Paul Frees TINPANORAMA CD On-Demand DISNEY THEME PARK Exclusive SHERMAN BROS

Description

**** NOT A BOOTLEG, THIS IS AN ACTUAL DISNEY COMPACT DISC MADE TO ORDER OFFICIALLY AT WALT DISNEY WORLD AND PURCHASED IN 2006.
Walt Disney Presents
TINPANORAMA
Buena Vista Records BV-3330 (Mono) STER-3330 (Stereo)
(12” 33 1/3 RPM LP / 1965)
Reissue: Wonderland Music on Demand CD (2006)
Executive Producer/Liner Notes:
Jimmy Johnson. Producer/Arranger/Conductor: Camarata. Running Time: 28 minutes.
Performers:
Paul Frees, Gloria Wood, Jerry Madison, Bill Lee, Betty Taylor, Skip Farrell, Richard Sherman, Billy Strange, Billy Storm, Carol Lombard, Ron Hicklin, Bob Swirn, Al Capps.
“Symposium” Songs: “Rutabaga Rag,” “Charleston Charlie,” “Although I Dropped 1,000,000 in the Market, Baby (I Found a Million Dollars in Your Smile),” “I’m Blue for You (Boo Boo Boo Boo Boo),” Boogie Woogie Bakery Man,” “Puppy Love is Here to Stay” by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.
Additional Songs:
“Shrub Herbs in the Suburbs,” “Close Your Eye, Mister Moon,” “Cousin Victor’s Elixir,” “Fountain of Teardrops (In the Valley of Sorrow),” “You Bug Me, Ann-Arlene” by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.
1962’s
A Symposium on Popular Songs
(embed below) is also a symposium on Disney’s stop motion animation and on Disney’s record company. Both entities involved dalliances in styles that might have seemed ephemeral on the surface, but were seminal in reality.
Disney artists Bill Justice, X. Atencio and T. Hee brought a unique twist to stop motion with their Oscar-winning Noah's Ark in 1959. Like Justice and Atencio’s animation for 1961’s The Parent Trap, the Disney animators did with stop motion what UPA did with cel animation: put it into a flat, two dimensional plane. Unlike the works of George Pal, Rankin/Bass or Burton and Selick, Disney’s stop motion figures are virtually all shot on “table top,” either against stylized backgrounds or positioned over them on a glass layer. When asked about the stop motion projects, Bill Justice recalled, “They were the toughest work I’d ever done.”
It’s not too much of a stretch to assume a connection between animating stop motion characters and “living, breathing” Disneyland ones. Well aware of how entertainment and animation were changing, Walt Disney was encouraging experimentation in creative approaches and staff assignments. Justice and Atencio would both become major figures in the development of the greatest Disney park attractions in history and the development of Audio-Animatronics.
At the same time, Disneyland and Buena Vista Records were still finding their way in the marketplace. The success of Annette Funicello’s records buoyed the record division when it faced possible shutdown. Though these early records are “of their time,” they created a business model through which Walt Disney Records continues to straddle the classic and the popular—always finding its greatest success when avoiding the temptations to fall to deeply into formula, or pandering to current tastes to the point of self-caricature.
By the last segment of
Symposium
, the animated figures have transitioned from the “found objects” of Noah’s Ark to the paper cutouts like those in the titles for 1963's The Misadventures of Merlin Jones 1963’s(which, by the way, re-purposes the musicians from “Puppy Love is Here to Stay”).
Professor Ludwig Von Drake, introduced on Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color
the previous year, makes his big-screen debut with
Symposium
(I love it when he holds up a Disneyland Record onscreen—complete with a Xeroxed label of his own album). Von Drake’s presence means the film benefits from the voice work of Paul Frees, in addition to fine Hollywood vocalists like Gloria Wood and Skip Farrell—plus R&B legend Billy Storm, who recorded an outstanding solo album for Buena Vista in 1963.
Buena Vista’s
Tinpanorama
LP demonstrates, like no other single work, the Sherman Brothers’ tremendous ability to write in any style. The album combines the six Symposium songs with six additional tunes, all exemplifying (and gently kidding) pop music through the mid-60s. “Mary Poppins had done so well, Tutti Camarata asked my brother and I to do more songs to fill out the entire Tinpanorama album, which was wonderful to do,” said Richard Sherman, who sings “Close Your Eyes, Mister Moon” with a comic vocal vibrato unassisted by electronics.
For the brothers, working on the film and the album were personally gratifying as they could revel in the era of their hit songwriting father, Al Sherman, and then journey to the age in which they created their first top tunes. Tinpanorama even contains references to their dad’s work. In “Although I Dropped 1,000,000 in the Market, Baby,” Paul Frees sings (a la Jolson): “Although potatoes are cheaper/Now was definitely NOT the time to fall in love.” This is a nod to “(Potatoes Are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper) Now’s The Time To Fall In Love,” an Eddie Cantor hit penned by Al Sherman.
Gloria Wood, who also voiced Dale (of Chip ‘n Dale), Oswald the Rabbit (for records) and sang on hundreds of commercials and TV themes (including Dobie Gillis), is heard as the flapper “Charleston Charlie” and as Andrews Sister-types in “Boogie Woogie Bakery Man.” For the latter,
Tinpanorama’s
notes also credit “Betty Allan” and “Diane Pendleton” as singers, but they’re all Gloria Wood. (You can also hear her scat singing in the background of The Parent Trap theme).
Among the six additional
Tinpanorama
tunes is “Cousin Victor’s Elixir,” a western novelty song sung by master guitarist Billy Strange, and a wickedly funny folk “downer” introduced and sung by Carol Lombard—not Carole the movie star, but Carol the studio singer and vocal arranger whose vast credits include the theme to the anime classic Prince Planet.
(Reprinted with permission of author Greg Ehrbar)