Falling Leaves by the Salten Sea
Hi everyone. We’ve been on a Felix Salten kick lately. I bought a copy of Salten’s JIBBY THE CAT for my wife Cathy’s birthday, and we both read it. It was not the children’s book it seemed to be, but a rather sober and grim look at a cat’s life from both the wild and domestic side. Salten doesn’t spare the blood or the death, and we both laughed and cried reading the book. I had never read Salten’s BAMBI. JIBBY whetted my appetite for more Salten to the point that I checked out BAMBI from our public library. I love the Disney cartoon feature version of the story very much, but Salten’s novel is a very different deer from the Disney version. It’s not so much “love is a song”, but “Can’t you stay by yourself?” Disney’s subtext is the “circle of life”, but Salten’s is that all creatures, including man, are mortal and there is a higher power over us all. I have continued the oral tradition this time by reading one of my favorite deleted scenes from Disney’s BAMBI, the “Leaf Scene”, and also reading Salten’s original version of the scene from Chap. 8 of BAMBI. The Disney script used many of Salten’s lines from the book, but rearranged them and assigned a definite sexual identity to the leaves. In Salten’s book, once a leaf is severed from the limb, it loses all power of speech and life, but in Disney’s script, the leaves seem to have life even as they fall and wind up next to each other on the ground, giving a hopeful quality to the scene. The sketches above are from Robert D. Field’s book “The Art of Walt Disney”, as is the text of the “Leaf Scene”. Early treatments for BAMBI, anthropomorphized not only leaves, but even the raindrops, the original version of the “Little April Shower” song was called “I Like Falling” by Frank Churchill. In it, the raindrops are actually singing about how they enjoy falling from the sky. The screenplay of BAMBI evolved to the point that only the animals were anthropomorphic, and a lot of the proposed cast was dropped, such as a chipmunk and a squirrel character. Disney made major characters out of Thumper the Rabbit, “Friend Hare” in Salten’s version, and the owl, a Screech Owl in Salten’s version. The major change is that the Disney script is a matriarchy, with Bambi’s mother being very central, versus Salten’s patriarchy, with the Old Stag, Bambi’s father, becoming his son’s chief adviser and role model (“Can’t you stay by yourself?”) Here is a link to my audio on Chapter 8: http://www.archive.org/details/LeavesChap.8 . In future posts, I’ll read a bit more from Salten’s BAMBI, it is a remarkable and very affecting book, and really NOT for children.
Felix is from 2-10 to 2-16-1936. Felix and Danny Dooit run from the cobra and it turns on Punk Chow and Fooy Tu Yu. Felix becomes a high wire artist to retrieve the diamond from a clothesline. I like Messmer’s control of graphics to suggest Fooy Tu Yu’s change of mood in the 2/13, in panel one, he has rounded hands and rounded fingers as he talks to Danny, in panel two, Fooy’s hands and fingers change to menacing points as he chases Danny and Felix. In the Sunday, Felix is a hero again, as he retrieve’s the Professor’s radio from a thief. In the next to the last panel, a favorite Messmer word shows up in Felix’s speech: “Fine! It Worked” Messmer used “Fine” over and over again in dialog both in the strip and the comic books. Maybe Otto was a fan of the “Vic and Sade” radio show of the 1930s, one of the characters from that show, Uncle Fletcher (Clarence Hartzell) always said “Fine!”, when he wanted to cover up for his ignorance of a topic.
Krazy is from 7-29 to 8-3-1940. Ignatz is in trouble with his wife for bringing Mimi so many apples, and when Mimi sets up a private school of her own, the principal cast play hooky.
Patrick is from 5-2 to 5-7-1966. Godfrey, Elsa and Suzy wind up on the fuzzy end of an ice cream cone and a baseball bat, and Patrick is on the wrong end of a hypodermic needle.
I completed the scene of animation I mentioned last week. The characters were Private Snafu and the Technical Fairy, for Steve Stanchfield’s upcoming DVD with upgraded copies of all the Private Snafu cartoons, including a few that didn’t make it into “The Complete Private Snafu” videotapes of years ago. I really found myself enjoying drawing the characters, they were designed by Art Heineman to be fun to animate, and they are! Steve liked my animation and the drawings have been shipped to him. I was afraid I couldn’t animate or operate the test computer after such a long time, but it all came back to me. Maybe I’ll get to do another scene someday, maybe not. Experience counts not for a thing in today’s “animation” marketplace. Great working with you, Steve!
Charles Brubaker says:
I’m looking forward to that Snafu DVD. Steve sent me a preview disc a while back and the restorations are amazing!
D.M. Yowp says:
I’ve learned so much from this post, Mark. Thank you very much. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to Disney’s development of Bambi.
I’m looking forward to the Snafu discs. Steve takes such care in what he does.
F says:
Great blog! I was wondering if you could share what publication you’ve been getting your Felix the Cat strips from.
Mark says:
Hi “F”,
I’ve decided to not reveal my source for the Felix strips, but I’ll give you a clue, it’s an internet resource. Please come back and read more, I post every so often. Thanks for reading my blog!
Mark
Steve says:
…..your experience counts with me! The animation is wonderful on this little sequence- how could I not like it?!?! Great working with you too Mark!
F says:
Thanks. Keep up the great posts. I figured it was an online resource. I’ve been looking for the list of newspaper names that carried felix syndicated and haven’t been very successful. The boston american supposedly has it but i haven’t been able to locate microfiche/digital archive of that easily (major universities/libraries)… wish I still lived in MA. I’ve been trying to collect hard copies of the strips but realize there are so many years that microfiche/digital might be the best. If you change your mind, let me know and maybe we can team up for the data mining and get our collections complete that much faster. Thanks!
Mark says:
Hi “F”,
Write to me at my email address: kausler@att.net and we’ll talk away from the blog. Put your real name in the message so I won’t feel quite so clandestine about writing to you.
Thanks, Mark
Eric Noble says:
I’ve read Felix Salten’s original version of Bambi as well. It truly is a different creature than Disney’s version of it. It’s not a book for children. I can say that I loved it too, even though I felt the patriarchal attitude of the book bugged me a bit. I think that Disney missed a beat when he made man the ultimate evil in the movie. I felt they should have kept the idea that man is just as vulnerable as the rest of the animals, but that’s just my opinion. I want to check out the rest of Felix Salten’s stories.