The Walt Disney Family Album - Woolie Reitherman (1985)

The Walt Disney Family Album was a monthly series on the recently launched Disney Channel that showcased the people Walt Disney collaborated with on many of his creations. The development of this series was a perfect storm. The brand new Disney Channel needed new content, there were a bunch of young people recently starting out at the studio learning from these masters, and many of these people were working on the lot or retiring and wanted to share their stories with the world. At the time people had their entire careers at Walt Disney Productions. Not so today.

The series was produced on a shoestring budget. Pretty much the crew was sent out with cameras to interview various people and put these shows together. It was a pet project of former Disney CEO Card Walker who'd been at the studio since the 1938 when he started as a mail clerk and personally knew all of these people and their important contributions to the studio. Walker cared very much about history and understood the importance of the Walt Disney legacy being preserved.

Walt's friend and Disney Legend Buddy Ebsen narrates the series. He starred in several Walt Disney films including Davy Crockett and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. He was also the first live action reference model for what became audioanimatronics. The theme song was written by future film score composer John Debney. His father had been a producer on the lot for decades and John started out his music career with Disney. The opening title was put together by John Lasseter in one of his final projects for Walt Disney Feature Animation. He was trying to get computer animation in at Walt Disney Productions and was eventually fired for he. He would eventually become one of the driving forces behind Pixar and would return to head Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2006.

In the long run, the Walt Disney Family Album proved to be a tremendous historical record as many of these people passed away shortly after being interviewed. There were plans to continue this series but when the Eisner regime took over, they shut it down because it was a Card Walker project. It's a great tragedy because who's stories never got to be told because they were robbed of this opportunity...There needs to be a revival of this series to chronicle the careers of the people at Disney in the 80's and 90's as they're retiring and could be gone in the coming decades.

The Walt Disney Family Album aired on the Disney Channel in reruns off and on up through the early 2000's when it aired on Vault Disney. It hasn't been seen since but sometimes interviews have been excerpted in other documentaries.

This tenth episode focuses on Disney animator Woolie Reitherman. He was one of Walt's legendary Nine Old Men. Most of the Nine started with the studio in 1934/35 at the height of the Great Depression. These became the core group of animators Walt would rely on from the 1940's on. Each one specialized in a different type of animation performance. Woolie was known for his action scenes and sequences.

He was a master at creating power and tension in his animation. Some of his stand out performances include Monstro the Whale, the Dinosaur Fight in Fantasia, the Headless Horseman chase, Jaq and Gus climbing up the stairs with the key in Cinderella, Alice growing to gigantic size in Alice in Wonderland, Captain Hood with the Crocodile in Peter Pan, the stray dog fight in Lady & the Tramp, the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty, and others.

After the extravagant cost of Sleeping Beauty, there was pressure from Walt's brother Roy to shut down the animation studio. Walt refused believing he owed it to these people to keep the doors open. Walt turned to Woolie to help keep things under budget so everyone remained employed.

Starting with The Sword in the Stone, Woolie directed all the animated features for nearly two decades. This was also when the budget reducing practice of reusing animation from previous films began being used in order to keep costs down and satisfy the money people. All three of his sons ended up voicing characters in the 1960's (King Arthur, Christopher Robin, and Mowgli.)

After Walt Disney passed away, it was Woolie's leadership that was one of the driving forces behind the animation studio. He stayed on to consult on The Fox & the Hound before retiring. What forced Woolie out was how political the studio had become. He'd been removed as director from The Fox & the Hound and had developed several projects to direct but none of them were greenlit in favor of The Black Cauldron.

In 1989 Woolie Reitherman was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. He passed away in a car accident in 1985.

Original air date March 1, 1985

Posted for historical purposes. This channel is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company.