Donald in Math-magic Land (1959).

If you grew up a child of the 80s, then odds are even Disney was a big part of it.  Whether as an occasional presence that your parents popped into the pre-digital era VCR for you just every now and then, or else as the primary shaper of your Imagination growing up, it's fair to say that the Mouse House had a decent hand in molding how we remember our childhoods in some form or another.  For me, it came from two places.  Part of its was from the video cassettes my folks bought for me.  The other was growing up with a version of the Disney Channel that was a like a version of Turner Classic Movies if it was geared for the Spielberg generation.  You'd have early prototypes of the kind of shows you'd expect to find in a place like that, such as program blocks geared toward airing the classic cartoons featuring Mickey and the gang.  You'd also have classic standbys such as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers or Darkwing Duck.  Then you'd turn right around and the next thing you know, your kids would get a chance to be introduced to Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, or John Wayne in films like The Searchers, or Stagecoach.  Then things might shift over to an anthology program called Lunchbox, which showcased actual independent animation from around the world.  After that, you might be introduced to a little known bit of childhood trauma fuel, such as Flight of the Navigator, or Dot and the Kangaroo.  Coming up next, the scene would switch rails again, and you'd be treated to the sight of James Stewart playing Mr. Smith going to Washington.  I'm not kidding, here, by the way, they had actual schedules of this stuff lined up all day.

You can even check out some of the classic Golden Age movies the channel used to showcase back in the day, followed by a heck of a lot more where that came from.  What I'm getting at here is that growing up with the Mouse Kingdom back in the 80s was a hell of a different experience from what it is now.  It was a lot more fun, for one thing.  You got the sense that you were in the hands of entertainers who didn't just know what that word meant, you also got the impression they had some kind of understanding of how much more it could mean with a little effort and honest creativity.  Growing up with the Disney Channel in my youth was similar in many ways to coming of age with the help of guys like Jim Henson.  There was this implicit sense of understanding that you were having your Imagination expanded and encouraged by the TV folks that your parents allowed to babysit you.  One of the programs that contributed to this sense of growing mental horizons also has to count as a product of the original Mouse channel.  Yet it also had a physical media copy thrown into the bargain.  It wasn't just any routine home video release, either.  It was part of an actual line of promotional material that the Company was churning out at the time.  The short film I'm here to talk about today saw its first home video release as part of the Walt Disney Mini-Classics line of VHS's.  I supposed the best way to describe it is to call it all a specialty brand that saw it its heyday in the years 1988 to 1993 (web). 

It was a back catalogue, of sorts, most which were no longer than perhaps 30 to 45 minutes of runtime, yet they seemed like features films in their own right, to a child of 7, at least.  The content of each video consisted of one helping from a number of extended theatrical shorts that Walt and his team put into theaters back in World War II, in place of their usual feature-length animated masterpieces.  This doesn't seem to have been anything that Disney was ever planning on.  Instead, it was all down to a matter of economic necessity.  With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the nature of the reality around everyone began to shift into a new gear, and the same process held true for the Magic Kingdom.  When America found itself catapulted headfirst into the then new conflict, it didn't take long for Hollywood to find itself a willing participant in the War effort against Hitler and what were then called the Axis nations, Italy and Japan.  This resulted in Tinseltown grinding out an entire future movie vault's worth of propaganda in the forms of film and short featurettes.  Walt's company was no exception to this rule.  It was very much as historian Bowdoin Van Riper explains in his edited collection of studies, Learning From Mickey, Donald, and Walt: Essays on Disney's Edutainment Films. 

"The outbreak of World War II broadened Disney’s involvement with reality-based films. The studio turned out a steady stream of instructional cartoon shorts for the military—light-hearted in approach, but serious in intent—that were designed to educate soldiers, defense workers, and civilians on subjects ranging from recycling and personal hygiene to riveting techniques and the proper use of anti-tank weapons.10 The studio’s second line of wartime shorts was propagandistic rather than instructional. Not all the propaganda shorts were realistic—Der Fuehrer’s Face plunged Donald Duck into a surreal, night marish vision of life under the Third Reich—but all sought to present reality as Walt Disney, and the country’s wartime leaders, saw it. Education for Death purported to show how Nazi Germany indoctrinated its citizens, beginning in early childhood. The most ambitious of these wartime propaganda films was the 1943 featurette Victory Through Air Power. Mixing various forms of animation with stock footage and lectures by Major Alexander de Seversky, it made the case for aerial bombing as a decisive factor in modern warfare. The demands of wartime diplomacy—specifically the need to foster good relations with Central and South America—gave rise to Saludos Amigos! (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1945). Mixing animation and live action as Victory did, they too were designed to make a broad point: that Latin America and the United States were natural allies, and their peoples similar in culture and outlook (5)".

The minor punchline involved here is that the main reason for all this innovation was the need to keep the Kingdom from financial ruin after Hitler and the Nazis pretty much busted the company's chance for overseas revenue from films like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi.  These are all cited as some the studio's best work for any number of reasons.  The trick is none of that artistry seemed to have made much of a difference when you're dealing with a mind that's out to lunch.  So, the War ate into company profits, and Walt was left having to scramble for ways to keep himself and his life's work afloat.  One of the ways in which this was done was through the easy income of making wartime propaganda.  The second, and most important way to do that was to create a series of short films.  The trick is that if you were to create a number of these pictures (too long for a regular Mickey cartoon, but not long enough for a full-length feature) and paired them together, then however lopsided or dichotomous the final results, you'd still be able to keep the brand alive and remind people that the Disney name was still in the running and part of the overall landscape of Hollywood.  It's the kind of strategy that's counter-intuitive in whatever remains of today's industry, yet there must have been some logic in their favor.

Because by combining two or more short films into one package, and placing them in cinema's, Walt somehow found a way to make it all pay off.  As a result, this part of his career became known as the Package Era.  Perhaps a better way to look at it is to say that Disney was the man responsible for the creation of the anthology feature film.  Works like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or Fun and Fancy Free were the result, and later on the short works that made up those anthologies found themselves further repackaged later on down the line as part of the studio's line of Mini-Classic re-releases.  The result was that kids like me got our first exposure to adaptations such as The Wind in the Willows, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, or Mickey and the Beanstalk from this now obscure video series line.  Donald in Mathmagic Land was part of that same lineup for me.  The first time I ever saw it was as a copy of VCR era physical media.  It was the kind you could hold in your hands.  When you unpacked it, there was a switch in the upper lefthand side of the cassette that would allow you to open up the lid covering the entire top half.  Once you did that you could see the reels of film the entire picture had been printed on.  Somehow our not so distant ancestors managed to pack an entire story onto such primitive tech, complete with a full orchestra and glorious technicolor.  It's been a long time since I've stopped to consider some of the remarkable contents of this simple educational video that was designed with children's schools in mind.  I'd like to take the time to unpack some of those contents. 

Jim Henson: Idea Man (2024).

This is the first day I can remember.  It's not my first memory, by any means.  Not by a long shot.  There are other times, places, and faces that I can recall happening before this moment.  The trick with all these other events is that they fall prey to the spotty, patchwork quilt quality of that brief yet crucial span of time when the human mind is still busy assembling itself into something like a fully fledged consciousness.  Before the day I'm talking about, all I have to go on are all just snippets, or bits of fragmented pieces of things I saw.  If I had to take a guess, then it might be that this is what the start of everyone's childhood is like.  The funny thing about it in my case is that what I recall with anything like crystal clarity isn't the house I grew up in, or things of that nature.  Instead, it's all scenes from various movies.  The first fragment seems to have been more or less the entirety of Return of the Jedi.  After that it's Christopher Lloyd doing his best Harold Lloyd impression on the hands of a giant clock tower, during the big finale scene of the original Back to the Future.  After that I might have made the acquaintance of an explorer and British expeditionary soldier by the name of Lawrence of Arabia.  Then, all of a sudden, I'm confronted by a musically inclined individual with funny looking hair, who goes by the even stranger, yet somehow fitting name of Amadeus.  Not long after is when I got to meet the first of what I've come to think of as the 80s Uncles.  It's a term I use for how I've come to regard all of the major blockbuster directors of that decade.

He's not the one I saw on that first full day in the life that I can recall, yet you can trust me when I say that Don Bluth's American Tail was one of those pictures that left a hell of an impact.  You think that film's impressive through through adult eyes?  Try watching the whole thing when you're barely more than five years old, sitting on the floor in front of your parents brand new (and long since discarded) bulky 80s Big Screen.  I've just learned how to form full sentences, and just like that I'm being introduced to my first and most abiding sense of the Gothic, the Enchanted Sublime, and an idea of the Epic Scope that has remained with me all my life.  All of this is an accurate enough description of what it felt like to watch that movie.  Yet trust me when I say that I still haven't scratched the surface of the kind of emotional impact a film like that can leave on just the right type of receptive mind at the best possible time.  Yeah, all the old cliches of 80s Trauma Fuel apply, yet that doesn't even scratch the surface either.  For me, it was like discovering what it meant to be alive.  Let's just say there's a whole trove of themes and ideas to a film like that which makes it all worth talking about.  It's something I'll have to make my way toward, somewhere down the line.  

My point for right now was that this was my first intro to the group of guys I call the 80s Uncles.  These were the filmmakers who more or less went on to construct what the very idea of childhood was like for us 80s brats.  In no particular order, I'd have to label them as Uncle George, Uncle Joe, Uncle Steve, and you've already met both Uncle Bob and Uncle Don.  For now, however, I want to talk about the day I met Uncle Jim.  It was the first complete day I can remember.  This is how it started.  I might still be just five years old.  What matters is that this marks the first moment where I become aware of my surroundings.  I'm dressed in my pajamas, and I'm making my way into the family living room from the dining area in my parents house.  The big blocky outline of our early big screen idiot box is there waiting for me, and it's turned on.  The first action I can ever remember doing is just sitting down once more in front of the screen and taking a look at what's there.  The next thing I know, I'm a being introduced to what looks almost like a barnyard menagerie that's come to animated life, and has somehow gained the ability to talk and wear the same kind of toddler's clothes that I was still in back then.  There's a green little frog on the TV, and he's sharing the spotlight with a pig in a pink dress.

Both of them appear to be at about the same age, though the girl might be just a smidge older than the tadpole she seems to want to dote on for some reason.  Tagging along with the pig and the frog is a talking bear in yellow pjs, and a beany hat, followed closely by a strange looking creature with a long nose and big, goggling eyes the size of tennis balls.  Close in tow is a piano playing dog, along with a brother and sister duo who are just as strange looking as the little blue weirdo (for that's what everyone calls him, and how he insists on being seen).  The funny thing looking back on it now is that none of this seemed out of place, the way it might to the eyes of a disenchanted adult.  Instead, the first thing that strikes me as interesting about my introduction to this setup is just how normal it all seemed.  Without missing a beat, some part of my still developing mind took this all in and accepted it without missing a beat.  It was as if we'd already known each other for years.  I guess you could chalk that up to just how much these cartoon kids made me feel welcome as a viewer, if that makes sense.  Whatever the case, what happened next was that I more or less followed these animated nursery inhabitants as they first browsed through a supermarket in a Plutonium power shopping cart, then ditched the idea to focus on growing muffins in a rural farming area that owed more to the world of Dr. Seuss than it did to anything related to the real work of soughing, ploughing, and harvesting.  That's how it all got started.

It was the first time I ever met Jim Henson's Muppets.  The fact that it was as a bunch of animated toddler forms of their usual adult selves really doesn't seem to have made all that much difference.  It was just the gang, you know.  No one except the characters themselves.  It's like you could take the way they were portrayed on Muppet Babies, then go back and look at how they were in their primetime debut with Th Muppet Show, and the strength of characterization given to these imaginary figures is so seamless that it has to count as an underremarked upon creative accomplishment in terms of the artistry that's gone into the writing of Henson's main cast.  In an age where there's the constant risk that showrunners have next to no clue as to how write with a sense of dramatic consistency to the characters in their charge, the level of cohesion that Jim and his friends were able to imbue the Muppets and their other creations with just comes off sounding like the unintentional yet genuine miracle it now is.  The thing is, none of this ever came up overnight.  The life of the Muppets is a story that will forever be entwined with that of their creator, and the trick with an artist like Jim Henson is he was a Man of Ideas in the truest Renaissance sense of the term.  At the same time, all of this creativity didn't just spring up ready made in a day.  Even if he was born with a nascent talent for tapping into the Imagination, the ability to both wield and then use this talent well was a long process of trial and error learning.

It's the kind of subject which by rights should be able to fill up several volumes of study.  A good source for what I'm talking about is the personal journal Jim kept to chronicle the flow of his own ideas.  Parts of this journal were published not long ago as Imagination Illustrated by Karen Folk.  While it's by no means the entirety of that journal, the content that was available to the public contains enough information that entire works of history and criticism could be made just from the chronology of moments leading up to the time of Henson's first public success as a puppeteer in Washington DC's local television sector.  Indeed, it even makes sense that a full-length book should be written about that time, as its one of the key periods in the artist's history where all of his talent was successfully channeled into a proper first showing.  That's something worth examining in full.  There's just so much worth learning about that time in Jim's first major step in his artistic development that I can even see some intrepid scholar with enough gifts not just penning a successful history of those early years, but of also having it turned into one of those recent string of biographical films that can either sink or swim on the skill the filmmaker has in knowing which parts of their subject's life deserves to have the camera

trained on it.  In some ways, I'm staring to wonder if maybe that's what Ron Howard should have done.