versus what we absolutely had to have fixed.

And once in a while, you got the idea that the overseas studio was deliberately delivering late so as to force us to only pick the most serious errors to fix. Retakes, after all, cost them money. There were occasional instances where a show would have to air the first time without all its retakes and errors would then be fixed for the second and subsequent runs. And once we started editing animation on digital video, it became possible to fix some errors at that stage.

Here's a story and no, it didn't happen on the Garfield cartoon I embedded above.

One time I was working on a series for an American studio but the animation was being farmed out to at a subcontracting studio in Taiwan. The operation there had what we'll call a Red Team and a Blue Team. The Red Team animated adventure shows full of giant robots and explosions and monsters. The Blue Team animated broad comedy and fuzzy bunnies. I was working on a show that was appropriate for the Blue Team and so it was animated by them.

Then a crisis erupted. The show the Red Team was working on had to stop production for some reason. Artists on the Red Team had nothing to draw. Some were under contract so the studio was losing money having them sitting around with no work. Some were not under contract and those folks would have to be laid-off. The head of our studio, the studio that employed me, was approached by the head of the subcontracting studio in Taiwan. Would it be okay, he asked, if the Red Team took a crack at animating an episode of our show? That would save the Taiwan studio some money and save the jobs of many of its artists. It would also get our show a little ahead in production, which is always nice.

The head of our studio here said it was okay to try it…but when the footage arrived from Taiwan, our line producer screened it and for the first time in the history of our studio or any other I'd ever heard of, called for 100% retakes. Every single scene had something wrong with it, he said.

The head of the studio in Taiwan was aghast when he heard this and it wasn't so much about the expense. It was the humiliation. And maybe the possible loss of business if it got around the industry that his studio animated a cartoon that required 100% retakes. He called the head of the U.S. studio and complained about the producer. He said, "Please…go look at what we sent over. If you were to tell me it was 100% retakes, I would accept it but I am sure your producer is being too fussy."

The head of the U.S. studio went and looked at the film. Then he called back the gent in Taiwan and he said, "I looked at it and you're right. It's not 100% retakes."

The fellow in Taiwan breathed a transcontinental sigh of relief. "I knew my people could not do that horrible a job."

The studio head in the U.S. continued: "It's only 99% retakes. I found two scenes that are passable."

The decision was made not to have the Red Team attempt the fixes. When the Blue Team finished what they were currently working on, they would simply start from scratch and redo the entire cartoon. Also, a new show — an adventure show — had been found for the Red Team to work on.

But when the folks on the Red Team heard that their work was being rejected in toto, they felt disgraced. They went to the head of the Taiwan studio and asked if they could be allowed to redo the cartoon…and they were talking about doing it when they were not on the payroll. They would work a full work week on the new adventure show, then come in weekends and evenings to redo the cartoon that had been pegged for 99-100% retakes.

The head of the Taiwan studio called the U.S studio to ask…and the head of the U.S. studio asked me. Could I juggle around the schedule of which cartoons would run in the same half-hour and when they would air? I did some juggling and determined it was possible. The Red Team therefore had time to redo the cartoon in what otherwise would have been their free time.

They did…and I wish I could tell you that their second try was perfect but it wasn't. It was better but it still required more than 50% retakes. I think eventually the Blue Team wound up doing the final fixes on it. I was told that later on, on another series, the reverse happened. The Blue Team suddenly had nothing to do so they tried animating an episode of the adventure series the Red Team was animating and the result was a similar disaster.

In the case of that one episode of our show, there was time to redo everything…or almost everything.  Still on some episodes, there wasn't…and that's one of the reasons TV animation is sometimes not as good as it should be. I once complimented a friend on an episode of a show he'd produced. He said, "You think that was good, imagine how good it would be if I'd gotten half the retakes I needed."

Yes, it's a good day not to be Chris Christie. Things just keep getting worse for the guy and now, everyone seems to saying that this scandal destroys his chances of a serious presidential run in 2016. I'm sure someone else has thought of this joke by now but I'm imagining someone asking him if he's going to run and he says, "I'll blockade that bridge when I get to it."

Anyway, I disagree. I don't think this destroys the possibility of a Christie run at the White House because I don't think there ever was one. His infamous temper and style make him look pretty non-presidential. (He doesn't much look like a governor lately, either. He looks like a guy who runs an auto body shop explaining why your car is not only not ready when he promised it but that someone in his shop, against his wishes, drove it off a pier into the ocean. What's more, he'll accept responsibility for it as long as everyone understands that he didn't do it, had no knowledge of it and that someone else is really responsible.)

But does anyone think this guy ever had a shot at winning the presidency in 2016? He's too conservative for anything but the Republican party but kinda moderate on a few issues, plus he was famously friendly with Barack Obama. That's enough to make him a non-starter in a G.O.P. where a sitting Republican senator or representative can get primaried merely for not hating Obama enough.

I'm sorry this has all happened. There was something I once liked about Christie…an occasional honesty and candor I found refreshing. I have to learn to stop liking political figures because, sooner or later, most of them disappoint you.

To no one's surprise, Woody Allen will not be appearing at the Golden Globe Awards to accept his lifetime achievement trophy. Here, he explains why.

I'm becoming a true fan of John Green on YouTube. Here he is with a mess of words you won't remember but wish you did. There must be a term for that situation…

No announcement has been made yet as to when it will be possible to purchase badges for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego…and by the way, don't depend on this page to tell you. I'll try to let you know but I may not be your first or best source. If I were you, I'd keep my eye on the Toucan Blog that the con operates, not just for registration information but for lots of interesting things you might want to know.

One thing I can tell you, though: It will not be possible to purchase four-day registrations this year. They will be selling Preview Night (Wednesday evening), Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as separate purchases. I do not know for sure why they are doing this, though I can speculate they think it may allow a wider range of people to pass through the halls during the con's duration…and maybe it will accomplish that. It might also mean some people will find themselves only able to get admission on Thursday and Sunday, thereby presenting them with the problem of what to do those other two days if they come from out o' town.

Do not complain to me. I have nothing to do with this. My importance at this convention begins and ends with officiating at Quick Draw!, presenting the Bill Finger Award and telling Sergio, Scott and some other guy what to sketch at Quick Draw!

For those of you who've never experienced Comic-Con, it is an amazing experience. I'm a person who's never bored but I am never as not-bored as when I'm at Comic-Con. There's so much to see and so much to do and, best of all, so many interesting people to meet and talk to. If you hate crowds, stay away…although one friend of mine who claims to hate crowds went anyway and later remarked that it was easier to avoid them than he'd thought. (He mostly spent the days going to panels and presentations, and I guess it helps that he isn't interested in the hottest new TV shows or movies.)

If you can't go or can't wait, consider WonderCon, which is being held in Anaheim on Easter Weekend. I don't like the location. The proximity to Disneyland has its advantages (lotsa great restaurants around, fireworks nearby at night, proximity to Disneyland) but it also has its downsides (traffic). Still, the Anaheim Convention Center is fine and the con, run by the same folks who do Comic-Con, is well-run and offers much of the same magic. There's less of it but more than enough. I wish they could go back to San Francisco but in addition to this venue, not instead of it.

Jerry Beck sent me this link. It's a piece about the history of — and sad demise of — NBC's Burbank studios.

In many past messages here, I've written of the joys that I once experienced in that building. I only worked on a few shows taped there — ironically, all but one were shows that aired on other networks but taped at NBC — but I was there a lot. In the early seventies, I trespassed so often that some of the guards would recognize me, figure I worked on some show there, and just nod to me as I walked right past them and went in.

At the time, every studio held something of interest. In Stage 3, I might be able to watch them do scenes for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In or Bob Hope might be in there, doing a sketch and swearing at his longtime cue card man, Barney McNulty. I must have seen him threaten to fire Barney at least a dozen times. Then across the hall, Johnny Carson might be visiting — this is when the Tonight Show was based in New York, as it will soon be again — and that incredible band might be rehearsing.

Elsewhere in the building, I might be able to watch Flip Wilson rehearse or see The Dean Martin Show rehearse without Dean. I did see Dean there for tapings but the rehearsals were fun, too…Dom DeLuise or Lou Jacobi, and sometimes, there'd be Golddiggers. I liked Golddiggers. I spent an afternoon there once with Gene Kelly when he was taping a short-lived series and then I walked with him down the hall to watch him tape some spots with Dean.

I met McLean Stevenson in those hallways once — this is later, after The Tonight Show had relocated here. He was guest-hosting one night and earlier in the day, we got to talking in the halls and he took me into Studio 1, I took a seat all alone in the studio audience and he ran through his monologue for me and I critiqued it for him. Another time, even later, my comedian pal Jeff Altman and I snuck in that studio when no one was around. Jeff stood on Johnny's star and did a monologue utilizing his great Carson impression — the one Letterman always asks him to do when he's on.

So I spent a lot of time in that building. I even picketed it a couple of times.

For a kid who loved television, it was better than Disneyland…and I can't think of a single building in town that would be like that today. Production is more spread out and Security is obsessive. I went over to The Tonight Show for a visit last year and I'll bet I could get into the Pentagon without clearance easier than I was able to get into Leno's studio with clearance. But in the old days, when Johnny was taping, if you knew where you were going and acted like you belonged there, you could just walk in and stand behind Fred DeCordova and the other producers while Mr. Carson did his show.

Sad to see it go away.  But in a sense, it already has.

From this morning's New York Daily News…

We asked director Jon Favreau if Robert Downey Jr. owes him any favors for casting him in the "Iron Man" superhero franchise. "Oh, he helped me out a lot too," he told us at Cipriani 42nd Street. "I think it was mutually beneficial and I got a really good friend out of it." Favreau also said he'd love to see the comic book Groo the Wanderer brought to the big screen. "It was a spoof on Conan the Barbarian," he said. "I liked that one."

Yeah, that might be nice. And Groo fans should watch this space for an announcement about the Cheese-Dip Eater returning to the comic book racks in a big way.

• When a politician keeps saying "mistakes were made," he's trying to avoid saying what they were and who made them.

• Chris Christie is throwing aides under the bus. But the bus isn't going anywhere due to lane closures on the George Washington Bridge.

Our friend Jim Korkis wrote with more facts about the intersection of Walt Disney and the now-more-famous-than-she's-ever-been P.L. Travers. I'll meet you on the other side to discuss them…

Travers' contract included three stipulations: She would receive a $100,000 down payment (comparable to over a million dollars today) toward five percent of the producer's gross for life. She would be a consultant on artistic matters like casting, the script, etc. and she could supply a story outline (which she did and it was rejected) but that would not prevent Disney from coming up with a treatment. However, Travers had to give her final blessing on whatever treatment was selected before she received a dime. That approval literally gave Walt Disney Productions (as it was known at the time) permission to make the film.

Travers firmly believed that things had been settled during the story meeting and as a consultant everything she suggested would be used. Just a few weeks after the end of the story meetings or approximately early May 1961, she signed off on the treatment which gave Disney permission to develop a script from the treatment. Walt sent her the final shooting script in Spring 1963 and she sent over fourteen pages of "corrections," most of which were incorporated into the film.

Yes, Travers may have been given oral assurances. Some claim that the reason Walt left during the story meetings is that he could claim that he wasn't "aware" of certain concerns Travers communicated.

Walt said, "You know what? Formal waiters have always reminded me of penguins." Then Walt had his son-in-law Ron Miller pull the movie Song of the South out of the vault to watch to see how well animation could be combined with live action. Yes, his staff originally thought he meant real live penguins knowing Travers' dislike of animation.

Let's just say that the situation with Walt and Travers was "complicated." Walt felt that Travers would be so fascinated by having her work done as a Disney film that she would be dazzled and defer to Walt. The contract was unlike any Disney contract before or since. Travers died a very, very rich woman. When Mary Poppins appeared in an arena ice show, money was paid to Travers, for instance. Despite her concerns about how her character was handled, she still kept cashing those checks.

Well, I don't blame her for that. I mean, if she did hate the movie — and obviously, she said different things to different people on that point — not cashing the checks wouldn't have made it any better. It would just have meant more profit for those who'd despoiled her creation.

In any case, it's apparently fiction that, as depicted in the new film, she at some point had script approval. She had treatment approval, which is a pretty far cry from script approval. It's interesting that she made "corrections" to the script and most were used as Saving Mr. Banks sure seems to suggest that they made the film wholly without her.

Jim followed up that message to me with this one about the article I linked to in which he did some fact-checking on the film…

Disney Archives contacted me this morning and loved the article but found one mistake. Yes, Walt planned to take Travers to Disneyland (it was in his schedule book) and everyone assumed he had. Official documentation shows that the day he was scheduled to do so (Easter Sunday 1961) Walt called with his regrets that he had a cold and so Bill Dover took Travers to Disneyland for her only visit. No documentation on what rides she went on but Walt gave her access to his apartment above the firehouse and to his little electric car. For decades, people (including those I interviewed who were there) "remembered" that Walt took her to Disneyland because that was the plan. So the entire section of Walt and Travers at the park is completely untrue. Completely. Another Disney urban legend.

Disney records also show that Dover picked up Travers at the airport when she arrived and took her to the airport when she left. He sent Travers Xeroxed clippings of articles about the film for a while and then continued a correspondence. When his wife passed away, Travers sent a nice letter about how it impacts you to lose someone you love. Travers was also assigned a chauffeur to take her anywhere she wanted to go when in Los Angeles but used him infrequently.

You know, Walt not actually taking her to Disneyland is a fiction I could live with. The thought of him walking around that place is such a fabulous image that I can't fault the filmmakers for not being able to resist it. I know folks who went to Disneyland, saw Walt in person there and it's one of the most treasured memories of their childhoods.

So now my question would be: If Walt didn't take her, did she go — as the film makes out — largely under duress?

I wasn't going to watch Saving Mr. Banks again but I've spent so much time reading messages and articles about it that I think I need to…but not for a while. One of these days, I'll give it a look in light of all I've learned and see if my opinion goes up or down. I'm expecting down but you never know. It might be easier to accept the leaps of logic and characterization when you're more aware of how much non-truth it was all playing against.

And now, let me introduce you better to my long-time buddy, Jim Korkis. (Devout Groo fans have already noted that I once named a ravaged village after Jim.) Here's a little film he wrote and appears in discussing Walt Disney's passion for Steam Trains. The estate Jim mentions where Walt built his own railroad was recently for sale and I think I read somewhere else that it now has a buyer. The trains are gone but some artifacts remain there…

Okay, so the Supreme Court has put a hold on further Gay Marriages in Utah pending an appeal of the ruling that allowed them to proceed. I didn't like that but I can kinda understand it.

Then today, the government in Utah said that not only will no further licenses to marry be granted to same-sex couples but the marriages already performed of man and man or woman and woman are no longer to be recognized. In other words, they weren't valid even though they were valid when the state issued these people licenses to wed. On the other hand, couples who obtained new drivers' licenses under new married names can keep them.

The Attorney General said, "Please understand this position is not intended to comment on the legal status of those same-sex marriages — that is for the courts to decide." But of course, refusing to recognize a marriage is commenting on its legal status. It's changing it from an actual marriage to TBD.

Has this ever happened anywhere? Has any couple, straight or gay, ever gone down to a courthouse, obtained a marriage license from the state, entered into Holy Matrimony, then been told, "Whoa! We're not sure if we had the power to issue you that license we issued so for the time being, let's pretend for the time being you aren't married"?

I understand that the state's position may be mandated by the wording of the laws that are in place but, boy, does this just point up how ridiculous it is to have any of these laws and not just let consenting adults marry each other. What about a couple that abstained from having pre-marital sex? I think that's what you're supposed to do in Utah, right? So they refrain until they're married and once they're married, they consummate the marriage with a lot of sex. That's also what you're supposed to do in Utah, right? And then the state says, "Whoops! Maybe you weren't married!"

Hasn't the state just retroactively turned marriage into adultery? Or something like that…

Number three hundred and twenty-two in a series…

I've decided not to post a lot of the messages I've received agreeing or disagreeing with my views of Saving Mr. Banks. Instead, I'm going to just discuss this one from one of the best Disney experts I know. My pal Jim Korkis is wise about All Things Walt and he sent this message to me…

On your recent posting, I think just like Harlan Ellison's rant on YouTube about the film, you undercut your point by not paying attention to the details. You talk about Travers throwing away green apples from her fruit basket but they were pears. Pears turn out to be a significant memory to her when she goes to buy some and returns to find her father dead. Harlan yells that in the name P.L. Travers that her middle initial stands for "Goff". These are all casual errors that often occur in the heat of trying to make an argument but often result in hesitation from a reader questioning "If they were incorrect on that easily checked fact…." what else are they wrong about?

As you know, I wrote a chapter about the Walt and Travers war over Mary Poppins in one of my latest books, The Vault of Walt: Volume Two. Yes, Travers was a bit different in real life. She was truly a "pill" as the British say with a condescending attitude, the tendency to drop names, vain (look how many times Mary Poppins checks out her own reflection) and very little tolerance for people who didn't see things her way. In fact, very much like the character of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory. However, she could also be playful and very flirtatious especially when younger men were around.

Travers always stated that Disney took advantage of her lack of knowledge of how films are made. It was her understanding that in the "Jolly Holiday" number that the backgrounds would be chalk drawings with live people performing in front of them as if they were on a stage. She didn't bring up animated penguins. In fact, when Walt brought up the idea of the penguins being waiters long after Travers signed the contract, his animation staff immediately thought he was going to train live penguins like in the True Life Adventure films.

Travers signed because she needed the money badly (her only consistent source of income was from a boarder) and felt that since the contract stated she would be a consultant, she felt that Walt would immediately defer to her on all matters once the contract was signed. Walt didn't.

As you might suspect, I have been interviewed a lot lately about Saving Mr. Banks. There will be a long interview in the Thursday edition of The Orlando Weekly by Seth Kubersky. Basically, I feel it is a sweet little film and not a documentary. It is also a film about Travers with Walt as a supporting character. Travers herself was quite a character and since the 1940s there have been films about the grumpy, opinionated older women or men who suddenly have a change of heart by the end of the film. In fact, I just saw The Bishop's Wife with Cary Grant this past holiday season and David Niven doing battle with an unyielding Gladys Cooper.

Okay, so they weren't green apples. They were pears. I don't think that changes anything.

I'm beginning to lose interest in the debate over how much the P.L. Travers of the movie reflects the P.L. Travers of the real world. There are many points of view out there, ranging from articles by published biographers of the lady to people who met her on the Disney lot. For what it's worth, I've talked to three of the latter group about her — Floyd Norman, Richard Sherman and Dick Van Dyke. Since I don't know who to believe, and since all of them might be accurate in a sense, I was just reviewing the film based on my interest in the character in it named P.L. Travers. I still don't like her, didn't like watching her for two hours, and don't buy the transformation she makes in those two hours.

I never thought it was a documentary but I also don't think it's a sweet little film.

I'm still a little fuzzy on a couple of points. In the beginning, her solicitor (I guess that's what he is) tells her that if she signs the deal with Disney, she'll have script approval. Later, she signs the deal with Disney and doesn't have script approval. Wha' happened? Was the lawyer wrong about what was in the contract? Was there another contract?

It is certainly not unprecedented in show business — or for that matter, other industries — for one thing to be verbally promised and another thing committed to paper. But it seems to me that if Travers was promised "script approval," or believed she'd been promised "script approval," she would have made a huge issue of the switch to "consultation" before she signed a contract that only gave her the latter.

I don't remember now and my DVD of the film is not handy but is the copy of the contract she signs at the end the same one she was carrying around during her weeks at the studio? Because if so, she sure wasn't acting like a person who had a deal that only guaranteed her consultation rights, nor was she demanding something stronger. Or did she sign a new draft that Walt brought with him to London? Because if so, it was foolish (and waaaay outta-character) to sign it without reading it and having her lawyer read it. She'd be justifiably furious if Walt had quietly changed a clause and taken away her only weapon in her mission to protect Mary Poppins.

Also: Did I miss something? She makes a huge deal of insisting that everyone call her "Mrs. Travers" but I don't think anywhere in the film, anyone says, "Hey, what's with the 'Mrs.' thing? She was never married!" Walt comes to all sorts of deductions about her motives and demons when he notes that her name isn't really Travers but it's not that bizarre for an author to change his or her name for publication — especially women authors back then concealing their gender — and to then live under the pseudonym. Actors do that all the time. Isn't the more unusual thing that a single woman is so determined to be addressed like a married one?

And hold on! People on Disney's animation staff thought Walt was going to have real penguins trained to act as waiters? Saving Mr. Banks pretty much makes P.L. Travers look like a fool for thinking that could be done. You certainly couldn't train them to do the kind of things the script called for. They used live birds for portions of that Jim Carrey film, Mr. Popper's Penguins, and all they could train them to do was walk from here to there and stand in place. Every other action had to be achieved via CGI — an option not available to Disney at the time.

For those of you who aren't losing interest in the question of the film's verisimilitude, here's a link to the article Jim mentions above which fact-checks the film. Jim is a very smart writer and a superb researcher so I'm sure interested in what he has to say.  While we're at, here's a link to purchase the book he mentioned, The Vault of Walt: Volume Two.  Any Korkis book on Disney is worth your time and E-tickets.

Oh — and I have one question, based on something Stu Shostak pointed out to me. Mrs./Ms. Travers/Goff/Whoever-She-Was paid her infamous visit to the Disney studio in 1962. When she gets to her hotel room, it's well-populated by Disney toys including a couple of Winnie the Pooh dolls. Now, Disney licensed the rights to Pooh in 1961 but didn't release his first animation of the character until 1966. Would there have been Pooh dolls with the Disney design in '62? And would Travers have made her little remark about what Walt had done to the work of A.A. Milne then? I'm just asking. And I guess it doesn't sound much like I'm losing interest in this topic, does it?