I was watching The Greatest Show on Earth, mostly being amused by all the anachronisms though I have to say I liked Jimmy Stewart’s “clown on the lam” character. What puzzled me though were the obviously unauthorized Disney characters in the parade. They looked like prisoners who had never seen the originals made them in a slave labor camp. I would have thought the big top could have afforded better. This was before Disneyland opened, in a time when copyright owners were a little less litigious. Nowadays the Disney corp. would send the SWAT team to a preschool for unauthorized three little pig pictures on the walls.
It’s been a while since I saw it, but are you sure that those were “Disney” characters? The Three Little Pigs are not from Disney. In fact, the closest that Disney can come to claiming originality since 1940 would be some of the sequences in Fantasia. (Especially true since their much ballyhooed “original” film The Lion King has been shown to have contained a “borrowed” plot, characters, names, etc.)
The flap with the Oscars and Snow White was the result of the Oscars deliberately using the Disney image of Snow White.
If Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck were included in the parade, that would indicate an infringement of rights–unless the rights had been purchased, of course.
Tom~
I had a similar question about a Laurel & Hardy movie March of the Wooden Soldiers, which was their version of Babes in Toyland. That film featured The Three Little Pigs who WERE dressed exactly the same as the Disney versions. The movie also featured a very Mickey-like Mouse who spent most of the movie harassing a cat. Later, he dropped fireworks from a balloon upon the ghouls who were attacking Toyland.
Anyway, I wrote a question to The Disney Magazine about it and they replied that Walt had, indeed, given Hal Roach permission to use Mickey and the Disney version of the Pigs. It was sort of a quid pro quo arrangement since Walt had used caricatures of L&H in a couple of his Mouse cartoons, with Roach’s permission, of course. AFAIK, no money exchanged hands.
I haven’t seen The Greatest Show on Earth in ages, so I couldn’t tell you if they were Disney Pigs or generic ones.
IMDB says there is a reference to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland in the picture: http://us.imdb.com/Mlinks?0044672 Did you see any of those characters in the parade?
Tom, I’ve seen videotape of the opening ceremonies of Disneyland. They had a few costumed characters running about and they looked kind of primitive, compared to the ones in the parks now. If the Pigs looked crude in Show, it may have been the limitations of the materials on hand in 1952. No polyester, y’know.
Feel free to correct me at any time. But don’t be surprised if I try to correct you.
The T.L.P. were in the parade as were a rather seedy looking Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto and more characters Disney specific and not.