Welcome to Y4 from Jim Hill Media.

I'm your host Jim Hill, and I'm here to answer your questions about the Walt Disney Company

and its competition in the fields of theme entertainment and animation. This time around I'll be following up on our October 2016 show

which as you'll recall started out as this Halloween specific podcast about the Disney

version of the Headless Horseman, but then

somehow mutated into an exploration of the work of Washington Irving. Now since

that show was posted on Bandcamp, some Disney dish listeners have reached out and asked if I had any additional

information about that live action animated version of Briffon Winkle that Walt wanted to make

with Will Rogers. Sadly, all that info was salted away in Disney's

ARL which is the company's animation research library but I promised that the

very next time I'm inside that climate controlled high security building,

I'll then ask them about whatever material they have filed away on this abandoned project from 1933.

But that said, if you want a taste of what a feature length

version of this Washington Irving story might have been like I suggest you

head over to kitty records.com that's's kidded i e right by the way not kiddidd y

anyway once you're there select the 2005 tab at the top of the Kitty Records home page.

And then, after going halfway down the 2005 page, you'll find an image of a Deca record from 1946 where Academy Award winner Walter Houston voices Rifenwinkle.

And if you click on that, you'll get to listen to this genuinely charming version of that Washington Irving's story.

Now where this particular recording it has a fascinating pedigree.

I mean for starters the script of this retelling of Rop Van Winkle was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who back in the 1940s were just two guys working in radio, but if you jump ahead 10 years, you find that Lawrence and Lee are now the toast of Broadway, largely because in 1955, they wrote Inherit the Wind, and then in 1956, Lawrence and Lee followed up that acclaimed legal drama with the popular stage

comedy, Auntie Maum.

And speaking of Broadway, it's kind of intriguing that Walter Houston was selected to be

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