This is the story of the Oz movie that was never made. It is the story of a movie that could have changed movie history but was doomed from the start. It is the story of The Rainbow Road To Oz.
In the mid 1930s Walt Disney started looking for a follow up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A lifelong fan of the Baum books, he tried to get his brother Roy to obtain the rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to do as an animated film. But MGM had just bought the rights, deciding to do the film ironically enough due to the success of Snow White.
It took until 1954 for Disney to get the film rights to the Oz books. He ended up with the rights to 12 of the books, including The Patchwork Girl of Oz which became the first Oz project he decided on. Apparently the initial plan was to do it as a two part episode of the Disneyland TV show. TV writer Dorothy Cooper was hired to adapt the book. But when she finally turned in her script, Disney was so impressed with it he decided to do it as a feature film instead. Bill Walsh, producer of The Mickey Mouse Club, was given the job of Producer and Sidney Miller was slated for Director. As for the cast, it was decided that the Mouseketeers would play the characters. As a test, a ten minute segment was to be performed on September 11, 1957 on the fourth season opening of Disneyland. The segment would consist of a couple of the proposed numbers from the film and the kids in costume.
The episode, which is on DVD, starts with Disney explaining the history of the filming of Peter and the Wolf, followed by a showing of the short itself. Afterwards, as Walt is about to introduce a segment from Fantasia, Cubby O'Brien and a couple of the other kids invade his office and drag him off to the Mouseketeer Stage. There they celebrate the third anniversary of the opening of the Disneyland theme park by singing songs extolling the park's greatness. Then they hand him the script for The Rainbow Road To Oz and try pitching the film to him with them in the parts. Yes, the conceit of the segment was that they pitch it to Disney when in reality, he had been behind the idea the whole time.
After showing him sketches of the Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl, Doreen Tracey (as the Patchwork Girl) and Bobby Burgess (in full Scarecrow makeup) do a number called "Patches". As a number, it's vaguely okay. Nothing particularly memorable, but nothing mind numbingly repulsive either. But Doreen and Bobby sing it well and actually look pretty great. It's a shame the footage is in black and white because I would have looked to have seen what the Patchwork Girl looked like in full color. Unfortunately, the choreography comes off as fairly bland and Bobby himself is no Ray Bolger. That may not sound very fair to Bobby, but he sort of tries to do a little bit of Bolger's shtick but doesn't go as far with it as he perhaps should.
After the number is done, a couple of more sketches are shown, mostly notably of Ozma, to be played by Annette Funicello. What follows is an odd musical number called The Oz-Kan Hop. Let me put it this way: it's no Over The Rainbow. Come to it, it may not be as good as The Lollipop Guild number. Consider that for a moment. How bad does a song have to be to be not as good as one of the most hated sequences of the 1939 film? Pretty bad.
Darlene Gillepsie (who has been making most of the pitch to Disney during the skit) gets to play Dorothy and she looks okay in the part and really puts some enthusiasm into it. I actually wonder how she would have fared if the movie had gotten made. Annette looks fine as Ozma but doesn't do much in the sequence but stand around and look pretty. Overall, the choreography is better than in the "Patches" sequence, but the number is so bad that tends to cancel out the good will.
When this number is over, Walt tells the kids that he gives in and they'll get to do the picture. In response, the cast sings the best number yet, The Rainbow Road To Oz, in front of and on top of a giant prop cake. It is the one number that almost could have justified the whole project.
After the show, however, Disney backed off of the movie. To this day, nobody knows for certain, though at least three theories have been put forward. One has it that Walt thought the Mouseketeers couldn't sustain an entire feature film. Sure, they were on TV five days a week and had appeared in a 3D short for the Disneyland theme park, but a multi-million dollar film? That's a bit of a gamble that Walt might not have been prepared to take.
The second theory suggests that as he watched the sketches, he had a feeling that the songs weren't as strong as the ones in the original film. Truth to tell, they really aren't. Hand in hand with this is the fact that Bill Walsh apparently rewrote Cooper's screenplay to Disney's dissatisfaction.
The third and final theory has to do with CBS airing the 1939 movie on a yearly basis. They had just started in 1956 and it is believed that Disney didn't want or think he could compete with that. Personally, I suspect it's a combination of all three myself.
Disney turned to another fantasy property, a version of Victor Herbert's Babes In Toyland, for his first foray into live action musicals. This film had Annette as Mary Mary Quite Contrary and, in what seems to be a nod to Oz, Ray Bolger as the villainous Barnaby. Ironically, this film gets compared from time to time with the 1934 version that had Laurel and Hardy. And not positively compared at that.
It would take 28 years after the Disneyland broadcast for Walt Disney Studios to finally get an Oz project on the big screen. When they did, it was quite different from the one Uncle Walt had in mind.
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