Welcome to Y4, a new monthly podcast for iTunes. I'm your host Jim Hill, and I'll be using

the show to answer questions that have been submitted by unofficial guide Disney dish

listeners.

This time around I'll be answering a query that Disney dish fan Matt Cooper sent in last month.

Matt wanted to know more about Scruffy, which was an animated feature that Walt Disney Productions had in development in the early 1970s.

Matt wants to know what I have to share about this Ken Anderson project.

Well, Matt, I can tell you that the company's interest in Scruffy actually dates back to the early 1960s.

Walt Disney himself had the studio pursue the movie rights to this Paul Galico book in 1963.

Walt Disney production suggests finish making The Three Lives of Thomasina,

which was based on a 1957 Paul Galico book, Thomasina, The Cat Who Thought She Was God.

I'm serious folks, that was actually the title of the book, or the subtitle I mean.

Anyway, Walt really liked how the Three Lives of Thomasina had turned out, so much so that he took

the juvenile leads of this Don Chafey movie, 8-year-old Karen Dautress, and 7-year-old Matthew Garver, and made them Jane and Michael Banks in the studio's

next high-profile production. Maybe you've heard of this movie, Mary Poppins?

Not only that, but as I mentioned a moment ago, Walt had the studio pursue the film rights

to Paul Gallico's most recent book Scruffy, which Doubleday had published back in December of 1962.

Scruffy, which Galico described as a diversion rather than a book,

deals with the Barbary Macax, these are the only wild monkey population on the European continent.

And according to legend, as long as these Gibraltar apes or rock apes, as the locals call

them, live on Gibraltar, the British Empire won't fall.

And you know who really believed in this legend? British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill,

which is why when Churchill learned in 1942 that the native population of rock apes on Gibraltar

...