Ten minutes to introduce the pathos of the situation and ten minutes of dramatic conclusion, sandwiching 45 minutes of pink elephants on parade.
Oy. I found his Alice in Wonderland to be extremely painful. I shudder to think what this will be like.
April 1st gets earlier every year
Iād watch that.
Iād watch that.
Well, now we know that this version will be free of awkward, racial stereotypes.
aaaannndā¦ live-action ?!?!
I donāt see how this could go wrong.
Johnny Depp as Timothy Mouse
Early fake casting news:
- The chameleon-like Johnny Depp will pull off another brilliant transformation to be Timothy Mouse. Expect shenanigans
- Angelina Jolie will play the seductive Magic Feather
- Dumboās mother is a hotly contested role, will it go to Helena Bonham Carter or Betty White?
You beat me to it by THIRTY SECONDS.
Think of his awful Willy Wonka remake and then imagine just how badly he could screw this up.
I always explain Dumbo to new parents (when the conversation turns to watching old Disney) as follows:
Do you know how Dumbo learns to fly? He drinks a bottle of whisky, has a 10 minute pink elephant hallucination, wakes up in a tree full of pot smoking racially stereotyuped shuckinā and jivinā black crows who convince him to jump off a cliff.
Great songs, though. And I love the early vocoded*-train-voice, and the animation of the tent-collapse. The song the roustabouts sing as they erect the tent is disturbing - basically āweāre black, so we get these shitty jobs then drink our wages away on the weekendsā. OTOH, you can contrast that with all of the white people in the film (including the white high-society elephants) - all of them, with the exception of Timothy Mouse**, is an asshole. Asshole white clowns, asshole exageratedly-Irish kid making fun of Dumbo, asshole white RingMaster. The white stork delivery man isnāt an asshole, but heās incompetent, so thereās that. Note that the roustabouts do erect the tents quite well in the rain, and the crows actually help Dumbo out.
* or whatever it is.
** and Iām not sure what race he should be, but if we go with the ādefaultā, heās white.
You can see a demo of the vocoded (they used a device called a Sonovox) train sound effect in this clip from The Reluctant Dragon, with Frances Gifford pretending to demonstrate it. From a 2015 perspective, the crows make us cringe, but he had black actors talking in early-40s jive; for the time, it wasnāt āracistā. And as you point out, theyāre really the only sympathetic characters in the movie.
Fair enough. And as adults we can appreciate cultural relativity, in the same way that we can appreciate the Sam character in Casablanca. But for kids, that appreciation isnāt there, itās just a more obvious and in-your-face form of the institutionalized racism our parents and grandparents grew up with.
I understand it, I allow for it in my interpretation of culture and heritage, and I know that for a 6 year old none of that matters.
Nice! Plus: Robert Benchley. I like his shorts work.
NOTE: audio has a crappy click, but I canāt find any other version
Iāve always wanted to read How to Wreck a Nice Beach but didnāt want to shell out the money (it doesnāt seem like the thing Iāll read more than once, and Iām starting to learn my lessonā¦). Lo! Itās finally available in my library system. Requested. 
UPDATE: reading this interview/article, I might be wrong about the āread only onceā idea I hadā¦
Hereās another Sonovox demo, with Kay Keyser:
I recently watched it again for the first time in years. This is a 30 minute movie at most these days, thereās a lot of filler and slow character development in what is currently a 64 minute movie.
They are going to have to add a ton of terrible background character work to cobble this into an 80 minute kids movie worth $14 in Manhattan.
Butā¦ DUMBO shooting down VonRichtoffen, DUMBO straffing the Japanese fleet off Oahu, DUMBO airlifting wounded soldiers in Vietnam. Thereās so much to cover.
