Similar to efforts made for the 1933 cartoon
Mickey's Gala Premier and the 1939 Donald Duck short
The Autograph Hound, the Disney Studios transformed Hollywood celebrities onto celluloid in what became the most expensive of all Silly Symphonies,
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood. Immensely popular and critically lauded when released in late 1938, it would, in unedited form, go on to languish for decades in the Disney vaults due to perceived offensive content related to its caricatures of African American personalities Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Stepin Fetchit, and a brief blackface gag involving the animated incarnation of actress Katherine Hepburn. The Walt Disney Company finally made it available in uncut form in 2006 on the
Walt Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies
DVD.
The celebrity caricatures in
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood are credited to Disney Legend Tee Hee, and they proved to be his baptism of fire into the Walt Disney Studios. Hee began working in Hollywood in the mid-1930s, drawing caricatures of contract stars for MGM's publicity department. He moved to Warner Brothers in 1936 where he would provide similar designs for the cartoon
The Coo Coo Nut Grove. Despite a earlier failed interview with Disney Studio boss George Drake and art instructor Don Graham, Hee later allowed a neighbor's brother, who was an animator at the studio, to hand deliver to Walt a collection of his caricature drawings.
In an interview with Richard Hubler, Hee described how he manged to get in the door of the studio: "This was through these caricatures again. Thank goodness they were the entree because my drawings were not good enough and Walt liked the caricatures. He thought they were great and he said, 'I think we can use him on Mother Goose Goes to Hollywood,' the film that they had not been progressing very far with."
He was paired with Ed Penner to create a storyboard for the short. He described to Hubler the story meeting where he and Penner presented their ideas to Walt Disney:
"When we started going through it, I had enough ham in me that when it came to the parts of the characters, I would enact them, standing up in front of the people--there were about twelve or thirteen people there, including Walt. I did Katherine Hepburn saying, 'I've lost my sheep, really I have," . . . I was flitting around you know, like they would do. And I think Walt was entranced. He laughed, and all the other guys laughed too . . . Ed Penner and I, we had the conviction that Walt would like it, and while I'd never met him, I just felt this was what he would like. So when it was all over with he said,'Well, I think it's great. What do you guys think?' And they all said it was great. So I knew I had a friend."
The other creative powerhouse behind
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood was Ward Kimball. Kimball animated more characters than anyone else on the crew, most notably the characters representing Hugh Herbert, the Marx Brothers and Cab Calloway.
As Hee observed, the project had been long in development when he was brought on board. According to authors Russell Merit and J.B.Kaufman, Hee combined the ideas from two previously unrealized Silly Symphonies--
The Hollywoods and
Mother Goose Land. Bill Cottrell, along with Joe Grant, (Grant had previously designed the star caricatures for
Mickey's Gala Premier), conceived for
The Hollywoods a forest setting filled with birds and animals based on Hollywood personalities. It was shelved primarily due to Warner Brother's release of
The Coo Coo Nut Grove, which Hee, as mentioned, was instrumental in helping to create. Hee ultimately married this idea to the concept of
Mother Goose Land, a short that was developed in the mid-1930s, but also later abandoned. A Walt Disney memo from 1935 summarized the idea for the short: "Jazz has taken the place of the old jingles, so Mother Goose takes them and puts them to a modern tempo with modern thoughts." This concept clearly evolved into the lively jazz-based finale led by the Cab Calloway and Fats Waller characters in
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.
Merit and Kaufman also noted " . . . so much story material was suggested for
Mother Goose Goes to Hollywood that at one point, in the spring of 1937, Disney considered releasing it in two reels. Ultimately it was released as a standard one-reeler, but remained the most expensive of all the Silly Symphonies."
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood was certainly appreciated by the very show business community it both satirized and celebrated; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject. It competed that year with three other Disney shorts,
The Brave Little Tailor,
The Good Scouts and
Ferdinand the Bull. The popular and similarly acclaimed Ferdinand ultimately took the top prize.
Don't miss the companion piece to this post:
Who's Who in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood
As a companion post to Going Hollywood With Mother Goose, we hereby present a guide to the celebrities and popular culture represented in the Silly Symphony cartoon, Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.
The short opens with a direct parody of the MGM roaring lion logo. While it comically features a roaring Mother Goose, what it notable is the take-off on MGM's slogan,"Ars Gratia Artis," or translated, "Art for Arts Sake." The Mother Goose logo features the pig latin phrase "ERTZNAY TO OUYAY," roughly translated, "Nertz to You!" or "Nuts to You!" This is quite likely a not-so-subtle dig at the Hays Office, the industry-created watchdog organization headed by Will H. Hays that constantly dogged Hollywood studios to adhere its code of morals and standards when producing their films. The Hays Office considered the phrase "Nuts to You!" to be offensive and frequently demanded (although often unsuccessfully) for it to be removed from scripts and films.
Katherine Hepburn is the first star to been seen in the cartoon. She is cast in the role of Little Bo Peep and spends the entire cartoon in search of her sheep.
The Old King Cole sequence features Hugh Herbert as the king and Ned Sparks as his jester. Comic actor Joe Penner arrives and presents Herbert with a not quite cooked duck--Donald Duck that is. Penner's signature line throughout much of his career was "Wanna buy a duck?"
Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx are the Fiddlers Three.
Charles Laughton, Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew are represented in Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Three Men in a Tub. Laughton is seen in his role of Captain Bligh from Mutiny on the Bounty while Spencer Tracy portrays his character of Manuel from Captains Courageous. Although Bartholomew appeared with Tracy in Captains Courageous, he is seen here as his character from the movie Little Lord Fauntleroy.
W.C. Fields portrays Humpty Dumpty and is antagonized by famous dummy Charlie McCarthy. Fields and McCarthy shared the screen in the movie You Can't Cheat an Honest Man and their longstanding feud was a popular feature on Edgar Bergan's radio program. Fields had previously played the role of Humpty Dumpty in the 1933 motion picture version of Alice in Wonderland.
Simple Simon and the Pieman are represented by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
See Saw Margery Daw is performed by Edward G. Robinson and Greta Garbo. Garbo utters her famous line, "I want so much to be alone."
Eddie Cantor is Little Jack Horner; Wallace Beery is Little Boy Blue.
From the cartoon's musical finale, Edna May Oliver, Mae West and ZaSu Pitts form a singing trio. Some sources claim that the center character is Joan Blondell, but based on her exaggerated figure, hairstyle and facial features, she appears much closer to Mae West.
Clark Gable and George Arliss.
Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.
Fred Astaire and the long controversial Stepin Fetchit.
And finally, big mouths Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye complete the musical number.
But one possible mystery remains. Who is portrayed on the figurehead of the rattle held by Ned Sparks in his jester incarnation? The design seems too distinct to be generic. Would anyone care to hazard a guess?
