B.M.: 'BEFORE MICKEY'

A highly significant pen-and-ink drawing by Walter Elias Disney will go under the auctioneer's hammer on Wednesday 30 December in the Holabird-Kagin Americana 2011 Grand Final Auction to be held at the Atlantis Casino Resort, 3800 S. Virginia St., Reno, Nevada, 89502, United States.


Boldly drawn with great confidence and competence in the style of 'twenties comics, the drawing is a reminder that whilst in his later career, Walt didn't draw the 'cartoons' that carried his name, the young Disney was no slouch at the drawing-board!

Made in c. 1921 and measuring 8" x 4 3/4", the drawing is attached to a blue page with a heading titled 'Miscellaneous' from 'The Girl Graduate's Record Book' that belonged to Walt's sister, Ruth Disney Beecher. The reverse side of this page has "another work of art and a poem" signed Ipkigenia Gilhouse with the date '21, but it is the Disney sketch that has set the opening bid at a cool $17,500.00!

Many thanks to Michael Goldberg for telling me about the sale, though I doubt I'll be able to keep up with the bidding for long!

MICKEY MONDAYS: Manifestations of the Mouse

Think Mouskashoes and you might suppose we would be talking about a pair of bright yellow boots, but not necessarily!

These Mouse-eared-and-tailed high heels are something else...










They are made by Mellow Yellow and you can check them out at Sarenza.co.uk, although their website says they are currently out of stock. I bet Minnie got the last pair!

WONDERLAND WONDERBOOK

It was 1969 – most of my readers probably weren't born – and I was in a state of HUGE excitement: Disney's 1951 animated feature, Alice in Wonderland was being reissued in Britain and was coming to my local cinema.

I was (in addition to being a rabid Disney fan) a crazed Carrollian having fallen in love with the book long before I could even read from having it read to me by my parents.

In those prehistoric, pre-video days I had seen stills from the Disney version, and clips on TV, I had read comic- and picture-book versions and listened endlessly to the Disneyland Storyteller LP, but... I had never SEEN the FILM!

I loved it! As passionately as I felt about the book, I was not so much a purist as to worry about the departures from the original text (although I thought it was more than a bit unfortunate to have mis-spelled the author's name on the credits!) and I went back more than once to the cinema that week to see it again - and again!

The supporting feature was the live action film based on Sterling North's book, Rascal, about raising a baby raccoon which - like all the sentimental Disney animal-pix – I also enjoyed and each visit I managed to pick up the promotional giveaways for the release: the ingenious Alice's Magic Wonderbook, the four pages of which could be manipulated so as to reveal six or, if you were very clever, eight pages!

Here are all those pages...

And, finally, the secret 'hidden' pages 7 and 8...

Ah, those were the days! Still, now you can watch the film any time you want on DVD and, on Blu-ray, you can watch me and others on the bonus extras talking about the book, the movie and those twin geniuses, Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney...