Did you know that my pal Floyd Norman animated on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? You may find this hard to believe but he did. That movie was made before Floyd was born but he didn't let a little thing like that stop him. Here — I'll steal part of the explanation from his fine blog…
It was the fifties and Walt Disney Productions had already launched a weekly television show on ABC. The Old Maestro and his creative staff were busily looking for projects they could exploit. Walt knew his audience delighted in seeing behind the scenes stuff and what goes on in the making of an animated film. Disney's writers came up with a brilliant idea. Since so much energy and imagination go into the making of an animated film what if we allowed the Disneyland audience to see material that never made it into the finished motion picture? A good example would be "Snow White." Animator Ward Kimball had put a good deal of effort into two sequences that never made it into the completed film. One sequence featured the seven dwarfs building Snow White's bed. However, the material Walt decided to show was the famous soup eating sequence. There was even a delightful song written by composer, Frank Churchill. It was entitled, "The Rhythm in Your Soup." Even better, the song recorded back in the nineteen thirties was still in the Disney's vault. Television audiences would finally see an entertaining sequence that had been "hidden" for years.
However, once the unseen footage was pulled from the archive, the Old Maestro had a major concern. The animation was fun and entertaining, but the sketches were clearly loose and rough. Perhaps a little too rough for television audiences not used to viewing rough animation. Walt Disney made the decision to clean up the footage. He wanted the drawings a little tighter, yet not so much as to lose the energy and vitality of the animator's original drawings. A crew was needed to get the soup eating sequence ready for prime time.
The year was 1956, and a group of young animation apprentices had just been hired. Having completed their thirty days of training, the young animation trainees were moved into a large room in 1-F, on the first floor of the Animation Building. I was one of those young trainees and our first assignment was to clean-up the rough sketches in Ward Kimball's soup eating sequence.
There's more on Floyd's blog which you should read often. In fact, if you're interested in animation, you should especially read this post on respectability for animators. You can check it out after you watch the soup sequence that Floyd was discussing…