Thanks, Lynn. Yes, Jiminy Cricket evolved over time. You may know that Collodi's original novel had a Talking Cricket who admonished Pinocchio to be a good boy and obey his father, and that Pinocchio's response was to throw a hammer at the Cricket and smash him against the wall! (That didn't keep th...

Good morning! And thank you, Lynn, for your kind words and your questions, and may I say that it's a real pleasure to be virtually visiting you and the rest of the Oasis this weekend. To answer your questions: I think what I enjoyed most about researching Pinocchio was that there was so much unexplo...

Dear everybody: This (Thursday the 11th) is the last of our four days together like this. If any last-minute questions come in I'll do my best to respond to them, but in the meantime I want to thank you all for your very kind hospitality for the last four days. It's been a pleasure to "meet&quo...

To Lynn: Yes, the Walt Disney Family Museum is definitely worth talking about. I think it took the better part of a decade to plan, design and build it. I wasn't personally involved in it very much until about the last year, but I started working with the Foundation in 2002 and the Museum was alread...

To knitwit45: Thank you for sharing that story, about your brother's childhood reaction to the Queen's transformation sequence. It is a very powerful sequence! Walt's daughter Diane saw the film at a pre-release screening at the studio, when she was about 3 1/2, and she reacted to that sequence in t...

To MichiganJ: Thank you for your note and your very kind words. I'm definitely with you on Otto Messmer. A great animated film is a luxury to be savored, and of course that applies to the Disney films we've been discussing here, but there are other films that fit that description and the Messmer Fel...

To knitwit45: Thank you for your message. I've never lived in Kansas City, but I am a native Midwesterner and I've always found a kind of primal appeal in the story of Walt's early filmmaking experiences in Kansas City. If you are familiar with KC, you probably know about the group there that's maki...

To sandykaypax: Thanks for your note, and it's always a pleasure to make contact with another Silly Symphony enthusiast! The good news is that, if you've got both of the "Disney Treasures" sets, you've got every one of the Silly Symphonies. At the time the first set was produced, it was cl...

To Lynn: the making of Snow White and Pinocchio ? How much time have you got? As you may know, but others may not, I've been working for years on a book about the making of Snow White and am just now putting the finishing touches on it (although it won't be published until December 2012, the 75th an...

To movieman1957: No, you weren't rude at all. Thanks for your kind words, and it's a pleasure to be here! Your question is a very good one, and I think there's probably more than one answer to it. For starters, I think you see the purest expression of Walt Disney's own personal vision in his earlies...

Good morning, Lynn - and there are long answers to both those questions, but the short answer is that both those events happened at the same time. Like a lot of people I got hooked on Disney at an early age, and since I grew up in a TV-less household, Walt Disney meant Walt Disney movies. I still ha...

To Lynn: Thanks for your note. Well, of course any time we can retrieve more "lost" pieces of the Laugh-O-gram legacy, that's tremendously significant. The Laugh-O-grams come very close to being Walt Disney's first films -- they are, in fact, his first films that tell stories -- and consid...

To Jack Favell: thanks for your kind words. You may already know this, but just for the record, that first video that moirafinnie posted was Alice's Wonderland , an historic film produced in 1923. It was Walt's last production in Kansas City before he left for Hollywood, and he used it as a sample r...

To moirafinnie: Thank you for your followup. That's a good question about the Disney/Fleischer situation, and I might have been a little hasty in my previous reply. So let me back up a little bit: as competitors, they surely did have some kind of rivalry. I only know about it from the Disney end, an...

To moirafinnie: Thank you, it's nice to be here! Yes, the Alice Comedies are a delight. As far as the hardships in producing them: yes, Walt and Roy Disney started with basically nothing and achieved their success strictly through the quality of their films, and it didn't happen overnight. So during...