Let it go...

 

Does anyone else remember when the only dose of Disney that you got were those Bank Holiday specials on TV?

In the sixties and seventies you had to go to the pictures to see a Disney film and they didn’t seem to be shown that often. I remember watching Fantasia one wet Tuesday afternoon in a flea pit in Cleethorpes on holiday. It must have been almost thirty years old by then, but I loved every moment of it.

I’ve never really been a fan of Disney’s sugary take on the world, I preferred Popeye and those wonderfully weird Harmon-Ising cartoons, but the short film clips shown on the Bank Holiday Disney Time Specials was a much anticipated event and I really can’t understand why. Watching a few minutes of a movie on a wet Monday or a dull 25th of December wasn’t really very satisfying and it wasn’t until years later that I saw some of the films in full. In fact there are many that I’ve never seen and don’t really want to,

I remember the Walt Disney Special on TV one Christmas Day presented by David Tomlinson in the sixties. I must have been about six I guess. I remember it clearly; David Tomlinson introduced clips from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Mr Toad, Swiss Family Robinson, 101 Dalmatians, that bloody Mary Poppins, and the Sword in The Stone. What probably firmly fixed it in my mind is that a few years later I met David Tomlinson whose two sons boarded at the school I went to.

I think the Disney Special went on into the eighties and nineties, but by then you could get Disney on video and we used to rent them from the mobile video man who called once a week at the house. I remember being very disappointed in Tron and watching Jungle Book over and over. I was never sure why Disney was so protective of his films being shown on TV. Or maybe it was just that the BBC couldn’t afford to buy them, but it wasn’t until the mid eighties that old full length Disney features began to be shown on ITV.

These days it seems that no sooner is a Disney film released than it appears on TV on Christmas Day afternoon after the Queen has done her bit. It’s kind of spoilt the Disney excitement and mystery that I felt as a child. Kids today can play their favourite Disney over and over and don’t have to wait for a bank holiday Disney fix. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, but maybe I should just let it go, let it go…