It's A Small World Animated Series

 I'm in geek heaven. I just watched a Mary Blair inspired, Richard Sherman scored, Walt Disney cartoon about the Rosetta Stone. Five times. Without stopping in between. It's that good. This episode isn't even counted as a "real" episode, i think. It's sort of a commercial for Rosetta Stone language software, but the best, most subtle and pleasant commercial in the world. And, I would venture to say, the best explanation of basic linguistics for children ever. My favorite class in four years of college was an Anthropological Linguistics class. Did I mention I was in heaven? Not to give the charm away here, but I'm loving the photo the kid takes of the Mexican kids after telling them to say "cheese" and they say "queso." Awesomeness.

This series is apparently planned for six episodes, one and two are available now, and takes children around the world to explore other cultures. It's so well done, I can't say enough about it. It's cute without being annoying, the It's A Small World tune shows up a lot but doesn't smack you over the head, it is understandable to kids without talking down to them. Walt would be very, very proud of this one, I think.

If you have kids, or, really to be honest if you have a heart and soul, you owe it to yourself to check this out!


It's A Small World Animated Series Pilot

It's A Small World--Rosetta Stone

Episode One--Jolly Holi Day

Episode Two--Bricht and Braw

All Episodes on One Page

Animation Run Amok

Disney sometimes gets criticized for being over-protective of it's intellectual property. The Disney Company holds copyright to many many stories and characters and iconic images, but these are the lifeblood of the company, the source of the magic Walt created all those years ago. I for one am happy to see Mickey remain outside the public domain and inside the embrace of Disney, and this past weekend my son and I found a perfect example of why I feel that way.

We took a Saturday trip to Carolina Beach, an island town just up the coast from our own. Carolina Beach is a bit, ummmm, let's say tackier than Oak Island. They have what they call a "boardwalk," though it hasn't any boards and is really just a two block stretch of bars and tourist trap souvenir shops. One newer attraction on the boardwalk, though, is a small collection of amusement rides, like you'd find at a traveling fair. It was daytime when we visited and they weren't running, but they were somehow even creepier in daylight than they would be at night, I suspect. We saw a dragon-headed roller coaster and a carousel with some truly disturbing animals to ride on. Then there was a fun house. It had a "cute" animated character theme, with a hodgepodge of familiar cartoon friends. Disney was represented by Buzz Lightyear and Tow Mater and Lightning McQueen. The Cars characters weren't too bad. I mean, they were not drawn particularly well, but they weren't horrible.

Mater actually looks ok compared to the rest of the airbrush artwork on this thing. Lightning looks a bit like he's very surprised, but hey, eyes are tricky in art, right?

Buzz Lightyear was another story. I mean wow. Check this out.

What is up here? Is this supposed to be an evil, alternate reality Buzz? John and I wondered what some poor unsuspecting kid would think walking up this with a happy image of Buzz from the Toy Story movies in his head. THIS is why Disney needs to keep a hold of it's copyrights. Please.

K Is For.....King Louie

I LOVE Disney's Jungle Book. I have since I was a tyke and my love has faded not one little bit as I've grown up. Baloo is a hero of mine and Kaa almost makes me not so horrified of snakes. Maybe it's the fact that he speaks with Winnie The Pooh's voice, I don't know. I love the jungle setting and the ruins where King Louie lives always seemed like the sort of place I wouldn't mind running off to if I got it in my mind to run off. One never knows, it's best to have a plan, right? Which brings us to King Louie. He's King of the Monkeys, and an orangutan himself I think. But its a Disney cartoon, taxonomy isn't all that important. What is important is that he steals his part of the movie completely. He's cool and happy and mischievous. He can dance and swing and sing. He sings the song "I Wanna Be Like You" which is all about how he wants the secret to fire so he can be just like Man. Well, this man would gladly give up civilization to be like HIM. Sometimes. To live in the jungle, singing and swinging through the ruins of some ancient civilization sometimes sounds pretty good. It especially sounds good when the stresses of life and work pile up this time of year.

So, with my love of Jungle Book in general, and King Louie in particular, imagine how happy I was when my friends' band, motherboy, played "I Wanna Be Like You." These people provide an escape for me when we go to see their shows, and hearing them sing this just melts my little heart. This video was taken after my very favorite ukelele songstress spent a week wrangling Munchkins in preparation for a stage production of The Wizard of Oz. Jen's voice is as a result extra sultry. Enjoy.

G Is For....Goofy

Donal Duck has always been my favorite Disney character, but I have a really soft spot in my heart for Goofy as well. He's such a good guy, always trying to do right, to help, to impress his son with his skills or knowledge, trying to be "cool" as he sees it. And it never works. He bungles things. Goofy is always too loud, too clumsy, too clueless or too enthusiastic. He keeps trying, though, often too hard, but he keeps at it. And Goofy's friends get caught up in his bungled attempts at cool and helpful, but they never hold it against him in the end. Rather, they always laugh it off and realize his heart is in the right place. Maybe that's why I like Goofy so much, I can totally relate.

Three or four years ago there was a little email  game going around. You were supposed to come up with one word to describe the person that sent the email to you and they would do the same for you. Two of the people that knew me best, a really close friend and the cousin I grew up with, came up with the same word. It wasn't a simple, trite word like "nice" or something either. Out of all the words in the English language, and these were very smart people with large vocabularies, they both came up with "goofy." I guess I might as well own it. There are worse things to be, right?

Pooh Sticks

"Pooh had just come to the bridge; and not looking where he was going, he tripped over something, and the fir-cone jerked out of his paw into the river. 'Bother,' said Pooh, as it floated slowly under the bridge, and he went back to get another fir-cone which had a rhyme to it. But then he thought that he would just look at the river instead, because it was a peaceful sort of day, so he lay down and looked at it, and it slipped slowly away beneath him, and suddenly, there was his fir-cone slipping away too.

'That's funny,' said Pooh. 'I dropped it on the other side,' said Pooh, 'and it came out on this side! I wonder if it would do it again?' And he went back for some more fir-cones. It did. It kept on doing it. Then he dropped two in at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first; and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one. So the next time he dropped one big one and one little one, and the big one came out first, which was what he had said it would do, and the little one came out last, which was what he had said it would do, so he had won twice ... and when he went home for tea, he had won thirty-six and lost twenty-eight, which meant that he was - that he had - well, you take twenty-eight from thirty-six, and that's what he was. Instead of the other way round."

                                                                               --A.A. Milne in The House at Pooh Corner


That, friends, is Pooh Sticks, simple fun for young and old, boy and girl, man and woman. As a small boy, I loved Pooh Sticks. Our family was always out and about somewhere on the weekends (thanks Mom and Dad) and often in a park or other outdoorsy space, these being generally free. Whenever we crossed a bridge over moving water, we'd have to play Pooh Sticks.

As I got older, my friends and I would play in streams and creeks, building dams and bridges and such. I'd always suggest a "stick race" and it was always fun. Calling it Pooh Sticks then would have been very uncool, but that's what it was, and I knew it.

In high school, when I started spending a lot of time with a certain girl, Lisa, who would become my wife, we would always be going off somewhere, often in the outdoors, it being generally free. Once, when  crossing a bridge, I asked Lisa to play Pooh Sticks. I didn't think about it at the time, but it didn't occur to me to call it anything but Pooh Sticks, because Lisa was Lisa and would understand. She did understand, and we played Pooh Sticks together for years and then brought our own little boy into the world.

Today that little boy is 12, a "tween" as he is fond of reminding us, and he too enjoys Pooh Sticks, often asking to play on our way across the canal to the beach on the little slice of paradise on which we were blessed enough to settle. And every time we play, I smile, inside and out.

I have to thank Walt Disney for a lot of that smile. I didn't pick up on Pooh Sticks from the books, though I'm sure my mom read them to me. I fell in love with Pooh Sticks, and the Hundred Acre Wood, through Disney's cartoons. I can't read anything of Pooh without hearing the cartoon voice (which made watching his voice come from Kaa the snake in Jungle Book a bit disturbing) and seeing his chubby wubby self waddling down the path. It's a little piece of that Disney magic that's been with me and a part of me since my earliest memories. And it's that magic that made me want to write this blog.

We are planning a trip to Walt Disney World this fall and I wanted to record my rather obessive planning for my own sake as much as thinking anyone else would be interested. But I got to thinking about the reason we love our trips to "The Dis" as much as we do. Our good friends are going  in less than a month and I know they are hoping for the total escape that only the magic of Disney can offer. Disney, for those of us who love it, can truly make all the stress and bad and worries of the real world go totally away. It's a haven, a sanctuary, one of the last truly magical places left. I was thinking how great it would be to carry at least a bit of that feeling with us even when we were stuck here in the real world. So that, too, is what I plan to write about, living a happy and magic-filled life no matter where we are and what is happening around us.