Weekend 432.1 (Lagoon Amusement Park)

(1) A couple of quotes from They Drew As They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney’s Musical Years (The 1940s – Part One) by Didier Ghez:

“While at Disney, she [Retta Scott] used to walk to work from time to time. Walt would sometimes see her and give her a ride the rest of the way to the Studio. Many years later she would confide that she saw Walt as a second father. That second father would chide her at times, like when her saw her feed the cats at the Burbank Studio. As a good Midwesterner, Walt feared that the well-fed felines would become less-effective as rodent deterrents.”

“In the late 1950s, David [Hall] established an indirect connection with Disney when he was hired by the former first vice president of Disneyland, C.V. Wood, to help design Freedomland, a theme park that opened in New York the following year.”

I’m coming back to the subject of C.V. Wood in another post. I’m also just reading about the extraordinary connection between Retta Scott and Nolan Bushnell.

Weekend 432.0 (Lasipalatsi)

(1) Kingdom Hearts is Disney at its strangest, darkest—and most moving (The A.V. Club)

“What is adulthood for Kingdom Hearts? It’s a bullet—or maybe a magic sword—barreling toward you, that you can’t stop. Those things you loved as a kid—those movies, those heroes, those lessons about friendship and love and hope? They’ll be there, when tragedy hits, and maybe they’ll help you. But just as likely, they won’t.”

“…and let’s not even get started with Ready Player One or the fervent online fan-theory culture claiming everything ever is connected.”

Weekend 413.0

Boom, boom, boom“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell

(1) The Reckoning of the FBI Has Begun

(2) The Real Collusion Story (National Review)

(3) Documents suggest possible coordination between CIA, FBI, Obama WH and Dem officials early in Trump-Russia probe: investigators (Fox News)

(4) Orwell On Trial: Was George Orwell an informer? The London intelligentsia is reeling from disclosures that the author of 1984 and Animal Farm gave a list of Communist sympathizers to a shadowy branch of the British government in 1949. (Vanity Fair)

(5) A quote from Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler:

“Walt’s belief that the SCG was Communist-inspired was undoubtedly sincere. It also may not have been entirely wrong. Arthur Babbitt certainly wasn’t a Communist, nor were any of the other animators, but Dave Hilberman, the assistant who had begun organizing the studio, had by his own admission been a member of the Communist Party and had even traveled to Russia when he was a young man. Moreover, an FBI report called William Pomerance, soon to be the union’s business manager, ‘one of the leading Communists in the movie industry’ and claimed that at least since July 1941, a month after the strike began, the union had followed the Communist Party line. Citing an internal source close to the labor situation, the report concluded that the Disney strike proved ‘conclusively’ that the SCG was Communist-dominated and said that the Communists ‘threw the entire strength of the Communist machine in Hollywood’ into the dispute.”

The still is from Our Friend the Atom.