8mm Forum: Symphony Hour (1942)

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Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on January 10, 2007, 09:15 PM:

OK, so we are now 7 more years beyond “Mickey’s Fire Brigade” and considering “Symphony Hour”. Once again Mickey, Donald and Goofy are together to really botch some job or other, but this time they are classical musicians out to perform in a radio broadcast. The rehearsal is flawless, but of course in any decent cartoon it can’t stay that way, so five minutes before airtime, Goofy and the instruments fall down an elevator shaft and the broadcast is done with the demolished instruments.

The resulting sound is…er… different. From my days trying to coax music out of a trombone, I recognize the sound of a mouthpiece being played without benefit of the rest of the horn. I believe I hear some kazoos and some pots and pans on percussion as well.

The musicians struggle with their squished instruments. Pieces fly off and hit them. A constricted horn inflates as Horace Horsecollar tries to blow through it, and of course explodes from the pressure. Donald attempts to quit several times and is actually persuaded(?) by Conductor Mickey (with a pistol, no less) to resume his post in the percussion section. It’s Disney, so nobody gets shot (-Surely more of a Warner Bros. thing…) and it all ends well.

It’s worth noting that this cartoon was made more than 60 years ago and its political sensitivities are a little… insensitive by today’s standards. We’re not exactly talking “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” here, but it has a couple of ethnic stereotypes sprinkled about that could get some people a little bent out of shape if they (or their kids) saw it. The interesting thing about Mickey shoving that big gun in Donald’s face is that it’s been clipped from the versions available on video, but in Derann’s Super-8 reel, there it is in all it’s homicidal glory! (Would it be “homicide” if a Mouse killed a Duck?)

This is a fully mature Disney Cartoon. All the characters look exactly the way we’ve become accustomed to seeing them, and sound that way as well. The difference between the look here and “Mickey’s Fire Brigade” is a lot less pronounced than between “Mickey’s Fire Brigade” and “Steamboat Willie”, a sign that the studio was maturing as well.

The movie has a wonderful Art-Deco look to it, in terms of the style of the broadcast studio especially. This makes me strangely nostalgic: doubly strange because I was born in the Sixties, long after Art-Deco was just plain old!

Derann’s print is wonderful to see. The colors tend to be more muted than many other Disney cartoons, but it seems largely because it is composed of interior and evening scenes. It still has its colorful moments as well. It’s a touch on the grainy side here and there, but not obtrusively so. The sound is a little clipped at times, but I wonder if the reason for that is to heighten the effect of how awful the damaged instruments sound. It's one of the problems watching a film where something is supposed to sound awful: it still sets off the Collector's Sonar!

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