Judson Fountain and "The Old Woman Of Haunted House"

Once upon a time, I wandered into Just Kids, one of the greatest stores in the whole wide world. My buddy Ken always has an excellent selection of stuff... including a bunch of LP's that would interest virtually no one. These are the records guaranteed to be in every thrift store or nostalgia store: Mitch Miller, those freebie Firestone Tire Christmas albums, and anything on the Buddah label. Ken's selection of unsellable records was, and remains, the finest in the world. The record I found and purchased for a buck was in a generic brown sleeve which had a piece of paper pasted to it. It looked very strange and somewhat amateurish. It was created by a kid named Judson Fountain. For a buck, why not?

Let me warn you that people either love the records of Judson Fountain or hate them, and the haters are probably in the majority.

When I listened to "The Old Woman of Haunted House," I loved it. I loved the enthusiasm of the performers and their desire to create an old-time "turn out the lights" radio show. I loved the cheesy Elektra Records sound effects - I had the same LP's. I loved the dialog; I loved the dialects; I loved the confusion of it all. Oh, and one other thing.

It really, really was scary. It has the non-linear qualities of a bad dream. It creates vivid pictures. If pressed, I could describe every location and every character. Give Judson a chance to work on your brain through your ears, and your brain will never be the same. And I mean that in a good way.

So, just in time for Halloween, here is Judson's The Old Woman of Haunted House. (16m)

Fans Come Full Circle

About seventy Carl Barks fans would be surprised to know that the letters they sent to Unca Carl are up for bids on eBay.

What else might they experience? Pleasure that Carl kept them? Outrage that they're now for sale to the highest bidder?

A bigger question: who might possibly be interested in buying these? A marketer eager to get 70 name and address leads? No, too old.

A blackmailer might be able to create some sort of return on them, however, by selling individual letters back to the people who wrote them. Why they might want them back is also a question; but if I were the guy who sent Mr. Barks a picture of myself dumping coins on my head ala' Uncle Scrooge's 'Money Baths' (tiny, blurry detail at right) - and I'm not - I might think about a better-safe-than-sorry buyback.

The implication of this estate auction is clear: put everything up for sale. Would it give you a warm glow to know that those ugly Hummels now despoiling the artistic sensibility of your home once did the same thing at the Barks residence? How about a ripped and dirty artist's smock that pre-dates the invention of the zip code? Hey, forget that, how about some used paint brushes? Would you like a roll of original Barks toilet paper? Since the 'dust bunnies' that collected in the corners of the Barks Studio are not listed here, I'm guessing they were sold to a private collector prior to the public auction.

Hidden Mickeys

What does it remind you of, that bronze head seen at left, made around the year 900?

If you said "a lion," you agree with Per Karsten, himself a head, though not of bronze, but rather of the Historical Museum in Lund, Sweden, which owns the inch-long fibula-fastener that was dug up at Uppakra, an iron age settlement just south of the museum.

If you said "Mickey Mouse," you agree with me and a probably everyone else who's seen this thing. Karsten does call this "the first Mickey Mouse," but he believes that this 'Borre-head,' as they're known, was not meant to represent any mouse, let alone the mouse. Whoever created this piece was trying to create a lion. The artist left no forwarding address, so we can only speculate as to his or her intent.

Karsten knows a good thing when he sees it, though. He wants to sell copies of this thing to museum visitors. He sent The Walt Disney Company a photo of the object and offered Disney the opportunity to underwrite further digs at Uppakra. I would bet dollars to donuts that Disney wrote back to allege copyright infringement, unfair competition and violation of the anti-dilution law, which protects the value of a trademark. In other words, something along the lines of "if you try to sell copies of that thing, we'll sue you back into the iron age." I'm pretty sure that's what they did when they heard about the 700-year old church wall in Southern Austria (right) which either proves that Mickey has been around for a lot longer than we think, or that Disney took a long weekend off and did some traveling during the period he was driving that ambulance in France.

I happen to think it is not just The Walt Disney Company that should be concerned about this object. There's another company that should consider legal action.

Mike Nichols and Elaine May - Part 4

This final part of Nichols and May's Monitor sketches includes: Fern Escapes, White House Laundress, Keep It Under Your Hat, Successful Director, The New Baby, I Love Lucy, Labor and Management, You're Snoring, Tallest Man In The World, Happy Birthday, Where's My Sheet, Your New Beaver, Bringing Home People For Dinner, About That Mustache, The Sick Mouse, Christmas Gift, Bad Cough, Selective Hearing, 1200 Frogs, American Legionnaire, David Ben Gurion (outtake), It's Not Nancy, My Chosen Career, Taxi To Rockefeller Center, and an extra: Mike and Elaine Interviewed on Person To Person.

Link.

Now It's Time To Say Goodbye

Jimmie Dodd traded his Mousegetar for a more lonely model to record this 1959 LP.

Download or listen here. It's great to hear Jimmie performing some non-Disney classics.

The song Lonely Guitar was performed by Annette Funicello on Disney's Zorro.

Watch the clip here. (Annette was one of the few guitarists who could get a finger-picked sound simply by strumming her instrument.)

Jimmie Dodd and his wife Ruth cut some 78's together. Here's the A and B side of one single where the songs are more upbeat than lonely.

Download here. (Sorry, this is an older transfer that won't stream.)

Jimmie Dodd was a mere 54 years old when he died in 1964; many of the kids who watched him every weekday on The Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950's were not yet out of high school. We hadn't seen him in years; he was like a friend from the old neighborhood.

I'm guessing that there has been only one memorial service in the history of the world featuring an organ interlude with this song line-up:


I'll go a step further and say that there couldn't have been a dry eye in the house when that last song finished.

A Man's Home Should Contain His Castle

Many years ago, I commissioned a castle. A day or two after this article appeared in his local paper, Mr. Cole wrote a letter to the editor apologizing for calling it a "screwy request."

I wasn't offended. It was a screwy request.

Death At Disneyland

I think we're due a break from the sad Disney Studio stories that have monopolized this blog for the past 48 hours or so. I say we move on to sad Disney Theme Park stories.

Well, you and I might find them sad. John Marr finds them fascinating.

So fascinating that he's taken "Death at Disneyland," the lead story from issue #13 of his uniquely titled fanzine, Murder Can Be Fun, and updated it to include the tragic events that have taken place at Disneyland in the sixteen years since issue #13 was published. The rewritten results are available in Murder Can Be Fun #20, the 'zine's final issue, released earlier this month.

Vanity Fair it's not, but Marr is an excellent writer with an ear for florid overstatement, i.e. "...beneath [Disneyland's] glittering facade lurks something malevolent, something lethal." He details the true stories of those who met an unexpected end in The Happiest Place on Earth. For those of you scoring at home, the Matterhorn, Monorail, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and the sailing ship Columbia have each claimed a victim, as has the Carousel of Progress. The PeopleMover has claimed two lives, two others were lost in the Rivers of America, and two people met their maker, rather than the Snow Monster, on the Matterhorn.

A copy of #20 (which includes "The Phantom High Roller of Glitter Gulch," "The Denture Murder Case," and lots of other non-Disney true-crime stories in its 48 pages) will be sent to you postpaid if you send $2 (in cash, postage stamps, a check or money order) to John Marr, P.O. Box 640111, San Francisco, CA 94164. Sure to be a collectible someday, if it isn't already.

And be careful out there. At the park.

Bobby Driscoll 1937-1968

This blog is not usually about things that might actually make someone say "Isn't Life Terrible." In fact, the opposite is true. It's usually kind of fun around here. Check out some older posts.

But the story about Hal Adelquist, my previous post, reminded me of another Disney alumnus who experienced nearly unimaginable tragedy: Bobby Driscoll.

In the July 1972 issue of Movie Digest, Driscoll's story was written up by Florence Epstein, who interviewed Bobby's mother after his death. The article was published just four years after that sad event.

Epstein's article begins with an imagined newspaper headline and continues from there:

Body of Unknown Vagrant Found in Greenwich Village
New York -- March 30, 1968

Two children playing in an abandoned tenement in Greenwich Village today stumbled upon the body of a still unidentified man, lying on a cot beside empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets.

There was no evidence of foul play. Though the death has been attributed to natural causes, it is suspected that the man -- Caucasian, of middle height and weight, with dark hair, about 30 to 35 -- may have been a drug addict.

No identification was found on the body. Village residents, shown photographs, could not identify the man. Unless relatives or friends come forward to claim the body, it will be interred in a pauper's grave in the City Cemetery.

So far as we are able to ascertain, no such story ever appeared in the New York papers. But it happened just this way. Bodies of unknown derelicts are found every day in Manhattan. Few of them are chronicled in the newspapers -- unless their deaths are "important." This one, though the reporters had no way of knowing it, was.

This young man had been world-famous. Recognized everywhere. A star. An Academy Award winner.

Ironically, there was a connection, however slight, between the role that won him a special Oscar and the way in which his death was discovered. In both instances, youngsters unknowingly stumbled upon scenes fraught with horror. The make-believe instance occurred in a movie titled The Window, and child actor Bobby Driscoll played his terror so brilliantly that no one who saw that movie has ever forgotten it.

Strangely, by the time of his death, almost everyone had forgotten Bobby Driscoll, or, rather, stopped thinking about him. He had been off screen for a number of years, and the man Bobby Driscoll had changed greatly from the child star Bobby Driscoll. It is not surprising that, in death, he was unrecognized. It is surprising that his family was not told of his death for almost a year and a half. And that the world at large did not hear of it until now, almost 4 years later.

To add to the peculiar twist of fate, today Bobby Driscoll is newly famous all over again, to a generation of moviegoers that had never even heard of him. His greatest success, Walt Disney's Song of the South, made 26 years ago, has just been re-released and is an enormous hit wherever it plays.

The rest of the Bobby Driscoll story, and the significance of his final years and death, were revealed that the other day during our conversation with his mother, Mrs. Isabelle Driscoll, in California.

His mother's voice, as she talked with us, was bright, full of vitality. Most of all she wants his death to be meaningful. "I'd like to go on a stump and say: 'You kids just listen to me. This is what happened to my son.'"

Bobby's body, as noted, was found on March 30, 1968 in an abandoned tenement in Greenwich Village. Death was due to hardening of the arteries, a condition common in long-term heroin addicts.

He was 17 when he went on drugs; 31 when he died.

"I don't want you to think that he was a perfect child, just that he was a very normal boy," his mother says, her voice still searching for the reasons, not finding them, pouncing here and there on likely explanations. In the recent past, until Song of the South reappeared in theaters, people would look hesitant when you mentioned his name. Then their eyes would widen -- oh, yes, Bobby Driscoll. Wasn't he a child star? What ever happened to him?

After Song of the South was filmed, Bobby and his little co-star, Luana Patten, made So Dear to My Heart and became known in some circles as "Disney's sweetheart team." Together and separately, they were later in many motion pictures.

Mrs. Driscoll was going to the re-opening of Song of the South one night in February, 1972. She had gotten a letter from her sister that morning advising her to take someone along. No. She'd go alone. She wasn't working that day at the health food shop, so she had her hair done, preparing herself even under the dryer for the long-ago sound of Bobby's voice, his pert little face. No crying, she warned herself, not until after the movie when she got home.

Bobby was the same way once -- disciplined. Until the drugs. Maybe it was because he always craved excitement. Could that have been it? She always thought he was like her, a very active person. Maybe he'd just gotten in with the wrong crowd. "You know what? When he went to have his tonsils out -- he must have been seven or a little older -- he sang songs all the way to the hospital. Most kids cry. You see, he was always such a happy boy, with keen humor. He smiled all the time."

He was an only child, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His parents weren't 20 anymore but thrilled to have him. A real pixie. Pasadena, where they moved in 1943, was close enough to Hollywood for people to have screen tests on the brain. Everyone had a talent scout. One day five-year-old Bobby, good as gold, was hoisted into a barbershop chair and the barber said, "He ought to be in pictures."

"Did you hear that Bobby?"

Bobby shook his head bashfully.

"Yeah," the barber said, "I mean it. Leave it to me. I have a friend who has a friend who..."

His first film was Lost Angel with Margaret O'Brien.

One thing Mrs. Driscoll knows for sure: it wasn't the movie people who got him started on narcotics. "He was so well supervised by Disney. People weren't even allowed to use a swear word in front of him. He had a great deal of love for Walt Disney. And he always did whatever the director told him to do. He was in this movie once with Sonny Tufts. He couldn't have been more than seven and they stood him on a box for some reason. Well, he fell and caught his foot and wound up hanging there -- upside down, crying his eyes out without making a sound. Because the director had told him before that noise cost money.

"Another time he was in O.S.S. with Alan Ladd. The director sent Bobby down to the basement of the set for a sack of coal. "Stay there until we need you," the director told him. Then they forgot all about him and broke for lunch. I thought he was in school. Finally someone remembered.

"Our minister had a theory. He said later, that Bobby just didn't want to be a "good little boy" anymore, he'd been too good. He wanted to be just the reverse. Maybe that was it."

Nobody spoiled him. When he was little Bobby couldn't touch the money he earned -- except for $.25 a week. Couldn't even read his fan mail. His mother kept it in boxes for when he was older. He wasn't sent to a professional children's school for fear he'd think of himself as different, superior. In fact, he himself bent over backwards to be just like everybody else. But he wasn't. He had enough talent to win, as mentioned earlier, a special Oscar in 1949 for a movie called The Window.

Then, when only a little time had passed, came the hard, sad years -- and headlines of another sort.

"He was really treated like a criminal at county jail. That's how they treated drug addicts back then. I didn't even know what narcotics were," Mrs. Driscoll said, her voice calm now, as if she'd said it so many times. How guilty she'd felt back then. The neighbors didn't help. They walked to the other side of the street when they saw her coming. And Bobby... "they handcuffed him and dragged him away. Rats in the jail. Homosexuals. Oh, it was different then. When I went to visit him I had to stick his fresh underwear under a faucet and hand it to him wet."

Something no one dreamed about in 1949. Mrs. Driscoll still has a picture of the three of them taken that year in London. His mother and father and Bobby. Close-knit back then, always together. Now Bobby was making another popular film -- Treasure Island. Working, sightseeing, planning the future. "You know what I'd like to be? A veterinarian," Bobby said. They laughed. He was an actor. Whenever Bobby felt bad about standing out that way -- successful, famous, his mother would tell him he had no reason to feel guilty, only grateful that God had given him talent.

They were a religious family. Went to church every Sunday, paid attention to the sermons. Bobby's uncle was a Baptist minister. One of his aunts was a medical missionary killed by Indians in South America. Religion was real and dramatic to him. When he was 17 or so he sculpted a head of Christ. But by then his parents couldn't reach him. He told a reporter, "I really feared people. I tried desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected me I fought back, became belligerent and cocky and was afraid all the time."

That quotation haunts Mrs. Driscoll. She doesn't understand it, can't believe he said it. "He never showed any fear of people. Before he went on narcotics he almost never cried. Afterward he was crying all the time. Drugs changed him. That's when he became belligerent. Then he didn't care about his appearance or cleanliness, he didn't bathe, his teeth got loose. He had an extremely high IQ but the narcotics affected his brain. We didn't know what it was. He was 19 before we knew. I felt he was changing but his father said no, it was just a phase he was going through like most boys.

"I thought maybe it was wrong of us to have sent him to public school. When he was 16 and the kids started getting jealous or making fun of him. That wouldn't have happened at professional school.

"The friends he made. He was always sorry for the underdog, always made friends with poor boys. So-called friends. One in particular I didn't like. I said "Bobby, I don't want him in my home." And he said, "You're right. I'll quit seeing him." But he didn't. He'd meet him on this corner somewhere; he was a pusher."

When he was 19 Bobby was taken into custody at his home in the Pacific Palisades. Police said they picked up a bag of marijuana thrown from the car of a friend who just left the house. Bobby looked scared, wide-eyed when photographers snapped his picture at the jail. But a month later he was back -- he and a friend -- on a charge of battery with pea shooters. The two of them had gone cruising in a car blowing peas at female targets on the sidewalk.

Before the year was up he'd gotten married. He'd been going with someone else -- a lovely girl, part of the movie colony. Mrs. Driscoll doesn't want to talk about it. Anyway, romance ended abruptly when the girl found out about Bobby's addiction. He met his wife at a party and married her shortly after, in December 1956 in Mexico. Secret stuff. Bobby knew his parents wouldn't like it. For three months he and his wife lived apart until that got impossible and they had another wedding ceremony. Bobby sent his mother a pair of solid gold earrings.

"She's just a girl," he told reporters about his wife. "She's not working or going to school. She's just going to be my wife."

He was working as a clerk at a haberdashery. "A good job. I like it." It paid about $75 a week. He was only 20 but already he could look back at a time when he'd earned $50,000 a year. Not that he thought it was over. Just that movie jobs were scarce. He did manage to land a part in 1957, in a film called Party Crashers, but he wasn't a child star anymore and the script was lousy and in 1959 he was back in court on a narcotics charge.

In 1960 he was accused of possessing a deadly weapon. In 1961 he was arrested with a French woman on a charge of burgling $450 from an animal clinic. A few months later he was picked up for forging a stolen $45 check. The judge could have given him 1 to 14 years but sent him instead to the State Narcotics Rehabilitation Center at Chino, California, for a minimum of six months.

"I had everything," Bobby said, repentantly, to reporters. "Working steadily with good parts. Then I started putting all my spare time in my arm. I'm not really sure why I started... I was 17... in no time at all I was using whatever was available -- mostly heroin, because I had the money to pay for it."

He came out of Chino in 1962 and went to work as a carpenter. "It isn't true that people in Hollywood didn't want to help him," his mother says. "Cornell Wilde wanted to help him. Michael Kanin, the screenwriter, tried to help him. Disney Studios made a mistake. They didn't call Bobby and say they wanted to talk to him. After he went to jail he felt everybody was against him -- no, I said that wrong -- he felt people were pointing a finger at him and thinking you can't take a chance on an addict. Anyway he didn't want anybody's help, he wanted to straighten himself out. He didn't ask me for any money. In fact when he worked he always sent me something. I still have a beautiful bedroom chair he brought home to me when he worked in a furniture shop."

It wasn't his life. He couldn't claim it as his life -- being married and having three kids and working at jobs that went nowhere. Bitterness seeped in. "Memories are not very useful," he told someone. "I was carried on a silver platter and then dumped into the garbage can."

In 1965 he left everybody, everything, and went off to New York to start a new life. He'd call home -- his parents -- once in a while. None of the studios in New York wanted to hire him, he said. He was having a hard time. Then he just disappeared. Every month his mother would call Bobby's attorney in Los Angeles to ask where Bobby was. The attorney didn't know. The only way to find out, he said, was to notify the police. But what if Bobby had gone on drugs again? Let well enough alone.

Then Bobby's father got sick and went downhill fast. Mrs. Driscoll placed ads in New York newspapers. Bobby didn't answer. It wasn't like him. Just wasn't like him. Mrs. Driscoll sent a letter to Merv Griffin -- Bobby had once appeared with him on a telethon. Griffin answered promptly -- yes, he'd try to locate Bobby. No luck.

Two weeks after Bobby's father died in 1969, Mrs. Driscoll received a letter from the county clerk asking her to confirm Bobby's death. That's how she found out. A year and a half after it happened. They'd been able to trace him, finally, through fingerprints. "You know when he died? The day before my birthday." He had been hooked on heroin for seven years but when he died he was, as they say, clean.

"Well, of course when I got the letter I called the police... they pieced some of the story together..."

March 30, 1968. Two little kids exploring an abandoned tenement in Greenwich Village peeked into a room. They saw this man stretched out on a cot, two empty beer bottles beside him and a couple of religious pamphlets they were afraid to touch. The man was dead.

No one recognized him. He was without identification, penniless. Like any drifter, he was taken to the medical examiner's office and then carted off to a pauper's grave in the city Cemetery.

"I had a letter just the other day from the head of this camp for underprivileged children," Mrs. Driscoll told us now, in 1972. "You see, drugs were found on one of the boys. So the camp leader called all 600 kids together and showed them pictures of Bobby and explained what had happened to him. All 600 are going to see Song of the South. It couldn't have been in vain then -- his death. Not entirely in vain."

Her voice is firm, more of a statement than a question. Faith sustains her.

That's how she lives -- all alone, estranged from her ex-daughter-in-law and the grandchildren, remembering Bobby, the way it was when her world and her beloved son were young.

[Visit A Minor Consideration, an excellent organization working to ensure the welfare of today's child stars.]

Hal Adelquist, 1914-1981

I bumped into the story at left while researching a post about Jimmie Dodd (which I hope to get online tomorrow).

After reading it, I checked around the web to find out more about Hal Adelquist.

According to The Original Mickey Mouse Club site, which seems to have the most information available, Adelquist was "a long-time Disney employee, [who] had worked in Production, Personnel, and the Story Department before being assigned to the Mickey Mouse Club. He and producer Bill Walsh were charged by Walt Disney with designing and developing the show. (Adelquist was also in charge of the short-lived Mickey Mouse Club Circus at Disneyland.) Despite the [Mickey Mouse Club's] overwhelming success, Hal subsequently fell out of favor with Walt Disney, and was demoted to talent scout, before leaving the studio in 1956."

According to Neal Gabler's Disney biography, "...Hal Adelquist, after performing some of the most thankless tasks at the studio, decided to leave..." during Walt's 'dead wood' firings in 1956. "When Adelquist obsequiously petitioned Walt to return not long thereafter - 'I'm not particular about the type of work involved' - Walt refused," according to Gabler.

Adelquist is cited as an "uncredited Assistant Director" on Snow White. He held the unenviable position of personnel head at the time of the Disney studio strike. When Carl Barks left the studio, his letter of resignation went to Adelquist.

The article above is from January 20, 1977. According to the OMMC site, Adelquist died on March 26, 1981.

There's got to be much more to this story.

It's Probably A Dump

Sam's Strip Was Meta

Meta has been defined as "a prefix meaning a later, more comprehensive, transcending, or more highly organized version of something. Used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one."

There was a meta-comic strip in 1961 - Sam's Strip, the comic strip that knew it was a comic strip. It never became popular, never appeared in more than 60 newspapers, lasted two years, and "confounded many readers." It was clever, though, and ahead of its time. Five examples of Sam's Strip by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas:

Moochie's Money Mystery

In this still photograph from Disney's The Shaggy Dog, Moochie Daniels (Kevin Corcoran) appears to be engrossed in a Dell Comic: Uncle Scrooge #18, from June/Aug 1957, which features "Land of the Pygmy Indians"by Carl Barks. (The Shaggy Dog was released in March of 1959).

But wait a minute. There's something strange about this picture. The price in the upper right hand corner of that comic is 15 cents. Folks, Uncle Scrooge #18 was, is, and always will be a dime comic. If you need proof, the bottom row of the covers below contains issues 21, 22, and 23, and they all say 10 cents.


Starting with issue #24, Dec/Feb 1959, the price legend read: "Still 10 cents." That's the handwriting going up on the wall, Junior Consumers.

Issue #32, Dec/Feb 1961 also says "Still 10 cents."

Issue #33: 15 cents.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that Moochie is reading a comic book that does not exist.

But wait a minute. Check the back of that still. What does it say? "Copyright MCMLXVII Walt Disney Productions - World Rights Reserved. " OK, so the still was created for a 1967 re-release, and somebody airbrushed out "10 cents" and replaced it with "15 cents," so that kids would not get wise to the fact that the comics that were costing them 15 cents... had once sold for one thin dime. End of story.

But wait a minute. Here's a frame grab from the DVD. The comic does, indeed, have a 15 cent price tag. Hmm.

But wait a minute. Dell must not have sold nearly as many comics at 15 cents as they did at a dime, because after seven issues of Scrooge at 15 cents, they dropped the price on the title (and all the rest of their comics) back to 12 cents an issue. And it stayed 12 cents until 1968.

So why is Moochie reading a 1957 comic in 1958 with a 1968 price in a 1967 still?

My nomination for one of the great unsolved Disney mysteries of all time.

What Was Walt Like? According to Bill Peet...

...there was the "jovial, good natured Walt..." and then there was the one pictured above.

I've never been fully convinced that Bill Peet An Autobiography is a "picture book for children," even though it was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children to "the most distinguished picture book for children."

Perhaps it's because the book features a parade of "chain smoking neurotics," Walt Disney among them.

Regardless, the book is spellbinding, still in print after nearly 20 years, and available from Amazon.

Rare, Oversized Snow White Poster Up For Auction

Ever seen this one before? Me neither.

According to Heritage Auctions, "These oversized pieces were typically intended for front-of-house displays, or for use as standees and, due to their large, difficult-to-store size and fragile paper-stock, were rarely saved. That this one has survived nearly seven decades is nothing short of a miracle, especially considering the thin, glossy photo paper on which it's printed (posters of this size were usually printed on heavier stock, but Disney obviously wanted to emphasize the artwork and the colors in this beauty, leading him to use a photogelatin process that required the more fragile paper). This breathtaking image, featuring artwork by animator Grim Natwick and art director Gustav Tenggren, practically tells the movie's story in its entirety, with delicate watercolor scene images surrounding a gathering of all the characters."

Quiztrak # 1 - Interactive Music Quiz!

Got twenty minutes? Want to listen to some great... and not so great... music and play the most demented trivia game ever?

Have you come to the right place!

Quiztrak is a quiz of my own devising where you answer questions based on music you're hearing.

It's been under development here at Isn't Life Terrible for years. Well, since the weekend, anyway. It's not really a 'test' of anything... it's more an opportunity to have an interactive musical experience.

How to Play:

1. Click on this link - The Quiztrak Quiz - and the first screen of the quiz will open in a new tab or window. Read the introduction to the quiz. Don't click "Continue" yet.

2. Come back to this window and click on this link -The Quiztrak Soundtrack - and the soundtrack for Quiztrak will open in another new window or tab.

If you're ready to start, click play in the Quiztrak Soundtrack window or tab... then rush back to the Quiztrak Quiz window and click "Continue," so that the quiz and the music start as close to the same time as possible. The music will play, and you'll be on your first of 65 questions and the first of 8 songs. Take your time! The questions will usually end before the song does.

If you don't get both the quiz and its soundtrack to start up within a second or two of one another, close everything and give it another try.

If you like it; if you hate it; if it doesn't work; or if it does, please post a comment and let me know. Whatever you do, don't take it seriously.

And if you're curious about Danny or Ernie (two of my favorites), come back and click the links below.

Watch Danny perform an incredible solo.
Watch Ernie's "NT."

John Mayer: Who Did You Think He Was?

My daughter became a fan of the singer-songwriter John Mayer while in high school, and has remained a fan in the years since. Critics dismissed Mayer, in the early days of his career, as nothing more the latest teen heartthrob. You can't blame them; he certainly fits the stereotype.

But Mayer has always taken his music seriously, and over the four years my daughter and I have been going to see Mayer in concert (roughly 15 or so times by now) he’s distinguished himself and has come to be recognized as a blues and rock guitarist on the level of Eric Clapton. Since Mayer has been writing and playing with Clapton lately, it's it's safe to say that Clapton agrees.

Mayer has been passionate about the blues from the beginning of his career, and takes time out to perform with classic American blues artists in smaller venues. I don't think my daughter would have joined me to see Buddy Guy play guitar, but because John Mayer was on the bill, she was absolutely determined to go. Because John Mayer played with Buddy Guy, my daughter became a Buddy Guy fan - and, for that matter, a blues fan.

Mayer publicly identifies his heroes, appears on the bill with them, and thus introduces his (primarily teenage) fans to listen to the music he loves. Because Mayer covered "Axis: Bold Is Love," my daughter now knows Jimi Hendix's music better than I do.

Mayer took a year off at the moment his popular music career reached its highest point… to form a blues trio. In a trio - where you've only got one guitar, one bass guitar, and drums - there's no place to hide if you're not up to the challenge. Mayer was brilliant. Here's the Trio at Webster Hall doing some Hendirx for a few hundred lucky fans (which, of course, included us).

His rock and pop music also should also be ranked among the best; "Stop This Train," from the "Continuum" CD is a particularly perfect blend of words and music. Like The Beatles in their early days, who frequently praised Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis, Carl Perkins and the other musicians who inspired them, Mayer is creating not only great contemporary music but also a generation of fans with more eclectic tastes.

Any graduates of Bullucka State out there?

If you've got the time, sell it to this man.

If you've got more time than that, listen to his ad.

Burley, at left, is still going strong, and I've listened to the man on radio for many years.

I spoke to Bill Treadway, the man who used to record these spots at Lone Star Studios in Houston. There was a lot of editing involved to get the spots down to a mere half minute, and Bill would work late into the night with razor blade and 1/4" splicing block to turn the recording into something ready for air. Bill graciously sent me an un-edited spot exactly as recorded. Burley had the product names written on separate slips of paper, and he would move the front sheet to the back after he read it. But he never knew when that sheet got up to the front again, and on he'd go.