October 2011
3 posts
Disney's The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow
Hello Friends! Some of you might remember that I used to run a gossip/movie-news hybrid site called The Bad And Ugly. That site is still around content wise (though the formatting of the site has changed), so I thought I’d migrate this Halloweeny post over to the Tumblr and replace the broken YouTube videos with links to working ones!
Because Fall = Halloween = Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. That wasn’t where I was born, but that’s where I spent the majority of my childhood and school-years. Living in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains reinforced my association between the autumn season and Halloween.
Living in Brooklyn, nature isn’t exactly all around me. When I suggested to a friend that they “just go outside and get a rock” to prop open their door, said friend looked at me like I was crazy. Because there isn’t anywhere within miles of me where I could pick up a rock that wasn’t really just a chunk of concrete.
So, around this time of year, it’s always nice to get in a spooky mood. Back in the days of grade school, where the entire month of October was dedicated to Halloween and harvest activities (yes, I grew up in the West where things like the yearly harvest were still celebrated), I would watch cartoons and “scary” movies. These days, the “scary” movies I see are usually adult-themed and very gory. Which is totally fine, but I can’t go watch SAW V and recapture the childhood feeling of a spooky Halloween season. It doesn’t help that whichever theater I go to, when I emerge to rejoin reality, I’m always greeted by a cityscape and not multi-colored trees and houses with jack-o-lanterns.
That’s why I spent last night watching Disney’s Halloween Classic “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow,” narrated and sung by Bing Crosby. The flick was originally a segment in a tow-part film RKO Radio Pictures and Disney released into theaters on October 5th, 1949 as The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The film was based on two literary stories (Kenneth Grahame’s Wind In The Willows and Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and both were narrated by then-celebs. Bing Crosby took on Sleepy Hollow and Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes, Captain Blood) narrated the Wind In The Willows portion.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was the final “package” film released by Disney. The studio had begun to bind two semi-related stories together before bringing them to theaters because of WWII related budget cuts. After The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Disney returned to doing single-narrative animated films.
So, courtesy of YouTube, I present Disney’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow after the cut. Because Halloween as a kid was fun, and now it’s just a week where I have to go shopping for a costume to get drunk in.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Part 1
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Part 2
OPKINO CUT: "Drawing Heart Out Of Something Technical And Seemingly Lifeless That I Like"
OPKINO CUT: “Drawing Heart Out Of Something Technical And Seemingly Lifeless That I Like”
Some of The Real Steel review (Reel Steal? Reele Steele? Authentic Alloy?) got caught between segments. And @misterpatches had some good points.
FULL EPISODE EVERY FRIDAY AT OPKINO.COM
“OpKino Cut” are segments that make good audio material, but ultimately got left out of the podcast. (Or you could have listened to the Temple Grandin episode where we actually left the rant in, and if so I apologize)
Here’s the two you missed if you’re only coming to this blog:
