Disney returns

Last December saw the first night of Treasures From the Disney Vault. It returns to TCM tonight, with two rather distinct themes. First up is Ireland, as TCM will be showing Darby O'Gill and the Little People at 8:00 PM followed by a Disneyland episode promoting the movie at 9:45 PM. TCM's schedule is calling the Disneyland show "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color", although if I understand correctly the TV show wasn't aired in color until 1961. Apparently, ABC, which had originally hosted "Disneyland", still wasn't able to broadcast in color, while NBC was, so Disney took his color to NBC.

(NBC's prime-time lineup would be all-color starting in 1964, and all of prime-time network TV would be in color starting in 1966, I believe. Some places, like New Zealand, didn't go to color broadcasting until well into the 1970s. There's an interesting radio program about New Zealand's starting of color TV here, although this isn't really the point of my blog. I just happened to get around to listening to that program yesterday.)

Later in the evening, at midnight, will be The Three Caballeros, a movie I haven't heard of before, in which Donald Duck goes to South America and makes friends there. World War II was going on in 1944 when the movie was made, and part of American policy was to have a "Good Neighbor Policy" toward the rest of the western hemisphere, or more specifically Latin America, which included cultural exchanges among other things. Orson Welles, for example, went down to Latin America as part of this policy after finishing The Magnificent Ambersons, which is what enabled RKO to send in a separate editor to cut the movie to a reasonable length without having Orson Welles go nuts -- he was 5,000 miles away so he couldn't do anything about it. There's also a documentary about Walt Disney's experiences with the Good Neighbor Policy called Walt and El Grupo, airing at 1:30 AM.