Circus
Sometimes a bluesky day over represents itself.
The short circuits aren’t crackling in ways
The electric company can fix.
Instead, the mind pulses on
Complicated and frantic.
The tight rope walker goes
Off to the left and falls
The bear comes down
Off his ball and cries
The tiger roars to his own tune
And then bites the head off
His trainer and escapes onto Main Street
Where he is promptly shot
By rather impervious deputies.
The blacktop is bleeding and broken into clumps
From where the elephants made their truths known
One guy who jingle jangles their trunks full of old
peanuts
Turns beet red when the kids ask why he’s whipping Dumbo.
In 1941, when Walt Disney needed to recoup the financial losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia, his studio wanted to produce a simpler, less ambitious animated feature. The result was "Dumbo," the story of a baby elephant who is ridiculed for his enormous ears -- which turn out to be wings that enable him to fly! The film was based on a children's story by Helen Aberson to demonstrate the prototype of the Roll-A-Book, a storytelling toy display device similar to a panorama. Kay Kamen, the company's head of merchandise licensing, had brought it to Disney's attention in 1939. The original story only had eight drawings and a few lines of text, but Dick Huemer and Joe Grant plumped out the plot; they wrote the script in chapters, like a book, an unusual way of writing a film script. Bill Tytla was put in charge of animation. Under Ben Sharpsteen's direction, Dumbo became the most financially successful Disney film of the 1940s. Costing only $950,000 to produce, it grossed $1.6 million during its original release and (except for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which had cost twice as much to produce) was the only pre-1943 Disney feature to turn a profit.
ReplyDelete